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Why Open Source Makes Sense For Handhelds
Guylhem writes "Are you still wondering why you should prefer an handheld running free software over one running Palm OS or Windows CE? Here's a short article to explain the main reasons you should consider.
The most important are sustainability and freedom: you don't want your applications to break when you update your handheld OS or hardware, and you certainly want to decide what *you* may do with your data. Palm and Pocket PC's DRM protected and obscure formats stand in your way. That's another good reason to prefer free software: you have the source code so you can develop plug ins to read such obscure formats. Even better - you can stick to standards formats such as divx which are poorly supported on handhelds running proprietary software." On the topic of handhelds, tanmay submits brighthand.com's small chart of some upcoming handhelds and smart phones that may be launched in the coming months.
When I buy a PDA I chose it for functionality, not freedom (whatever) or sustainability. Why should I care if I can get free updates to a PDA in five years when it probably still wont be able to do what my Microsoft or Palm PDA can do today? I?ve looked at the Linux PDAs and I just don?t see the point. They have all the complexity and failings of UNIX with no software and limited compatibility.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
...breaks my other OSS all the time. Conflicting lib requirements/*.SOs, et al. I can't remember the last time some of my Windoze software broke because I installed something else or 'upgraded' or 'patched.'
Now, there's plenty of other reasons why you should use OSS over CSS, but 'breakage' usually isn't one of them unless you are running a machien that is dedicated to a particular task (i.e. web server)
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I can do what I want only with Palm and Windows. Linux is intriguing, but fails the tests of functionality and compatability.
One problem is that there are a lot of PDA's that almost no one writes software and have weird/uncommon processors. For example, my Jornada 548 runs on an SH3 processor - I can't run Linux because of the SH3 processor, which no one has written the specific kernel patch for... So, do developers try to develop a uC-Linux based kernel for the SH3 (which I've heard is hard to do) or do they try to write software that replaces the Jornada PIM, and open-source it? (which no one has done yet...) So, now, I'm basically stuck with PocketWord, PocketOutlook, PocketCalendar... and no one is willing to write any software to replace it... jeez, maybe I had best learn how to code for WindowsCE 2000.
I'm currently using my friend's old Handspring Visor. Runs quite a few great OSS programs, such as PCash and Vexed, and it does everything I need.
You are not the customer.
They are so damn cool.
My C750 Zaurus is one of the best looking PDAs out there (the rest all being Sharp ones too) - miles ahead of any Palm, Sony or HP offering.
As well as being so goddam sexy, it has a much easier to use (for mobile computing purposes) interface than the PocketPC as well as one that is more flexible than the Palm which I find to restrictive. (Since mine is more than a productiviy tool, I use it more like a mini laptop.)
Throw in Bluetooth and WiFi (which you can use at the same time _as well_ as a SD memory card - try that with another device) for less than $600, all in a box that fits in a pocket and is reasonably robust, with 5 hours battery life... it's hard to say no.
Beep beep.
No they won't put the girls off. My girlfriend stole my Zaurus SL5500 and refuses to give it back, so I had to go out and buy a C750 instead. Oh the pain.
Beep beep.
Freedom of choice is always better, Dude (or Dudette).
I just bought the Sharp Zaurus SL-5600 and it kicks the snot out of my Palm Pilot. It's a few years newer but is still a better machine than the most recent Palms. And when I get the addons sneaked in past the lovely but untrusting Morticia, then I will have far more than had I upgraded the Palm.
Mine came from Amazon.com @ $300.00 - new in the box. This is the best techno trinket I've had years.
Original poster has to be a troll - or his significant other won't let him get the better toy and it's just sour grapes talking.
Too lazy to create a sig...
Not knowing what to expect out of a PDA? How about reminding me of important dates and meetings; keeping a searchable contact list; allowing for short note taking; email.
Fun extras that I can do with my new PPC Toshiba e755: Surf web with builtin 802.11b will on the toilet; show off some pics; listen to music; watch videos I've captured with my Radeon A-i-W and crunched with command line WM encoder 9 to incredibly small, smooth and clean files.
Some "innovative uses" by "inspired thinkers" mentioned in article: Install Apache to show your webpage off to friends; ease of upgrade to new device by writing your own compatible SW (anyone ever hear of Export|CSV?
Oh, and I love this: "If you are lucky, you can download a new version that runs on PalmOS 5. If you aren't, forget your beloved application."
Yes! That's inspired thinking and innovation, being unable to move on from your beloved 1994 PDA apps.
How easy would it be to get a real standardisation body to draw up a standard for Open Source software?
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Obviously, ISO would be the biggie, but maybe it would be more realistic to begin with a national standards body {German DIN [?] for instance} first, even if only to give the others something to use as a template?
What I'm thinking of is a standard literally for openness of source; so claiming compliance with the standard would oblige vendors to certify that they were giving you permission to copy and modify. Standards bodies themselves do not necessarily do the testing {though many will rent you testing facilities}; but rather, publish the specifications -- and a list of approved test procedures -- and anyone can test and certify their own products, though in doing so they are accepting responsibility for the consequences. The standardisation body gets the right to sue you {for misappropriation of trademarks} if you apply its mark to products that do not meet the standard.
A "standards-compliant" sticker on Open Source software might carry some clout with purchasing authorities, too
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I just swapped my old Palm Pro for an M505. I miss the Palm Pro horribly. It actually worked, and never once suffered an electrostatic-discharge refusal to sync or a "dreaded green-light crash." Not once in five years.
As far as handhelds go, reliability is the most important feature. That's an excellent reason to go with a stable but modifiable platform, if you ask me.
Microsoft's approach to PocketPC is completely the opposite of how they established DOS and cornered the PC market. DOS was sold as an operating system that would run on anybody's PC, regardless of manufacture. It wasn't what you'd call "open source" but it did open up the hardware platform and provide a common reference point we could build on.
PocketPC, on the other hand, takes an entirely different approach. You're stuck with MS-imposed limitations like a chunky 320x240 screen size and you can't break out of the Windows shell to the underlying lower-level functions. Working with PocketPC has been very frustrating for me; it's got vendor lock-in coming at you from two angles (MS and whichever OEM branded the unit).
With PocketPC, Microsoft has torn a page from Apple's playbook when it comes to product positioning and the complete lack of "freedom to innovate." Unfortunately their design ideas aren't any better than Apple's were a decade ago with the Newton.
If Microsoft truly wanted to compete in the PDA realm, what they need to do is come up with a DOS-equivalent that will run on a Palm or Clie or even a PocketPC. Indeed it's clever how they're pushing the commodity hardware costs onto the OEMs, and all they have to do is come up with the software. (A bit reminiscent of Dell's JIT manufacturing.) But in the long run I think a product that has both a closed software architecture and a closed hardware spec isn't going to fly.
And there's also the bloatware problem. Why should a PocketPC need a 406MHz CPU? A Clie with twice the pixels gets by on a much leaner chip.
I've bought a Zaurus C860 in Japan and it rulez. It is really a small laptop, awesome screen/image quality and you can easily type on its keyboard. More than enoung RAM, simultaneous SD card and WiFi support and easy USB network connectivity with Linux. Screw those proprietary Palm and Symbian crap.
Well the available models are way to expensive for me. If there was something more entry level like a Palm m505. I suppose Linux is not exactly good for cheap devices since it needs some more powerful processors? What about a cheap PDA with ecos or equivalent on it.
I can't remember the last time some of my Windoze software broke because I installed something else or 'upgraded' or 'patched.'
It used to happen all the time with Microsoft Windows systems. But Linux came along and challanged Microsoft in terms of reliability. Microsoft scrambled and came up with Windows 2000 as their response. It's far, far, more stable than older MS offerings.
Problem is, many of the most frentic Open Source advocates haven't used a Microsoft OS since before W2K so their experience of 'buggy easily-broken' Microsoft OSes is dated and no longer the case.
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Not ironic at all. When designing for a system with constraints (limited MIPs and RAM for early mainframes and PC's, mAH of battery and viewable kilopixels in handhelds, etc.), a developer who is capable of hand crafting an application to fit in that environment will be able to produce something far more usable than a trivial port of some bloatware meant for a system many times larger.
Technology advances will help out some types of bloatware (e.g. Mr. Gates depends on Intel keeping up with Moore's law). But advances in battery energy density are very slow; so, in some ways, the constraints for optimal applications for handhelds will always be different than for PCs.
One of the main failings of PocketPC handhelds is that a large portion of the applications for it are ports of applications meant for hardware with bigger displays, larger caches, and unlimited power (AC wall plug plus noisy fans).
Since I am the AC who posted the link to the article Tirel copied, let me enlighten you. One day, I'm happily reading comments when I came across an "informative" post by Tirel. The problem was, it seemed familiar to me - so I did a quick google search, and turned up the original article he had copied a paragraph from. As a developer, that pissed me off - he didn't cite or give credit to the original author, and the original author hadn't copyrighted his work in a manner that would allow Tirel to post a section of it as his own work. This earned Tirel a space on my Foes list. Tirel (along with a number of others) has an excellent history of using other people's work as his own. It's really an unfortunate side-affect of the open-source development model - we tend to attract those who wish to use the work of others as their own, because our work is so easily available. Anyhow, whenever I see a post by a foe, and it looks like it might be copied work, I check it out at google and a slashdot comment database. This is what happened here. Because some mods are afraid of M2 negative-mod smackdown, I post my plagarism information as anonymous - that way, it doesn't give me any karma if those mods mod my post up. Simple enough for you?
so why are you posting as an AC?
Windows 3.1 had something like 50,000 applications
so did OS/2 then, it can run them no problem. that was the comparison.
OS/2 is used in atms. That was my point of that statement. It is still used. And still used in banks quite often, and telcom companies etc. You can't say no one used/uses it.
If you were an administrator, which i doubt, why don't you really post on AC? Maybe you weren't able to set up os/2 well if you had stablity problems.
The only thing it compared well with was Windows 3.
Why? It may habe been similar era, but it obviously performs much beyond any of the early windows (3.1, 95, 98) since it had true mulitthreading and a fs that was a lot less prone to fragmenting.
My main point was, your comparison of OS/2 to linux on PDA's makes no sense. Linux on pda's has no apps? OS/2 has no apps? both false and stupid to say. Stupid people will use what they are told to use through marketing, not "what has applications". Ease of use may be an arguement, but I really don't think linux is far behind if at all on pda's. oh one last one
It's clear from your rhetoric that you are a Team OS/2 member, BTW
I guess that could be true if i were lying on my profile, but until that is proven I'm a CSc student.
if you want to respond to this, try repsonding non ac and i may be interested.
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
The Zaurus is great... but it's nowhere near it's potential. Think Mac OS X with it's beautiful exterior and powerful innards. The Zaurus is just like that but without the beautiful exterior. In fact, the exterior (meaning the software) is terrible.
I love using my Zaurus for SSH, web development (I have Apache, PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, and CVS installed and in regular use. I have all my current projects checked out in a big SD card and I do development work while checking source code my modem card or WiFi card.
But do I ever use the PIM software? No. They're hideous. QT is bloated enough on the *desktop*, on the zaurus it's just insane. Simple apps take up 10-20 MB of RAM, it takes 20 seconds to launch a program...not worth it! I do everything in vi and text files!
I have a dream of some smart developer taking the Zaurus, gutting it completely, and coming up with a new lean and mean Linux distro that blows everything away. Heck I'd do it myself if I had the time..I wish I did.
The Zaurus unfortunately is for the geeks like me still. But to be honest I prefer good ol' paper and pencil for stuff like appointments and phone numbers.
I have an IPAQ (by Compaq) and the best dirsto I found is familiar.
When I first installed Linux I posted some screen shots, running the web server from the IPAQ directly connected to the Internet and firewalled with iptables. I have a dual PCMCIA sleeve, and with 2 nics it can be used as a router/firewall with NAT. The foldable keyboard works great and is very sleek. I have a 5G PCMCIA hard drive so I can watch movies on the bus. You can also use Sprint as a wireless ISP as there's now a Linux driver for the Sprint wireless modem.
There are camera and phone attachments but I don't know how they work with Linux.
This "familiar" distro has a good mailing list, moderated and mailed daily.
The software for handhelds and all new electronic devices should be open sourced because, although competition is good (Windows vs Palm, etc.), there are too many diverging standards at the moment. Open sourcing will force development around practical functionality rather than marketing strategies.
I have a Palm Pilot - specifically, a Tungsten E, their newest low end model, which I got for $170.
So far, I've gotten movies to play in divx format with mmplayer (which means they're about 1/10 the size they were with the included app); 15 books to be stored in 3MB with plucker; a better light dimming system (you could hardly affect the light before) with dimmer, a NES emulator from nesem, and a remote control system (using your palm as a remote) through Omniremote.
It also comes with Documents-to-Go, which can read and write word, excel and powerpoint documents (the same kind you find on the PC, not an import).
What exactly am I missing in freedom of choice? All the stuff I chose didn't come with my Palm device, with the exception of Documents-to-Go, and one app is even GPL (plucker).
I think I'm limited only by the speed of the processor, and for wireless stuff. I could have gotten the faster ones, or wireless, but I'd have paid more for those. I got a lot of bang for my buck, without paying the extra $130 that you did.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I use Opie on Familiar Linux. Before this I used a Palm IIIc. Perfectly fine for my use, basically typical PDA stuff.
Just because you *can* do more doesn't mean you *have* to. Linux makes for a perfectly good underlying OS for a PDA. Opie is an excellent environment for a palmtop.
I do a little database stuff with some PyQt based apps. I tossed 'em together in a GUI, tested it on my laptop, and transferred them over. Nice and easy. And easy database apps are likely the biggest missing thing from a typical PDA setup.
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Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Good for you. I can't, though. I need a web browser, an ssh client, and a terminal window capable of displaying at least 80 columns of text. My Zaurus gives me that. Nothing else I've found does. The fact that it runs Linux is a bonus, of course, and has huge hack value :-)
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Treo 600 just works great. I mean who cares about DRM when you can Divx on Palm OS5 already? Also ebooks? You can just download books, put them in .doc format, and read it with Docs to Go.
The applications on the Palm OS just work great - Docs to go to read/write Office docs, Verichat for instant messaging, SnapperMail for email.
Why bother with the customization and the quirky linux interface, when you want a smartphone that just works fast and well with great software.
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- I can only sync using ActiveSync(TM), which is proprietary and only runs on Windows.
- Contacts & calendar only sync with Outlook(TM).
- The SDK, albeit free (beer) only runs on Windows(TM).
It boils down to: to make full use of my WinCE IPaq, I would have to buy Windows for my desktop machine. I have yet to try SynCE - the free ActiveSync protocol implementation, perhaps it will let me sync with Linux, but more probably I'll just install Linux on the IPaq.