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Mobile Phone with PC running Linux 2.6
A8 writes "There is a new toy (aka the S101) around the corner from a German company called Road GmbH. Looks like the Nokia Communicator, but is a little PC with GSM, GPRS, IrDA, Bluetooth, WLAN -- you name it, running Linux 2.6/Qtopia! Sorry seems like the page is in German only." There are also versions based on the same hardware but running Windows CE and Symbian.
Take a look at the keyboard - finally a keyboard at a PDA-size device that includes keys for international characters. It takes germans to understand that some alphabets are longer than a-z!
What use is linux for handhelds, considering there are currently no good open source mini browsers (eventually, there will be minimoz) or handwriting recognition programs.
For less than this, you could get palm or windows devices that are fully functional. Until there is a free handheld environment, we can't just say "stick linux on it".
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I'll probably get modded troll for this :(
If you don't already understand the whole "Linux" appeal, I doubt you'd find anything particularly appealing about a Linux-powered phone.
For the most part, I think the appeal is the ability to tinker with it, add software that wouldn't be intended, and various other 'geeky' things that most consumers wouldn't give a damn about. It would give the sysadmin type a great deal of mobile administration ability. If you don't grok grep and pine for sed, there's not a perl of wisdom I can give you which would likely make you see the significance.
Additionally, since it uses Opie, there's a lot of available software out there for the device already. Much of it is 'geeky' software, but as a for instance: you'd be able to emulate PalmOS without any problems, provided you had the ROMs. I don't know if this is possible with WinCE, though, so it might not be all that 'special'.
This particular device looks fairly useful to me, and that's saying a lot, as I tend to thing such things are just trendy toys. The existence of the SD slot is definately nice, as it'd allow you to use this device for quite a few things, including a portable MP3 player. It's got a built-in keyboard which - while not full-size, is a hell of a lot bigger than those on other chick-key keyboards.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
To the user it probably has no advantages at all. You won't even notice it's Linux.
To the manufacturer it's just the usual freedom/free beer thing.
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I don't know wbout Symbian, but getting licenses for Windows CE is not a problem for any size developer. I used to work for a very small company (less than 10 people) in 1999 and we developed an embedded device with Windows CE (2.1 I think). Getting the licenses was not a problem at all. The environment (to build custom CE images) wasn't expensive either (I don't remember exactly, but less than $1K).
A CE license in our miniscule volumes was about $50 (again, I don't remember exactly), which might be considered prohibitive for devices in the $200-300 range. I don't know.
OTOH, Linux in a phone is mighty cool. I doubt it will be available in the US, though.
This is why you should never buy any electronic device, no matter how useful. The very moment you click on "place order", something twice as good and half as expensive will appear on the market, and make you hate yourself!