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Is the Agenda VR3 Linux PDA Dead?
An Anonymous Coward writes: "LinuxDevices.com has published a news item about the uncertain future of Agenda Computing and their VR3 linux PDA. According to the article, some members of the Agenda developer community are continuing work on current projects, but many have switched to other projects such as the Sharp Zaurus. Apparently there is an Agenda Germany office which is still shipping the VR3s (including to the U.S.) and which has said that they are continuing VR3 development -- but's not clear whether that means software or device development. Looks like another cool linux device has bitten the dust. Sigh."
I don't know. Do you have to buy a device because it runs Linux? Maybe there are better OS-es for PDA's.
-- Cheers!
Good reasons for using a free OS on a hand-held are going to include:
- Freedom from proprietary content-control mechanisms. If these are built into non-open hardware drivers you're fucked. You might as well not buy the device in that case.
- Weird hardware hacks that the designers didn't anticipate e.g. interface to Lego Mindstorms GPS-targeted siege engine
;). Again,
you need free access to low-level drivers.
So maybe no ranting required.-- What do you need?
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
Is it that you don't think the programmer should do everything for free, or is it that you can't afford any really nice software?
You don't understand the difference between free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech. It's the latter which is important GNU/Linux PDA users, not if GNU/Linux or a different free-as-in-speech system is running on the box.
That doesn't mean that GNU/Linux on PDAs is free-as-in-beer. When I bought my iPAQ last summer, the preinstalled GNU/Linux distribution was priced about 40 or 50 €, and I didn't have any problem paying for free-as-in-speech software. I would of course have been able to flash my PDA, but as I hadn't done it before and flashing the bootloader bears the risk of "bricking" a PDA and making it unusable, it was a fair deal. Apart from the preinstalled iPAQ I got a CD with all source codes used for building the GNU/Linux image, even a cross-development environment (binary packages + source + build scripts), everything.
It would be a good idea for Agenda to have a similar business model with commercial free-as-in-speech software, too. That's what GNU/Linux users are looking for.
PDAs don't sell very well if they ship with a half-baked OS and the expectation that your customers will fix it for you.
The biggest problem with marketing Linux-based PDAs is the miniscule software catalogue.
I'm not referring to the wide range of GPL'ed Linux applications that work on Linux PDAs (read: can be possibly made to work with reduced features after 'just a bit' of massive re-architecting and 'just a few' 36-hour porting/hacking/debugging sessions). I'm talking about the tiny pittance of ready-to-run pre-packaged apps, compared to the thousands of apps already available for Windows CE/Pocket PC and PalmOS PDAs.
While I'm a fan of Linux and Open Source, I have to acknowledge the catch-22 problem of trying to capture market share for Linux PDAs when Microsoft and its PDA minions - Compaq, HP and Casio etc, are barging their way in with the support of huge R&D and marketing budgets - and attracting the attention and efforts of legions of corporate and independent software developers who smell the $$ and cut their code, confident that they will recoup their development costs and make a profit before their apps end up on the warez/crack sites, Morpheus, Gnutella etc.
Growing software catalogues feed bigger hardware sales, and vice versa.
The moral?
If you want to push a new hardware/OS combination into the market, all you need is a few billion dollars behind you, and allow some time for the developers to get on board and feed your credibility with a software catalogue before you *have* to turn a profit.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
It ALWAYS could sync with Linux, because any two linux machines can sync with each other if they have serial ports, pppd, and rsync!
If that's not enough for you, then its Free Software, so go and write your own improvements. The only financial reason that a company should try to sell their hardware with Linux (aside from the kewlness factor) is to reduce their software developement costs, because the user community will step in and do it for free.
(That said, their fatal mistake was that starting to program was too hard- it needed too much hackivation energy. They released the source code, but as a mismash of patches to other projects. If they'd let users download a single tarball which built into a kernel and full set of executables, their software deficiencies would've been fixed faster, and maybe they'd have survived to this day)
I bought an Agenda in January 2001 and sold it by March 2001. I was initially blinded by the fact that it ran Linux, but very quickly I discovered that the device was useless to me unless I used it solely as a developer device and did not expect to use it on a day-to-day basis.
The penstroke recognition was so innacurate and slow compared to a Palm device that it made the Agenda useless and there were no real productivity applications.
It's too bad that it's dissapearing but the honest truth is that the Agenda had no value to offer beyond the "Linux Inside" gimmick.
Agenda's problems had nothing to do with linux and its fitness or lack thereof for PDAs. It died because it was pushed out the door before it was done. They weren't done with the OS, they weren't done with apps, and they weren't done with the hardware. It was pushed out the door because of the financial difficulties of Agenda's parent company.
Actually, with the latest kernels and romdisks, the Agenda is a pretty nice device for the low end of the PDA spectrum But its not consumer-ready and probably never will be now. But it could've been. I use it as my everyday PDA currently. But I also have a Zaurus and will probably switch to it once I have a few spare cycles.
A bigger issue I have with Agenda is that I don't think the target market was a winner. I don't think the low end of the PDA spectrum is where a business wants to be. Its up at the high end with the iPAQs, Jornadas, and Zaurus where anything interesting and profitable would be happening.
The Sharp Zaurus only runs Qt/Embedded. It will not share the screen with any other toolkit, and if I develop for Qt, I may end up having to pay steep licensing fees. Thanks, but no thanks. The point of Linux is that software is compatible among different Linux machines/devices and that I'm not forced to use just the software that some hardware vendor decided to impose on me.
One of the reasons for using Linux is its versatility. If manufacturers want a Linux device to take off, they need to put some of that versatility into it. USB, Ethernet, and a standard expansion port would have made a big difference in the success of the Agenda.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Like most other geeks, I have a long history of hardware addiction. I love my VR3 because it packs a lot of functionality into an incredibly small package. Even better, it runs straight up Linuz and X, so it is a hackers dream! I hope the Agenda manages to stay around, because if it does then it has unlimited potential. Linux software support grows exponentially for a new platform, and for the VR3 it is just now starting to take off.
James
http://james.nontrivial.org
From the article...
some developers have now switched to other projects such as the Sharp Zaurus
"Switching" from one Linux platform to another? It's a little ironic that part of the demise of this Linux PDA is something that can't/doesn't really happen to Linux on the desktop and is actually something that keeps the community together -- developers don't usually have to pick and choose which distribution/hardware/etc their Linux apps will run on.