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Royal Linux PDA Finally Coming To Market
An anonymous reader writes "According to LinuxDevices.com: 'After a false start and a delay, Royal appears ready at last to ship its Linux-based PDA, the Linea LX. The Linux LX is now expected to arrive this quarter, priced at $399. The device will be based on a 200MHz Motorola i.MX1 MDragonBall processor equipped with 64MB of SDRAM and 32MB of Flash memory, and will include Trolltech's Qtopia graphical framework and PIM suite.'"
Yes, but if you RTFA (I know...I know...no I'm not new here), this one is an ARM derivative.
uk reseller
I've had mine for a few months and it's great!
Bah, this has the exact specifications of a Zaurus SL-5500. And it looks cheaper and clunkier and the keyboard is some snapon crap. And it's $400! You can pick up SL-5500's these days for cheap.
For the record, I do love my Zaurus. The battery life isn't super, but it lasts about a week or so worth of actual use before I need to charge it (unless I'm in a meeting and need to "take notes"...read: play a game). I don't code on it though, but it's highly beneficial to be able to get in and tweak various scripts to do nifty things (like when cards are inserted).
Anyway, if you're going to spend $400, you can probably get a newer model or an iPAQ and load OpenZaurus/OpenEmbedded (yes, it works on non-Zaurus hardware). You'll probably end up wanting that anyway.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
And that should impress me how?
Its a pretty vanilla ARM core with a few tweeks
I wasn't trying to troll with the grandparent comment, but if you look at the CPUs being developed specifically for handhelds by Texas Instruments or hell even intel with their multimedia extensions. These chips open up a new world of apps for PDA/Handheld products with DSP tech built in to them.
This is just another "been there done that" core from motorola.
I hope you die painfully and alone.
dragonball vs xscale benchmarks
seems like a 66mhz dragonball in the sony t675 is no for behind the xscale 250mhz in the sony nx70, but considering the cpu speed went from 66mhz to 200mhz, this might be one smoking cpu, at least judging from the integer benchmark on this page.
What benefits does this PDA runs Linux under the hood provide? The only mention of synchronization is Outlook. Did they choose Linux for the "it's Linux, therefore it's cool" factor or did they choose Linux because it's a good kernel to develop this kind of hardware on?
I dunno about this thing but having Linux on my Zaurus was great. I could sit there with a fold-out keyboard and fire up Xwindows, running programs like Octave (a Matlab clone). I could do VNC, SSH, AIM, email, and browse the web. I could do any of this just about anywhere on campus.
Running Linux means that it can run Linux software.
Life is too short to proofread.
Yes it's in the m68k processor family. It's essentially the same chips as the Palm devices use.
There have been three Linux PDAs yet, which have become available in the market actually: the Agenda VR3, the SHARP Zaurus series and the Yopy made by Samsung. Some other Linux PDAs were created for developement purposes only (e.g. COMPAQ Itsy), others were announced but have never made it into the market.
I believe so. This is the same Royal that got reamed when they were caught pilfering Palm, Inc. code. It turns out I have one of the DaVinci's that contains the stolen code (My mother's husband gave it to me about two years ago).
Now for those of you who didn't read the actual article, go and read it and look at those screenshots. Boy, those fonts look so horrible!!!
If you have used Windows CE based or Palm based PDAs; you know what kind of beautiful sub-pixel anti-aliased fonts to expect. These fonts look ugly which is a huge usability hinderence.
I hope these guys would take advantage of the awesome freetype2 libraries on linux *properly* to display fonts.
Osho
Nope. It's an ARM. They kept the same name from their previous line of products, which was based on 68k. See here:
http://www.motorola.com/imx