Slashdot Mirror
Linux Finds Its Way to More Handheld Devices
LXrider writes "The coolest new handheld to pick Linux as its OS is the Pepper Pad. This device was one of the most exciting products to be found at this year's otherwise lackluster C3 Expo in NYC. The Pepper Pad runs MontaVista Linux on a Intel XScale PXA270 (624 MHz) processor and it used for viewing multimedia, surfing the net, and controlling your home's electronics."
does it run Windows?
Could this open some eyes and increase interest in alternative (Linux, Mac) offerings?
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
I think the Motorola A780 is the coolest:0 ,,70,00.html
http://www.motorola.com/motoinfo/product/details/
The site doesn't mention it, but it will also have built in GPS.
For $800 bucks????
I'll stick with a cheep laptop thanks.
Don't mod me, bro'!!!!
Any chance this would run other distributions like Debian, or maybe even a *BSD like NetBSD (I do know that OpenBSD runs on the PalmOne Treo 600)? I looked at the product section of MontaVista Software and it seems to be a commercial distribution with no "community edition." The only thing close to free as in beer is the free preview kit I wonder if it would be possible to apply their source packages to come up with a free (as in beer as well as speech) distribution, like CentOS did with RedHat Enterprise Linux. Does this already exist? I realize distribution maintainers need to eat, but I think the pricing model of Xandros would be better, if not a distribution like Debian or Slackware. OTOH, I see some Debian packages for cell phones here., and there is a page for *BSD on mobile devices (cell phones, PDA, laptops) here.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
This is a really neat product, especially the instant-on, waterproof characteristics, and the 20GB HD. But at $700, I couldn't help wonder where the market niche was supposed to be? It's significantly more than a PDA, yet it doesn't look to price-compete against low-end notebooks (perhaps it does?). It's definitely way cheaper than tablets, but then again tablets have a lot more input features. So I'm not sure where it's supposed to compete in the market. Am I supposed to buy it instead of my PDA? Or my notebook?
Things NOT to look for in your staff
Oh yes, this marvel of engineering can be yours, for the low, low, price of $849.99.
I like the packaging, and the use of open source. But for that price, I think I'll pass.
--
Free credit report info
What does your Credit Report look like?
My question is always "Yes, but can I run it under Linux?"
...but the video on the site requires Windows Media Player 9.
On a device like a handheld or even with a media PC or something? The underlying OS should be transparant to the user.
Yet another product that will fizzle away because it's about 50% too expensive for it's target market. That's what you get when a committttteee designs a racehorse...
Or does the keyboard seem nonsensically small?
I don't get the point of taking the time to integrate a keyboard into a device like that and splitting it into a thumb-typer arrangement with itty-bitty buttons (the thumb is not the most agile or delicate of bodyparts).
Have you seen some of the features? A substandard MP3 playing jukebox, the obligatory notepad etc. Can you install linux app packages? Is there access to a shell? It doesn't seem so.
You'd have to gut it to install a linux OS that would be recognizable or put up with their own OS which doesn't exactly excite.
I think the idea is essentially good but it lacks some pretty essential goods:
1. 2.4 kernel? C'mon! 2.6 is out... we like new crap.
2. 800x600? Okay, it's good for a lot of people out there -- just not me. For something that small, I would want at least 1024x768, but a wide aspect display would be really nice too... if it had...
3. DVD playback. This device really needs DVD playback and even video out to be really cool. It needs to be that headrest DVD player *and* be a computer too.
4. 802.11g
5. USB 2.0
6. IEEE1394 (iLink, Firewire, whatever)
7. Bluetooth
A cheap laptop beats this thing all over the place except for being aimed at the consumer rather than the hacker. It would be REALLY nice if this thing could connect with a cell phone to exchange data (pictures, address book, etc) and gate itself to the internet. USB 2.0 and/or Firewire and/or Bluetooth would be among the best means by which a lot of this could happen.
For this configuration of hardware, I think they could have saved a lot of money and development time by adopting a version of Knoppix for this thing. Pull out the packages you don't want, add a few that work for this hardware and lock down the UI so that people don't need to know it's Linux and you're good to go.
An added advantage to having a DVD reader installed on this thing would be easy user updates/reloads -- it's a no brainer to insert a "factory reload" media, reboot and hold down some magical key combination eh?
Anyway... a laptop beats this and these days the price is probably better too.
...so Slashdot is printing thinly-veiled press releases.
Isn't there a "Wor of teh World Sucks" movie review in the queue?
I looked at the Pepper Pad. Ho-hum. It's got a 20-gig harddrive, it has yesterday's WiFi (b not g) and USB (1.0 not 2.0), a Blackberry keyboard, and it runs some oddball version of Linux.
For a $200 more, you can get a G4 iBook.
My father is a blogger.
No, the coolest new Linux device is the Nokia 770.
7 70
http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,1522,,00.html?orig=/
as desktops and laptops get smaller
handhelds get larger?
seriously... the thing fits in your lap- not your hand... call it what it is!
"Yes, but, does it run Linux?"
1998 called, the copyright on this joke hasn't expired yet.
"Derp de derp."
and more attention to the little mom'n'pop hardware that is great. It will not be great for mainstreem hardware to be the sole offer, because it often undersells smaller competitors to the point of harming customers and the future innovations. It's the little man, down to the worker at his desk, that is relied for perfecting his stroke on the picture. All the painters of highest regard were somewhat sloppy in their day, and yet their "art" has endured to show forth a different interpretation of things that it continues in its own merit onto others. Somtimes you need to invest in bad hardware to allow a small company exist long enough to produce its most inspired product. I am not saying its a bad product or componay, although market reach implies such, yet consider SoftField Tech and its Linux-only PDAs. Its next release of PDAs will be verry good, but that will never happen unless people buy the already existing outdated hardware.
I am waiting for VA Software to re-enter the hardware market; and that I will to, every day. Slashdot is a great post of VA. It needs to be said, the VA hardware was a great enterprise that I am said to see fade away just because people were finding it difficult as a VAR. Somtimes, image is the only solution you can offer on a product that passes your way and that is the secret of QA.
I am the nightmare of nightmares.
Not only does it have a terrible name, but I saw the instruction booklet for the Pepper Pad, and it looked completely useless. I don't quite understand who would want a not-quite-laptop sized, but not-quite-palmtop sized device that doesn't really do much else except play media. When my boss asked the salesgoon what it does, she said "it plays movies...and acts as a tv remote!" ... when he asked why someone would want it, the salesgoon said "it plays movies...and acts as a tv remote!" From what I saw, it looks just about as usefull as a speak n' spell.
...does it run BSD? (if it ran Windows: "Does it run BSOD?")
Although p1120 is two years old technology, it is much better:
1) slightly lighter (2.2 pounds).
2) bigger screen (8.9 inch compared to 8.4).
3) higher resolution (1024x600 compared to 800x600)-Much better for watching 16:9 movies.
4) regular clamshell laptop design with a regular keyboard.
5) slightly better cpu, i386 architecture (transmeta crusoe 800 MHZ).
6) regular 2.5 inch hard disk. It comes with a 30 GB drive which can be replaced with a 100GB drive. Drive upgrade is very easy, only two screws.
7)Better upgradability, it has a regular cardbus slot+a mini PCI slot. Ih comes with a mini card which is a wireless b/modem combo -it can be easily replaced with a g wireless card.
8) Standard i386 architecture makes it possible to run multiple operating systems. On my current system I run
1)Suse Linux 9.3-slower than Suse 9.0, faster than Solaris 10.
2)Suse Linux 9.0-this is the fastest OS for the laptop.
3)BeOS 5.03- faster than Suse 9.3 Solaris and Windows.
4) Solaris 10 (only at 800x600 resolution)- a bit slow. To install solaris I had to put the dive on another machine; once installed solaris runs fine on p1120.
5) Win 2k (it came with winxp home)
All on a 100 gb drive.
Disadvantage : more expensive, $1199 from Fujitsu USA. Last week it was on sale at NEWEGG for $1050. The difference in features is worth the money.
Other alternatives: Sharp mm20 ($1200-1300), it is even lighter, 1.9 pounds. It has a regular 10.4 screen but has a 1.8 inch drive (20 GB) There are 1.8 inch drives up to 60GB (9.5 mm) but mm20 can only take a 7 mm drive. Right now it can be upgraded only to 30GB. It has a better CPU, efficeon 1GHZ, and 512 MB RAM. Compared to p1120 it has a big disadvantage, it is very fragile. Fujitsu p1120 is sturdy, you can drop it in a bag or purse without any problems.
It better get my coffee too..
A cheap laptop would be a better choice.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yeah
Both size and weight are too big for a handheld. It is closer to a subnotebook (Sharp Mebius Muramasa, mm20, Toshiba Libretto, Fujitsu p1120), but lacks the standard features of a subnotebook (i386 compatibility, pc card slots, regular keyboard). Most subnotebooks are smaller and lighter and have many additional features. I think nobody will buy it.
From the Pepper site:
E-mail-Send and receive e-mail using the virus and spyware resistant Mail application. Mail keeps all your messages until you delete them [...]
It is surprising that Apple hasn't reacted to Pepper's choice of name for their email client.
Sig Sig Sputnik
We went with MontaVista because, at the time, it was the best pre-compiled solution with RPM support that ran mostly out of the box. We're exploring other options and have used various cross-compilers to build binaries for the Pepper Pad. In theory, if another distribution will build, it will run. :)
We're not officially working on any other distributions at the moment but we're exploring our options in our (lack of) spare time.
PepperHacks - Hacking the Pepper Pad
"The coolest new handheld"? I saw this thing at CES 2005 in January and found it interesting yet underwhelming. Obviously, it hasn't taken the world by storm yet. At $800, no big surprise, me thinks.
I've ran into something similar before.
A system which was built around Linux but you can't see the word "Linux" being mentioned.
And when it comes to synchronizing - it only uses Microsoft Windows - thus even implying the system was built around the same.
"Linux" is becoming a taboo word - since they believe it implies user-unfriendliness and inflexibility.
The companies not only take but give nothing back, they feel "ashamed" of mentioning the free OS.
The coolest...er, hottest...Linux handheld device ever!
The only distribution that gets bigger with use!
I found the keyword "Linux" on a second page "Technical Specifications"
On a crusoe machine you can install any i386 linux distribution. On an arm CPU it is much harder, besides the lack of as bios makes it impossible to set up multiple operating systems on the device. For example you cannnot dual boot a sharp zaurus: you either run the Sharp linux implementation or replaces it with open zaurus.
Probably not, because this device isn't about the operating system. Other than the mention of Mozilla, where do you see an indication that this is NOT Windows?
Yeah, it's Linux. The target user doesn't give a damn. He or she just wants instant-on web and no-brainer wireless. And MP3s that don't require one to dig for some grey file to make it work.
And the marketing doesn't even mention Gnome, KDE, RPM, or Debian. Heresy!
Come to think of it, with all the user focus, I'd better re-read the article and make sure it's not a Mac ...
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
i assume DS-Linux and PSP linux were not present?
i didn't read it, so sue me.
Fer christ's sake, I'm a linux fanboy, but if we were to give an article to every new product that had embedded windows in it ... or even embedded linux in it, we wouldn't have room for the Dupes! This isn't interesting. not even mildly. It's an example of a doomed product that uses linux. With misleading editorializing: "More handheld devices" implies a crop of new linux handhelds (which this is a bit bigger then anyways), but we get ... 1. That may or may not be linux compatible (probably can't sync with linux), and which requires WMV 9 to watch the preview of.
This is NOT meant to be flame bait!
But this product, plain and simple, is UGLY UGLY UGLY.
It's my biggest problem with the Linux community. You need to take some lessons from Steve Jobs and the Apple community. Virtually everything I've seen in the Linux world is UGLY UGLY UGLY. OK for tech geeks, but not for nobody else.
If you really want to be mainstream, you need to change your ugly ways.
So everybody will probably think I'm just trying to get a rise out of you. Which will simply prove my point. If you don't see how ugly all of this stuff is, you don't understand why Linux -- an excellent concept -- hasn't taken off.
From their technology page: "The Pepper Platform includes Pepper's own patent-pending Application Framework for plug-in application programs..." Software patents are not cool.
is it me, or is that thing HUMONGOUS?!?!? i mean it's almost the size of a tablet. shouldn't it be categorized as a laptop/notebook and not a handheld?
HD Trailers
That SoftField PDA is actually pretty cool. For Linux users, I think it stacks up pretty well against a Zire 31 (or whatever it is), especially since it runs on AAAs and comes with a cradle. If I had known about it a year ago, I would probably have bought it instead of the Tungsten E I have now.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
you bought the distro because it supporeted RPM's??!?!?
rpm has long been relegated to the dustbin as a "package management system that truly sucks ass".
... hi bingo
The softfield thingy looks pretty neat. Beats the hell out of getting a cheap Palm clone and running CLinux on it.
Montavista is a primary supporter of ARM Linux. The Pepper Pad runs on ARM. Do the math. RPM is a freebie.
I am writing my comment on a Sharp PC-MM20 installed with Mandrake 10.1. Except it is a cram shell design and has a keyboard and touch pad. I think the sharp is far more superior product.
My HP-HX4705 also use the same chips as this Pepper pad thing and it gets hot prety quickly. Although not as not as my Sharp set at top CPU speed.
It looks like a clever little device. Small, decent screen. It might be useful for some quick WWW access from the couch type stuff.
But, for $850?!? Who the hell will analyze this against all the laptop options, and decide to pay more for this limited little device, rather than going with a full laptop?
This surely is an alternative at less than half the price of the pepper pad ($849.99)?
Mobilis products have already been covered in slashdot.
-- Prem
Aiming to tweet on a rice
I used to work at a company that ported WinCE and Linux to StrongARM devices. Our last project was a webpad. We went out of business shortly after that.
If I had any advice to offer it would be this. Drop your price. By a lot. It's been said in this thread before a few times but your price point is all wrong. For that cash you could get a laptop. That's what sunk us. People think that a few hundred bucks is a PDA, and anything over about $500 is a laptop. So if you fall in the laptop range, you have to provide laptop functionality.
Would you buy a laptop that ran at 624Mhz with no math coprocessor or video acceleration for $850?
Another point is the hardware. Don't know much about PXA270, but the PXA255 wasn't up to video. Getting video to run on it was my job, and best I could manage was 2 or 3 frames per second. We advertised that it could run video...and in a way it could. But it totally sucked and that put customers off. If it doesn't perform well you're better off simply not promoting it as a video player.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I have a Agenda VR3, which is what the device use to be called. It's a very solid and well designed PDA. has a nice big screen without a lot of wasted space on the edges of the screen by placing many of the buttons on the side. It has a nice crisp grayscale display with a backlight that is almost as good as a PalmIII's. It has a flash-based file system, which is especially nice because it has a pitiful battery life. A good rechargable battery would have really made a difference on this device. The AAAs simply don't cut it. I've used NiMH on my VR3 which does help somewhat on battery cost, but s single charge of NiMH's last even less than disposable cells.
The OS and apps are well written, who could have guessed you could cram a full X server in it and have it be as responsive. Running a real X server makes it super easy to port apps over to the VR3. Although the solitaire game and Agendaroids that comes with it are pretty good for stock games.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The link to purchase it, for those so inclined, belongs to none other than the one company whose spirit embodies innovation, amazon.com. I'd avoid buying it for that reason alone, although I do think that $800 for something that offers about 1/10th of a desktop for the same price is a little, um, uneconomical.
Dude, you're really confused. BSD doesn't run on the Treo 600. A quick googling shows a number of pages detailing how to use a Treo with a BSD system, as in, hotsynching or connecting to the internet. Likewise, those Debian packages don't run ON cell phones, they're just FOR cell phones (as in data exchange and mobile internet). Same with that last page, for BSD and mobile devices. You actually think BSD runs a Sony Ericsson T39, do you? I'd sure like to see that.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
(I do know that OpenBSD runs on the PalmOne Treo 600)? That section of TuxMobile is a bit misleading. In this case, they mean that you could use the phone as a modem with a laptop running OpenBSD.
Pepper Pad is a monster! You need a car to transport this around with you :)
Psion Revo had a functioning keyboard, display worked well even with bright sun light. It was light and the size was perfect too.
Please bring it back with upgraded hardware so it can run linux and has Bluetooth, GPRS, WiFi etc...
cheers!
Sorry bozo, it's the idiotic rpm flamers (Hi!) who've been relegated to dustbin because they hardly ever knew what they were talking about. You're no exception.
Moron.
One way to pack more power into a handheld device without making it unwieldy is to separate the computing/storage part from the UI part. That is pack the CPU and disk part (with it's batteries) in a "brick" and make a separate screen that essentially just runs remote desktop over some appropriate wireless connection. Depending on your needs, you can mix and match bricks and screens of different sizes. A one kilo brick could go in your back pack while you walk around with a screen. Or, if you are indoors, the brick stays on your desk, and you walk around the office. Or, you could bring the brick home from the office and dock it with your home office 24" screen and keyboard, much like you would with a laptop. Then of course, you wouldn't need a wireless screen.
There is a difference between this and a laptop is the mix and match part. If you need a truly handheld device that you can use while walking around or standing up away from a desk, a laptop is not a good solution. Typing with one hand, holding the laptop in the other is strenous. Especially if we are talking top-of-the-line laptops. Tablets are limited in computing power, and are heavier than a same-size screen would have to be with this model.
... but Linux still doesn't support half of my hardware. When will the community as a whole learn that Linux will take forever to adopt as long as the hardware is a complete pain in the ass to set up? My Wireless B Linksys USB adapter doesn't work, my nVidia & ATI cards work either sometimes or with horrible performance, and my Sound Blaster doesn't work either. And before you mention it, yes I'm aware of ALSA and all that fun. But personally, I don't like to spend weeks upon weeks browsing forums for obscure fixes to drivers.
I'm not saying this is directly the Linux community's fault, I know that hardware vendors are being wankers. But c'mon... Linux is wayyy too much of a hastle at the moment to bother with. And believe me, I've spent a lot of time trying to get a Linux system up that I'm happy with.
$849.99 Jebus!!
This is the most poorly thought out product idea I've seen in a while (and I see a lot of them in my line of business).
I don't think the Pepper Pad will make it to the stores, let alone stay there for any length of time.
What advantages does this silly contraption offer over a low end laptop? (clue: NONE WHATSOEVER).
For that price you could have a pretty good mid-range laptop if you shop around.
I don't know how they got the investment capital to fund this (although maybe it's just vapourware).
Great that it's supposed to run Linux (rah rah!) and all, but WTF?
The clincher was:
"Two rechargeable lithium batteries offering hours of use"
Hourse of use? How many damn hours of use? Two? Three?
This device is a solution looking for a problems that doesn't exist.
It's an abortion and it's as fugly as hell.
For an application/product such as this, I would start with uClibc and busybox. Then build on top of that like LFS for the big userspace apps. Looks cool, tho.
C|N>K
You are absolutely right.
These guys just don't know their market. Simple as that.
There should (in theory) be a big market for appliances like this, but no one has yet successfully exploited it.
The general purpose laptop is so hard to beat at its current price point that even well-spec'd PDAs are sold on the thinest of margins.
Beats me what these guys think their up to. This just won't sell at $850 or anything remotely near that. In fact it won't sell period - it's a bad idea.
I call bullshit. Show me a citation with working links to back up your assertion here please.
The Treo 600 works WITH NetBSD, just like it works with Linux, FreeBSD, and OSX... but the Treo 600 does not RUN NetBSD... and nobody that I know of has ported it over to do so. I would know, I manage this little project, and I'd be one of the first to find this out.
Write code? Gee I don't want to have to go out and Buy Monta Vista when I have a prefectly good distribuation to work with. How do you boot and
install your own OS? JTAG? Is there going to be
shell root access so we can make our own modifications?
Nobody is ever going to buy this at $850.
It's a crock! $250 would be too much.
Cupboardware (n):
Any useless but superficially attractive item of consumer electonics purchased by people with too much money that is played with for two weeks and then condemned to reside in a cupboard for 18 months until being eBayed or given to the local charity shop.
2 fps - wow, such a thing would be perfect for watching Japanese cartoons. Did you ever think of taking it to a convention where full-grown men watch children's cartoons?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
If you want to write code, you should probably use gcc or a cross compiler, both of which can be acquired easily. Hell, we might even ship gcc - who knows? ;)
I'll leave the boot/install your own OS part for you to figure out. Suffice it to say it's easy, if you can write code you can figure it out. You won't need a JTAG.
i'm personally looking for another Linux PDA like the Zaurus.. but even still, the price for those is above $500 unless you go Ebay on that bitch..
You'd figure since Linux is an open source, free operating system, the price of Linux PDAs should be substantially cheaper.. I want a Linux PDA the Price of one of those cheap Color Palm Pilots.. $200-300 price range would do the trick for me..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
The thing that caught my eye was the Remote Control ...
...
. 800$ seems almost reasonable 8)
As the happy owner of a home theater, I have a few (8 or 9) remotes, the XBOX media player hitting the Linux Fileserver, then the amp itself, plus the various cd/tape player
I was thinking of getting a cheap (lol) tablet pc, an extensible bathroom mirror handle and hack together a nifty all-in-one appliance to control everything from my couch, including email and VNC to the rest of the network (a few pcs, including ONE windows machine)...
When you see that a Philips TSI6400 I Pronto costs $1,129.00, and that it has more or less comparable functions http://store.yahoo.com/aboutgizmos/phtsipr.html..
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
I've seen a lot of posts that say it's not small enough for a PDA, or it's not a laptop. When I looked at it, the first thing I thought was they were trying for the living room/portable internet access. That's just what it looked like from the start. reading the specs tells the same story. If you want to be able to get to the internet or other PC stuff from anywhere in the house this is your answer. Actually it is darn good for that....except for the price part (which is a bit high, but not unreasonable) this thing fits better than anything I've seen yet. Most people I've talked to have a wireless router on thier broadband. This thing lets you get that connection out of your home office and is useful in it's own right.
Am I the only one that thought they hit closer to the right design than most yet?
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
You don't need to buy MontaVista; you can compile everything using Kegel's crosstool. Also, all flash locations are unlockable at the OS-level by the hacker so, if you're confident, you can write your own u-boot (or whatever) to flash. Of course if you flash something bad you'll have a paperweight and will need to go in through JTAG.
Root access is available by hitting ctrl-shift-1 from within our GUI. Once you're there you can enable remote root login by setting a passwd and firing up sshd.
We also have three serial ports, one of which is pre-configured for console.
PepperHacks - Hacking the Pepper Pad
Let's see...coming up on just over 2 years since Softfield Tech unveiled their $299 Linux PDA...vaporware, like 99% of the other handhelds that are coming out "real soon now". What is surprising is how many sites post info and show pictures of a device the company has no plans to ever release. Ditto with that Canadian Company and it's PowerPlay device...black and white with RS232 sync... ::BLAH::