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Review Of Yopy 3700 Linux PDA

Posted by timothy on from the funny-name dept.

SecondToughest writes "Gizmodo has a recent post referring to a review of the new Yopy 3700 Linux-based PDA. The reviewer seems to like it: 'Overall, this is beautiful hardware. The design is compact when not in use, but when opened the Yopy is quite user friendly. The really great thing about this PDA is the presence of both MC and CF card slots. To me, this is almost the perfect PDA design.'"

10 of 225 comments (clear)

  1. Sync with Windows only? by FosterSJC · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is this a joke:

    "At this point the Yopy is only designed to sync with the Windows Operating System."

    So I am supposed to dual-boot, first developing my own software in Linux, then boot into windows just to load it onto the device. NO THANK YOU. Zaurus it is.

    1. Re:Sync with Windows only? by timeOday · · Score: 3, Insightful
      That's not what Sync means. If you schedule one appointment on your PC calendaring app and another appointment on your PDA there's supposed to be a push-button way of "synchronizing" the two so both calendars have both appointments.

      It's not simply copying a file.

  2. size by leomekenkamp · · Score: 4, Insightful

    With the screen down the Yopy is about the same depth as a paperback book

    I'm sorry, but 69 × 103 × 24.7mm means that this pda is about 14.7mm too thick for me. IMHO a pda should easily fit in a pocket.

    --
    Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
  3. You see by Mr_Silver · · Score: 5, Insightful
    ... the majority of people (ie. non Slashdot crowd) who will buy a PDA don't give a flying toss about what the underlying operating system is.

    For them:

    • It must do all the general PIM stuff well
    • It must be stable
    • It must be feature rich
    • It must support whatever media they currently use (MMC, SD etc.etc)
    • It must sync with their computer (note they say "computer" when they generally mean "windows").
    The fact that it's Linux based is not going to be a major selling point. When your data is on MC and CF cards, thats a major selling point.

    A story: One of my co-workers asked me what I thought about the up and coming Linux based Motorola phone. My comment was that the fact it was running Linux makes absolutely no difference. If Motorola implement the same horribly awkward , difficult to use and ugly interface that they have then nothing will have really changed.

    The underlying OS is largely irrelevant, it's what runs on top that makes all the difference.

    --
    Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
  4. Re:Linux? by Qzukk · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Sure, if you're willing to pay the license for it and pass those costs on to the consumer.

    Linux has become the way to go embedded on the cheap. If you don't need an RTOS, what in QNX are you paying for?

    --
    If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
  5. $499? by markv242 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    It astounds me that PDA makers continue to believe that they can charge more than $250 for their hardware and get any serious amount of sales. I haven't noticed a whole lot of innovation from PDA-makers (other than the Hiptop) and their core functionality (contacts, appointments, notes) has been co-opted by everyone from the cellphone makers to Apple with the iPod.

    Until someone can give me some really compelling reasons to upgrade from my old Handspring, I will continue to use my money to purchase more reasonable hardware upgrades: that is to say, more RAM for the laptop, bigger drives for the desktop, etc.

  6. Re:Linux? by supun · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Depends. With Linux there is no license cost for the OS, with QNX there is. So if the cost of the extra memory to hold a bigger OS footprint, per unit, is less than the OS license, per unit, you'd go with the extra memory and Linux.

    --
    :w!
  7. Perfect design...maybe, but the software? by Call+Me+Black+Cloud · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Also from that same review:

    Okay, now let's talk about the areas for improvement. Once I mastered the built in software, I was pretty much stuck. There are a few games included but that's about it. Until Yopy gets some Linux developers to help them out, there is very little software available. I also wasn't able to use my wireless card because of the lack of drivers. As I mentioned earlier, the lack of software isn't strictly a Yopy issue. Linux Operating systems for PDAs will only be as strong as the development community behind it. That brings up the next issue: at this point the Yopy is only designed to sync with the Windows Operating System.

    So to sum up:

    Very little software available

    Needs drivers

    Only syncs with Windows

    So what is the company hoping for?

    1. Linux geeks buy Yopy because it runs Linux
    2. Said geeks churn out software and drivers for it, because that's how it works in the open source world
    3. Sales increase because the Yopy is now attractive to the masses
    4. Profit!!!
    Why would the average PDA user purchase this instead of a Palm or Windows PDA? What can the Yopy do that existing systems can't? I am interested to see how this turns out...
  8. Re:Except that its a real _OS_ by RevAaron · · Score: 3, Insightful



    I've unfortunately went over this a dozen times with plenty of other people.

    I know it may be hard to come to terms with this, but WinCE is a real OS too. Not just an app launcher.

    You can multitask. You can mount NFS and SMB shares. Play MP3s, MPEGs, DivXs, whatever. Unlike on the Zaurus, you can get *real* handwriting recognition- not just *character recognition,* to which you are confined with any Linux PDA (at least for now). You can code in a million languages on the device it self under CE- and unlike on Linux PDAs, it's a lot easier to find a well-adapted port rather than something barely shoehorned in. Apache, FTPd, SSH, telnet, X11 (remote and local), VNC, rdesktop- I've all done it from CE.

    It's a failing of the current PDA Linuxes to make you create a swap file to get more RAM rather than an advantage. In WinCE, you just simply adjust the amount allocated to RAM vs Storage via a slider; on current PDA Linux, you have to install a hacked kernel (with hardcoded values) or create a swap space in your storage area.

    WinCE is very, *very* far from perfect. But so is Linux, on the PDA and otherwise. Anyone who thinks that WinCE or Linux are perfect is delusional.

    I've run bash on CE. Big deal. And, unlike with PDA Linux, I don't have to put up with substandard software. It may come as a shock, but a lot of folks want their PDAs to work well as PDAs and not just show-off toys at LUG meetings. :)

    My current main PDA is a Zaurus SL-C760. I'm not some whacky MS zealot. It's a shame so many Zaurus users are just Linux cheerleaders. The Zaurus could be a great platform, but no amount of talking about will make the PDA software available for the Z any better.

    --

    Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
  9. these things are high-end UNIX workstations by 73939133 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Just about every PDA around today has the specs of a high-end UNIX workstation of a few years ago. Your average PDA today has a 200MHz RISC chip, 64Mbytes of RAM, hundreds of megabytes of Compact Flash storage, etc. Many UNIX workstation had 1/10th the compute power, memory, and disk storage.

    Furthermore, Linux and X11 aren't "high-footprint" at all by modern standards. Sure, on your desktop machine, they use lots of memory; that's because they can: people configure every feature into them and then they go on using lots of cache. On a PDA, you can squeeze a Linux kernel (I don't know about 2.4, but certainly older kernels) into a few hundred kbytes, and the X11 server and toolkit into less than a Mbyte. That's less than Windows CE or Qt/Embedded. It probably is even less than PalmOS 5. In fact, if you really want a small footprint OS, ucLinux is another option; it can even run on old Palm hardware (no MMU).