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."

Comments

Linux

[tsa]

I don't know. Do you have to buy a device because it runs Linux? Maybe there are better OS-es for PDA's.

Why are people surprised?

[not-quite-rite]

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.

Re:Why are people surprised?

[ProfessorPuke]

I've got an Agenda (although I waited until the price had dropped more than 50%). Strangly, the resolution and monochromeness were both selling points for me! The resolution is better than a Palm (160x240 vs 160x160, due to no Graffiti area), and monochrome means much better battery life.

However, their hardware spec was still hugely flawed. Some of the more obvious deficiencies:

• /dev/dsp: They built in sound hardware (input and output!), with a port for a nokia-style earmike. But to this day no useful software has used it. An mp3 player isn't too much fun when you've got maybe 3 megabytes storage free.
• too small: It's SMALLER than most Palms! That sounds like an advantage, but the fact is, the customers for a Linux device are going to be geeky hackers, and willing to look like a nerd for hauling around a huge brick of hardware. If the Agenda had been slightly bigger, not slightly smaller, then there may have been room for AA batteries (much longer life), more RAM, more flash, or who knows.
• not enough memory: Here's the memory on my unit: \w\$ cat /proc/meminfo total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached: Mem: 7798784 7487488 311296 0 0 729088 Swap: 0 0 0 MemTotal: 7616 kB MemFree: 304 kB ... 8 meg is adequate. I guess. Barely. If they could've bumped it up to 16, the device would've been much more useful. Today hardware hackers enjoy pulling apart SIMMs to solder in this upgrade themselves- if its that easy, the factory should've done it.
• not enough storage: Same deal as the RAM. Had 8, should've had 16. Most of the 8 was already exhausted by kernel, /bin, /usr/bin/X11R6, /usr/bin/games, etc. With 16 flash, the out-of-box device would've come mostly empty, instead of mostly full, which is a world of difference. Many Palm users felt decieved when they found that the advertised "8 megs of storage" wasn't all usable for their contacts and appointments. Here's the stats:
  \w\$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/mtdblock0 3.3M 212.0k 3.0M 6% /flash
• Replaceable batteries: You had to unscrew the case to change the AAA batteries, rather than being able to slap it in the dock every night and never think about losing power, like you can with many Palms and PocketPC units. That would've been an especially important advantage for a device whose usefulness come from software hacking. You want to plug it in, export DISPLAY=workstation:0, and beging to code, without worrying that operating the serial port drains batteries faster than normal unplugged operation. This problem reduced the convenience of developing new software for the Agenda, which thus reduced the benefit that a Free Software operating system should've given them.
• No USB: USB is cool, what can I say? A USB port could've not only handled the recharge problem from the same plug as the data, but it would've had better bandwidth too, and not require a nonstandard serial-port adapter. And imaging if the PDA could emulate a USB mass-storage device to export its filesystem to random PCs you meet throughout the day (kinda like the Terapin Mine, but that's a $700 system).

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. If they'd done just 1 or 2 of those rather simple improvements, they could've justified the higher price to average users.

Re:Oh well, a lesson learned

[Peter Harris]

You know, he could have been referring to Freedom rather than sale price...

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.

From the developer community

[VertigoAce]

As a company, Agenda Computing USA is long gone. The office in Germany (Agenda Computing GmbH) still exists and is finacially a distinct entity. They are still developing software and even accessories that weren't available from the US.

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.

Financial problems and an unfinished product

[Johku]

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.

Re:That's a bummer man

[trampel]

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.

Re:Oh well, a lesson learned

[Jay Carlson]

Their code base was not all GPL

No, it isn't all GPL; a lot of it is covered by the LGPL and X11 licenses. :-)

Seriously, we have the source to every bit on the device. And I mean Open Source. It did take some effort to get the X11 sources, and source for the PMON boot loader, but we have them all. I know this because Brian Webb, who isn't an Agenda employee, rebuilt everything from source to support my snow ABI, which is not binary compatible---if it wasn't rebuilt, it wouldn't work!

We're still working on automating the rebuild. Right now, doing this rebuild is a manual process, but I think we're a few weeks away from having a big "make World" that will spit out a cross compiler and then a romdisk image.

Now, if you're fretting about PDAs with components that aren't Open Source, go check out the Zaurus. Its Java implementation is proprietary. (If you want to write apps for it, they have to be GPL'd unless you're a Troll licensee; I guess some people see that as a positive thing.)

and the device was expensive

$250 always seemed a touch high to me. I think there's a Linux PDA niche somewhere below the iPaqs, competing directly with low-end Palm devices. LinuxDA is a little too low end for my taste; I want virtual memory. I would think that had Agenda's parent company not stumbled, pricing on the VR3 would have come down.

I don't remember an NDA on their developer pages.

(I wish people would stop moderating articles with "overrated/underrated" just to avoid metamod; the parent is at score 3 with no moderation reason. And the parent msg is substantially incorrect.)

forget the Sharp Zaurus

[markj02]

I have developed software for the VR3. It's a nice little device. Because it uses standard Linux GUI software, I can now take my software and run it on several other Linux-based PDAs.

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.

Here's why agenda got it's butt kicked

[Ukab the Great]

• It had a risc processor that was almost four times as a fast as a palm's cisc processor, but responded to user-generated events almost three times as slow. This is probably do to the fact that the linux kernel does not prioritize handling UI events whereas PalmOS does. It is probably also due the fact that PalmOS doesn't try to do serious multi-tasking because something like a PDA really doesn't require it except for a few limited daemon-type things (e.g. alarms, timers, etc). Sure, if it does serious multi-tasking, geeks can run apache on it. But then you have to ask yourself who you're really marketing the product to.
• The Agenda did not remotely have any serious human factors involved in the hardware design. Most likely they said "we'll design the hardware first, and worry about the interface later on". You can clearly see this from the strangely placed buttons and the ultra-slippery metal stylus that is ultra-hard to get a good grip on. Any UI person worth his salt will tell you that you should always come up with how the person is supposed to interface with the software/device before you ever write code/manufacture it. On a PDA, usability issues are amplified several thousand times: On a sit-down desktop, you might have half a day to navigate a poorly designed interface. With a PDA, you might have 20 seconds to get down a damned important phone number.
  
  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.
  
  
• The user interface was badly designed. The calendar on the agenda was nowhere near as good or as clean as the palm's. And where the palm had a global area for looking over the applications (i.e. home), Agenda made it into an application called Launchpad. File managers should have the feel of being a global entity, not an application that has to be started.
• Agenda's web site really didn't contain a whole lot of information that was helpful and only contained a few pieces of documentation here and there. There seemed to be this attitude of "if you want help or support or information, check out the agenda community". When you're a company, you just can't say that. Also, Agenda should have put all the developer community apps on their web site. People don't have the patience to follow links.
• Agenda prevented reselling, but did not provide things of as great a quality as a reseller might (if at all). For example, if someone were allowed to beef up the consumer IR software, to add a whole bunch of IR codes for various consumer devices, and make it generally easier to use and then sell it as the Ultimate Universal Remote, people would have gotten a kickass remote and Agenda Computing would have still made money of the hardware, which was their original business model anyways
• Agenda couldn't really decide who their target market was: end-users who wanted an organizer or linux geeks with a lot of patience and a love for futzing who wanted a cool toy. You always have to know who your market is if you want to succeed in any kind of business.