Slashdot Mirror
Toshiba e740 Pocket PC
Brian writes "Details of the e740, Toshiba's XScale model which will be powered by PocketPC 2002 has been leaked. PDA LIVE.com has the scoop and the photo :)" Integrated 802.11b, nice.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
... on how long it takes someone to get a Linux kernel hacked onto the thing :)
400MHz Intel XScale Processor, a 3.5" 16-bit reflective screen, 64MB RAM, 32MB ROM
Get two e740's, add a little more ROM and it's better than my pc...I really need to have a talk with the wife about my allowance.....
P.S.Could someone extract all these "anonymous cowards" from my butt?
ARM helped Intel.
- 3D to a lesser extent than desktop: If I buy one of these, it's gonna be to play on it half of the time.
- USB in: HP did release a Palm PC allowing you to connect devices like keyboard, mouse and the like to it. And that was really cool when using it on a desktop. Unfortunately, no USB hub on these little sucker.
- No integrated extended battery pack ala VAIO. What I would like to get is a double or triple life battery extension that matches the design of the PDA.
- Most PDA come with no screen cover. Being the most fragile part of a device that you are supposed to carry all over the place, this one is just a pure puzzle to me.
- I want WiFi AND Bluetooth, not one or the other.
- Wireless earphones so I can listen to my mp3s without tripping in the cables, or hanging myself when I take out my coat.
- etc...
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
blue unplugged.com has a review, and expansys.com accepts preorder.
Cheers!
geek page at KY speaks
Small computers are great, but they do lack one thing that most geeks see as paramount in desktop systems, that is upgrading and builing them yourself. Though with laptops you can add/remove ram and harddrive(s) you cannot change the key compontents such as the cpu. What we need is some kind of standard that small/wearable computers need to be built around, not only would that help small businesses that don't have the money to start from scratch but it would also make a wearable computers move forward and become aplicable to the things we use desktops and servers for today.
Carpe meam simiam!
I could really take advantage of the Integrated Wi-Fi, seeing how I just equiped both my home and office for it. Integrated Wi-Fi inso a PDA changes drastically the posibilities of usage for such a device. Wireless is what I believe will change PDA's from being an expensive rolodex and note pad into a crucial business device.
Too bad it's a PocketPC. The Sharp PDA looks interesting though, even though the Wi-Fi option is an aftermarket card.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Yay, 400 MHz must mean it's twice as fast as my 206 MHz IPaq, right? Well, regardless my main problem with the PocketPC line is that the screens are so small, by which I mean they don't have enough pixels. There's that new Clie or whatever with a 480x320 screen, and this dinky little PocketPC has a screen half that size. I'm just not impressed, even if it does say Microsoft when you turn it on.
Porting your 640x480 app to a screen 1/4 the size is not easy!
The other problem that I have with PocketPC is that the PocketPC Terminal Services Client won't let you run 128-bit encryption. Strange, considering that the Citrix Client does 128-bit encryption just fine. Citrix figured it out but MS, who CODED THE POCKETPC OS can't get it to work. Not very reassuring.
And whoever said that PocketPC needs some kind of screen cover is right. And the OS itself is extremely difficult to work with from an installling-drivers-for-the-802.11-card perspective. Like to install software you have to have a Windows PC running ActiveSync. They should focus more on making the PocketPC a computer capable of standing on its own and not requiring constant trips to the cradle.
sounds like these things have loads of horsepower; i'm sure some pretty amazing games can (and will) be played on them.
:)
games are pretty popular on PDAs, and this begs the question... why don't they make the controls better-suited to gaming?
you know games are one of the reasons people use to justify the purchase of these things. nobody is buying one solely to game, of course, but why else do you need a 400mhz cpu in your PDA?
just like the PC market, games are one of the driving forces behind ever more-powerful hardware, even if people don't always admit it/realize it.
the thing that sucks about gaming on these machines, though, are the controls! they're awful, and your hands get cramped up. why don't they build one with a slightly bigger control pad? also, they should move its location from the center, over to the left, to resemble a more traditional gameboy setup. i can guarantee the company to do this first will see a nice return on their tiny investment.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
The possibility of making Beowulf cluster certianly should be raised, but the Slashdot Collective is probably more worried about it being driven by the Devil's software, so it seemed like the logical choice.
I was lamenting along the same lines yesterday or so on another Pocket PC story and I got links to three Linux efforts for PPC, but I wasn't impresed by any of them.
The first was a page for a the earliest IPaQ running X, but the page was two years old and they had to tweak the hardware in what they themselves claimed was a fairly risky procedure just to get it to run Xcalc. So, that was more of a cool hack stunt than the KDE or Gnome distro for Pocket PC 2002 that I was hoping to find.
Then some helpful individual started giving me cheerleader stuff about the Zaurus. Well it sure seems to me that the Zaurus is more about Java than what I think of as a Linux distro. Personally, I don't see any advantage to either Sun or IBM over Microsoft.
Finally someobody pointed me to Symbian which also appears to rely quite heavily on Java. Perhaps Symbian did the Zaurus software or has some licensing deal, I'm not sure. They seem to be the closest thing to Linux for a Pocket PC platform.
However, I recently did some work for a Pocket PC OEM and I researched the market in the course of that contract and learned about the OQO. This is probably going to be the Pocket PC platform killer as it's a Transmeta processor wth a micro hard drive that can run standard Linux distros and at the same time it can run XP, so Redmond likes it too. I honestly don't think the Pocket PC thing is going to work until something more like the OQO concept comes to market.
I thought one of the coolest parts of the OQO design was the external LCD monitor and keyboard. The thing is like a Pocket PC when you're really on the road, but at home or work you plug it into a monitor. With a ultra thin bluetooth DVD burner it could be the pretty rad toy. Of course price is very important. All this stuff has to get much cheaper. The Pocket PCs are so overpriced right now and that GPRS service or whatever it's called is really hard to sell as a bargain when they're charging by the meg. Oh yeah you can use Instant Messaging pretty cheap and for some people in certain types of companies that's really super special but generally speaking it's a tough sell at twenty bucks a month with bandwidth caps of a few megs when people are thinking in wi-fi terms already.
The Cassiopeia E200's cradle has both a USB client connector (for syncing) and a USB host connector. You can also buy a bottom lip for the Casio and that has the USB host connector, so you could drive a tree of USB devices while mobile. I saw a picture of it in a magazine review. I believe USB current out from the lip device is limited to 100mA (the USB specification allows current limitiations of 100mA to 500mA).
I do not know if the NEC MobilePro P300's USB host mode requires it to be plugged into its cradle.
The big deal here isn't that the XScale *can* support both SD and CF, but that the model *does* support it, that they built physical slots to accept the media. That's what is cool.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Why? So you can sound 31337 and name-droppy without even being at your computer, or for a good reason? ;)
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Alright, this is more like it.
I think I'm starting to get it which isn't too bad since I disdained portables till I got this gig with the Pocket PC company.
The first IpaQ link I saw was obviously outdated, but handhelds.org is the scoop and a painfully obvious URL to boot. Thanks for clearing that up.
I wasn't too far off though because I notice that they are suggesting you're going to want a microdrive to take advantage of all the Linux Arm goodness out there and this current set of flash memory powered devices is going to be lacking in that respect. Add that with the knowledge that WiFi still has some issues that should be addressed real soon but not quite yet and the verdict reads: not ready for prime time --yet.
Besides, I think the OQO notion of being able to plug into an external monitor or KVM is excellent. Let's move production on those babies to China and drop the knob on the price selector. Or droolsville, how about 2X512Meg Compact Flash and dump the microdrive. Too pricey for now, but next year? Who knows.