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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.'"
What counts is how fast it feels to the user... not bragging rights for processor speed... such a pity that it's competitors are going to push their clock speed to the fore on spec sheets and the proles aren't really going to notice the real speed.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I still have my Linux-based 'Agenda' PDA. It's pretty good - although the handwriting recognition is kinda iffy and it's a bit short of CPU power.
It's quite surreal to be able to pop up an Xterm on this tiny box.
It's nice to be able to use NFS via PPP to copy files back and forth to my PC...having that level of general 'stuff' available is a powerful reason for wanting Linux in a PDA.
www.sjbaker.org
Does anyone know the dimensions of the thing? it looks a bit thick.. or is it my imagination?
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
People always talk about running Linux in this or that device instead of the original OS it came with...
Maybe now the Microsoft Zealots will come out of the woodwork and ask:
"Yea but, can it run Windows!?"
"Just imagine a BSOD on these?"
etc.
Where do i get a decent handheld running GPE?
I was waiting for it since i saw it the first time
Move Sig. For great justice.
Looks like the specs are pretty close to my Zaurus 5500, excepting the fact that my Z has a built-in keyboard as opposed to that snap on thingy (extra $$ ?) and includes a Compact Flash slot. Oh yeah - and I only paid US$190 for my Z a year ago. Sure the processor may be a bit faster, but I really don't see much to justify the price. Also, only one expansion slot means that when you plug an 802.11x card in the SDIO slot you are stuck with the built-in 64MB of SDRAM and 32MB of Flash. Judging from the way I use my Z, that would be severely limiting, especially when you are doing online activities that need to keep logs, like kismet.
\/\/oobie
A better comparison would be to other PDA's... in which case... it's still a ripoff. A new iPaq at that price has double the clock speed (plus SD and CF slots, Wifi, and Bluetooth) and is probably considerably smaller and lighter. (My friend just got one - it's a nice little PPC.) You can get one with specs similar to this one's for about $100 on ebay.
Chalk another one up for PocketPC... If anyone wants Linux handhelds to succeed they need to price them affordably with similar specs. Much like the desktop Linuxes. (Linii?)
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
I owned a Royal DaVinci (the original line of DaVinci's that Royal had out) and was very hurt when the lawsuit with palm (Link - Link - Google Search) because Royal stole code from the PalmOS source and used it in that line of products. While the UI was fairly nice and I liked the Royal Davinci, soon after I received it I found that Royal basically stopped supporting it. It had been a great deal, and I had been hoping to get a lot of use out of it, but software and accessories never made it to market that were supposed to, and Royal was not allowed to continue supporting the device during and after the lawsuit.
It left me as a customer fairly hurt, so it is understandable that I'd be just a bit cautious before spending 400.00 on a product made by Royal. I doubt they'd make such a mistake again... especially if they are using an open-source platform, but I'd still be very cautious, I've lost a lot of faith in them as a company.
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
I'm as big of a linux fan as the next guy.. I own two Zaurus PDAs. But, I'm not sure why they are releasing this after so much time. I don't see anything about these PDAs that lead me to believe they will succeed.
- Linux OS - some of us find this a compelling feature. But, the Zaurus's have met that relatively small market already.
- Form Factor - it looks rather thick, and not particularly small in any dimension. There are many small/lighter/thinner PDAs to choose from.
- Performance - at 200MHz, it's not bad for a PDA, but there are many others out there that are faster and can do MPEG video.
- Software - Yes, the linux command-line utilities are nice. But, for general PDA apps, there are many better choices than the Linux PDAs.
From looking at the picture of the Linea LX PDA up close, it is apparent to me that Linux will not be taken seriously in the PDA or desktop markets until a graphical design artist actually takes the time to do some user polling and UAT to determine which graphical icons look and work the best for the end-user. I mean seriously, they have a 'Contacts' icon with an @ symbol, and an 'Email' icon with a paper envelope and stamp symbol. Not only that, the 'Text Editor' and 'Sketch' icons appear to have been switched at birth. For the average Joe, this just isn't intuitive and simply leads to more cursing and hitting the 'back button' than is reasonably acceptable.
That's very sweet. I love how Linux is porting too all kinds of devices, and not just personal computers and servers.
I wonder if it will be possible to download that version of Linux somewhere so that I may install it on my current PDA? I'm really interested in checking out the code itself also... just to see what makes it so flexible on the PDA.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
I flashed linux with qtopia to my old Compaq iPaq 3970 almost year ago, because WindowsCE ond PDA sucks. And the hardware has practically the same performace as this advertised gadget. In fact, I use runlevels to switch between X11 server with java, python and gtk stuff & co. and qtopia w/pim on framebuffer.
There you are, staring at me again.