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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!
Their code base was not all GPL and the device was expensive. I remember some NDA type stuf on their page too. I was interested but those things kept me from going any further into it. Hardware vendors beware, software should be free. All of it.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
How was this groundbreakingly different, and what did it offer over any other PDAs.
Any product that tries to cash in on the "Linux is cool" will find that people are looking for substance, not gimmicks.
I doubt there were many people that considered it a serious player in the world of PDAs.
I am not saying this to start trouble, I believe it just needs to be said.
geeks Dilbert people?
marketing travelers?
I dont knom.
Has sockwave flash support?
...
1 saludo
Tei
-Woof woof woof!
... there's already some interesting ideas coming out of the VR3 project ... offhand I can think of that Snow ABI which considers building apps in a different way to be more memory thrifty ... unlike a PC with virtual memory, a PDA is severely constrained with no guarantee that a wireless connection will be available. Some of the ideas could be extrapolated ... for example, if you have a transmeta chip, could the ABI refactor themselves in memory (ie reorder libraries to drop non-used portions?) What about mechanisms to detect dead code or where the memory/code hierarchy changes (think reconfigurable chips hibernating in spare memory slots as one HK uni research group published).
... perhaps we need to consider next generation hardware advances to .... ummm ... create the hobbit ABI. Think reconfigurable. think non-linear memory, think small embedded devices that can join together in a single complex task, think auto-optimisers/refactors a la JIT.
I mean, we evolved from the dwarf binary format to elf
LL
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 community itself is currently debating the best way to move off of Agenda Computing's servers (which are likely going to disappear without notice in the next several months). Once the community switches over, all of the software can be maintained by the community.
Other people, such as myself, are working on Linux-based PDA software that is platform independent. PicoGUI, for example, runs on the VR3, the Helio, PC's, OS X (I think...), and several embedded systems. With this kind of development, the success of the software does not depend on the success of any particular piece of hardware.
I think this has nothing to with LINUX. And the GPL is good because how often has it happened that good code was lost because the company went under.
The problem with palmtops is that I have tried and tried to use them. But what I keep going back to is the smallest leanest notebook possible. And many other people think the same way. A Palmtop is in many ways a "toy".
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
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...
You are kidding right ? There are roughly three players in the marketplace right now
Symbian who run on Mobile phones like the Nokia Communicator (I have one, its superb), and Psions
WindowsCE on those lovely iPAQs, and they are lovely to use even if you hate Redmond
PalmOS single threaded poor quality OS, with a large user base.
NONE OF THESE ARE GPLed. All of them are successful.
People do NOT look to buy a PDA because they can hack code on it. Sure I can develop code for my PDA, but the OS ? Its a commercial product, I don't want it to fail. If you buy an PDA only if its got a GPL'ed OS then you are limiting your choice and are certainly not the mass market.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
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)
Linux v EPOC (A full ground up 32-bit RTOS)
Stability ? None of my EPOC machines have ever crashed
Customized integration ? Drag and drop word, excel, powerpoint or whatever docs to the device and back, sync with Outlook.
Security ? SSL, Digital certificates as standard.
Low Feature Creep ? Its a good thing that you don't get more features ? Even so all of the documents produced on my old Psion work on my new Nokia.
Does only what you want it to ? Does all that and things I hadn't thought of an now love (record a memo).
In terms of stability, integration and security EPOC blows Linux away, the major reason is simple
It is an OS designed for small devices from the ground up, not the porting of a big iron OS to a small device.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
It looks like a product marketed almost solely at the technical community just can't succeed in economic conditions like those at present, if ever.
Even industry heavyweights with large technical communities are in trouble (Psion - who invented the handheld computer - are pulling out and there are continuing rumours about the future of Palm), so what hope is there for a newcomer to the market? (Sharp take note! :-) )
The parent company of Agenda Computing, Kessel International Holdings, had severe financial problems. The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong suspended trading in Kessel shares on 23rd May 2001.
Agenda US was said to be "temporarily closed" because Agenda Germany (Agenda Computing GmbH) as an independent company was planning to establish an office in US (which would have become the new Agenda US). Apparently they were never able to come up with sufficient funding for that (at least not yet).
This is what we have heard from an ex Agenda employee Shane on the Agenda mailing list (I hope I got it right).
The financial problems might have been one reason why they started selling Agenda VR3 when it was still way too unfinished as a product. But there were also some technical problems such as not having enough available RAM. It made it harder to quickly come up with usable set of PDA applications. I guess it was the result of trying to push for a too low price point.
Anyway, I continue using my VR3. It is a nice device and certainly has been one step forward for Linux PDA devices. I am just sad that the step didn't carry very far.
NOT TRUE.
I'm happily using an Agenda, and syncs with Linux (gnomecard and gnomecal) quite well.
Admittedly, earlier versions of the synchronization programs had problems, though.
and this kept me from buying one. the ONLY pda that sync's with linux effortlessly is the Palm and it's clones. you cant sync an iPaq, a Sharp, a VR3. Sorry, but putting all the development into the PDA and then snubbing all the customers you are specifically targeting is pretty darn stupid.
I would have bought a vr3 if it would have worked with Linux even 1/2 as good as the palm pilot does.... I would have even loved to see 1/64th of an effort to make it synch with linux PIM apps, or even just text based where I have to write perl conduits...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
I have one Agenda VR3 and I have to say: few
times in my life I was more disappointed with
something. Technically the device is very powerfull
but it seems that they concentrated only in
hardware. If at least I could get java to
work correctly with it then I could use it more
(actually java only works with it when your
code throws no exceptions!)...
Their website makes the device look very appealing
but the reality is that there is no decent software
to support this hardware. Agenda still is nothing
more than one very expensive toy...
Some people have looked into porting POSE (the Palm OS Emulator) to the Zaurus and other Linux handhelds, so that it could run Palm apps. Unfortunately, POSE needs a Palm ROM image, and those are not freely redistributable. You'd need to have a Palm anyway to get it to work. And the speed would likely be atrocious on a 200MHz ARM chip. It's not full speed even on my K6-II 500MHz.
I had a different idea. The Palm SDK's are available, and there's prc-tools and such for Linux. Why not create an emulation layer for the Palm API, like Wine emulates the Windows API on Linux?
The Palm API is better-documented, and much simpler. It'd probably be fairly easy to get to at least Palm OS 2.0 or so. Then you could recompile Palm apps for a Linux PDA. There would be a speed hit due to redirection, but the underlying processor is much faster; overall I'd think there would be a speed boost.
You'd still need to recompile, but there are lots of open-source Palm apps, and lots more developed with Linux; the developers might have good motivation to quickly port their app to a new platform.
I think the endianess is the same, so that's not a problem. To be legally safe there might need to be a clean-room effort, I'm not sure yet, but this'd be a way to get a lot of apps for, e.g., the Zaurus, and quickly.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
That means device development. Software development is being done by the user community.
Agenda Germany should concentrate on hardware, since that's not something that we can do by ourselves very well. I'd rather buy a mass produced Agenda with 16MBytes of RAM, rather than spend hours soldering.
But even though I had been willing to shell out $250 for it, I got one for less on ebay. I've had it for a week, and I love it! Consider:
- Easy to program. I can develop
for it an run code natively on my Linux box,
without emulators or other stuff.
- GPL, and documented file formats.
I can write my own code (and have done so)
to sync
data reliably, i.e., correct conflict
resolution when records are changed both
on the PDA and the desktop.
- No need for Wintendo. Although
there is Linux support for most PDAs,
if you have to upgrade the OS, it seems
like vendors only provide
.EXE
files. That doesn't help those of us
who do not use the garbage from Redmond.
- The Right Philosophy. Full CVS
access to the sources, Open mentality.
Come on! We all
bitch and moan about Sony, but how many
of you have gone out and bought their
PDAs "because they're nifty", despite
the evils commited by the company?
- Great price. Not everyone has
$500 to spend on an ipaq
or Zaurus or the latest nifty toy.
It has its flaws... lots of them. But for the price, it's easily the best thing out there.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.
The Palm, on the other hand, was invented after the designer carried a block of wood around in his pocket for a month, pondering what the PDA should act like. Agenda Computing could have used a good block of wood.
I work for the largest (paper) agenda company. We supply agendas for almost 50 % of North American schools. I called up Agenda VR3 and said, hey, let's talk. Maybe there's something that we can do here. Unfortunately, I never heard back from them. We then made arrangements to sell Palms, and VR3 was left out in the cold, where, apparently, they are freezing. We've had some corporate changes lately, and our relationship with Palm is in question, but there was an opportunity there that the VR3 people seemingly just ignored. Too bad!
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!
I was very excited when I first heard about the VR3 and was going to buy one as soon as it was released ... untill I read more information about it. It lacks in storage space and RAM compared to other PDA's and has utilities that you can get from the net, like mp3 player, but no room to actually put them to use unless you map to the RAM which is always a bad idea.
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.
It's true, I was being lazy and cheap but that's my right. Another poster has pointed out that I might have been wrong about my assesment of their licenses. In this case the lesson is double: Even the perception of restictions is enough to keep a community from forming. It was enough to keep me from buying one.
As for that troll on the soap box, there are ways coders can make money besides working for some devilish company that wants to resell their telnet client ever year. I suggest you learn how, and fast.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Agenda's U.S. phone and fax numbers have been disconnected
:) somewhere in October or November, but the letter was returned. The USPS reason, if I remember well, was 'unclaimed'. I don't know what that mean, but my guess is that they were in a so bad shape financially that they could not afford the USPS fees to collect their prepaid mail...
Not only that: I sent my registration card by mail (yes, I did it on the internet too
I agree. There is nothing inherent about the technology of Linux that makes it less suitable for PDA's.
:-) I'm pretty much BSD-only these days, as I can *do* *what* *I* *want* with the code, without any strings attached.
But PDA's by their nature, are a bit more proprietary, where vendors try hard to differentiate themselves from each other. (Who would stand out in a group of a dozen PDA's that all run RedHat 7.2.)
Any successful PDA isn't going to be a public domain project, but a business venture. And BSD's licensing makes a more viable foundation than Linux. It breaks my heart, as I have used Linux from the start, but GPL is just too "restrictive in it's forced freedom"
And it still amazes me how people dump on using Linux or BSD on PDA's (why bother). These are *excellent* general purpose operating systems that are far more flexible than Windows CE and PalmOS, and can be made to not use a lot more resources. I think they're a perfect base, even if that's completely hidden. The big trick is to get a proper application suite on top of it, that is workable on a PDA. No standard X apps nor window managers are workable on a PDA. Qt's attempts are better, but still leave a lot to be desired. Once the productivity apps are there, and workable on a handheld form factor, you'll see FreeBSD/Linux PDA's take off...
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Had very bad B5 quote. Probably have very bad karma, but at least there is symmetry.
Most servers run with only a text-mode console display, or they run entirely headless. Should we scrap them because its not X?
X11 can fully support text-only applications, as well as Qt-based applications. Qt/Embedded does not support X11-based applications. Get the difference?
This whole post just makes no sense.
Perhaps that's because I have developed handheld software and you haven't?