$300 Linux PDA from Royal to feature Qtopia

An anonymous reader writes "According to a Linux Devices news item, Royal is preparing to release a Linux PDA before the end of this year with a price point of under $300. The device will use Trolltech's Qtopia, so it will share a common operating environment and application platform with the Sharp Zaurus Linux PDAs. Royal announced a Linux PDA in January 2002, but apparently discontinued that project and embarked on a new design. The Linux Devices story includes a photo of the earlier version."

Comments

If at first you don't succeed...

[jbellis]

This is Royal's what, third try at the PDA market? First there was the Da Vinci, which at $99 was priced right in 99 when the lowest-cost palm was 2 or 3 times that much, but still didn't make a very big impression. Then there was the, uh, something that made even less of a splash than the DV... Now this. Best of luck to ya, Royal, but I think it's going to be another too little, too late. If anything there's even less room in the market now for a non-MS, non-Palm pda now than in 99.

Royal hates their customers

[frovingslosh]

Have you ever bought a Royal product before? I did. Long ago I got a typewriter with a printer interface on it. I paid way too much, but was attracted by the promise of being able to replace the print wheels, of the promise of variable spacing type print wheels amd how I could use this on a computer. Then I ran into Royal customer service when I tried to actually buy the variable pitch print wheel. They pretty much laughed at me and told me it wasn't really available. While I was still trying to track it down I also tried to find out what the width table for the variable spacing mode was (I would need it to build my own printer driver software - this was long before Windows and there was no company supplied sriver software at all). Again, I was treated like dirt for even expecting that I could get information that was going to be needd to actually use my Royal product from the group that claimed to be supporting it.

I will never buy a Royal product again. Any company I'm involved in where I have a say in the matter will never buy Royal equipment (yes, I have stopped some purchases). There are other PDA's in the world; no one needs one bad enough to buy one from Royal.

Qtopia ? I prefer OpenZaurus

[theefer]

Qtopia is fine on my Sharp Zaurus SL5000D, but OpenZaurus (with Opie) is really better (and Free) in my opinion. It's more polished, more mature and better documented.
I don't really need the few software Qtopia has over OZ (Opera, Handcom Office Suite, ..) since there are free alternative (Konqueror, etc).

Good to see Free forks can compete and sometimes overtake the original commercial software.

If you have a Zaurus, you really have to try OpenZaurus !