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Smartphones For Text SSH Use — Revisited
jfischet writes "Back in 2005 a Slashdot user asked this question and the responses were helpful — but I'd like to ask again to see what has changed in three years. I'd like to know what this community thinks is the best choice of smartphone for remotely administering Linux/UNIX boxes via SSH."
An iPhone with shell access seems the perfect match.
If you have a Palm OS device (i.e. a Treo), then pssh is still the way to go. Alas no, this solution hasn't changed since 2005...
I've found the Sidekick 3's terminal app is pretty good because you get a pretty easy to type on keyboard. The font is readable and the terminal emulation is good. You also get a decently wide screen, not full 80 columns though. They also have good help for how to type in Ctrl-C, and other control sequences, etc,
Putty on a Sony-Ericsson M600i works ok for me, but most of the time, I'd keep the M600i in my pocket and use my Nokia N800 through Bluetooth.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Likely you've never used an iphone keyboard for an extended period of time. The keyboard is actually quite good. Well, I do suppose it's good for typing english. I'm not sure I'd want to program on it. It likes to tell you what you mean.
I use Pocket PuTTY. I don't know if it is the perfect answer, but it works for what I do.
I've had good results with the BlackBerry and MidpSSH. The terminal software is average, but having the ability to open a connection via your BlackBerry Enterprise Server is very useful. It's nice to not have to open up any Internet facing SSH ports while still being able to connect to any of your servers.
I've been running one for close to 2 years for just this purpose.
Runs symbian putty perfectly, does 802.11 for when you can get to it, has an ok real web browser, and does real email (imap/pop/smtp).
And on the plus side, actually fits in a pocket, and can support real typing.
Pity nokia seem to consider it a dead-end product, and go out of their way to ignore it.
pssh on the Palm Treo is the only thing that seems to work for me. Keep in mind I want to use Emacs via my smart phone, so I need Control and Meta (aka Alt) to work well. pssh uses the center key for these, with one click for Control and a second for Meta. It also has a very small font which allows me a 80 column wide view.
I have considered switching to a HTC phone such as the AT&T Tilt with Pocket PuTTY. Unfortunately, it seemed to hard to use for two reasons. One, I couldn't easily find a way to have a really small (but usable) fond. Two, I couldn't find a way to easily enter Control and Meta. I tried this mostly at the store, so if there are solutions to this, please let me know!
I have tried the iPhone with server side ssh script on a friends iPhone. Again the font and keyboard issues made it seem not too feasible. It seems like the font issue would be easy to fix, but the keyboard Control/Meta issue seems even harder to address on the iPhone. Again, please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm thinking of getting an iPhone 2.x in July... web surfing has become more important than my ssh access.
Just a factual correction - Double tap the shift key for caps lock.
I use the E61i with midpssh, which has worked better for me than Putty, though I have long forgotten why.
The E61i's keyboard works great, I can type at a decent clip, and it has a proper control key. Some unix nerd characters (vertical bar, etc.) require 3 or 4 keypresses to get to but it's not that bad. Between wifi, GPRS, and 3G/UMTS I can pretty much always get online.
For example, even in countries where there seems to be no working data service over prepaid GSM SIM cards (e.g., Syria), I've just turned on the wifi sniffer and followed it to a fancy hotel, and then loitered in their lobby to fix a weeping server. The hotel people think I'm just sending text messages.
Downsides: It's a big phone physically, it could use more memory (get the web browser plus a few ssh windows going and you've hit the ceiling), and when the wifi isn't making a connection to a given access point it's very difficult to diagnose why. For example, I've never managed to get it to connect via my MacBook's internet connection sharing, which would be nice so I could sync up the email when I was at an internet cafe and save money on subsequent syncs over the cell network during the day.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Not having used one much, let me ask how, exactly, you are supposed to deal with 'keys' that are substantially smaller than a fingertip and have no tactile feedback to boot?
A few ways - one, the keyboard displays a larger version of the key you are currently pressing, and does not actually take input until you lift away - so if you hit the wrong key you can slightly adjust your finger to be on the right one. That's much quicker than it all sounds.
Secondly, truly predictive input. I'm not just talking about word completion (though it does that) but by also recognizing what you are typing by the pattern of the keys you press - so the predictor knows you are off to the side a little while typing and makes suggestions based on what you would have hit if you'd hit the right keys to start with. That works really, really well to the point where most miskeys don't actually mean you have to go back and correct a word as it simply corrects it for you.
With more specific tasks (say, for instance, a terminal) in seems to me there is further automatic aid that could be rendered while typing. If people are having trouble getting text right they aren't trusting the correction as much as they could/should be - or they need a little more practice.
The really annoying thing is, it would probably be great for writing with a stylus, but that does not (last I checked) work on an iPhone.
I really liked Grafitti, did not like Jot (think that was the name) as much, but I greatly prefer the iPhone keyboard for text input over Grafitti which I used heavily for several years before my Palm died.
You also have the possibilities to support gestures in an application as well, which could be interesting for control.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No matter how much you like your shiny iPhone, the poster cited SSH as his primary use case. It means his primary use case is typing shell commands. Which means a phone with a real keyboard will work best for him. Yes, you CAN type text relatively OK with the iPhone. No, that does NOT make it the best phone to type text on. Get a clue!
If the guy had asked for a smooth web browsing experience, recommending a (3G!) iPhone would have been understandable. But for SSH? Pure fanboy, or pure ignorance. Take your pick.
Oh, as for what phone to use - E70 is better if you want the regular phone form factor and have good eyes. But personally I would prefer E61i (with Blackberry form factor), as it has much larger screen (although slightly smaller resolution) which means text is easier to read. And it has more RAM, which means you can run more applications simultaneously. E.g. with E70 running a Java MIDlet and the browser simultaneously is going to be iffy because both are RAM-hungry applications. E61i is newer too, so it has a more recent version of the web browser.
Slight correction: There is currently a jailbreak method to enable SSH for iPhone. Nothing official, though.
...when using your iPhone keyboard.
And a jailbroken (not necessary to "unlock" to "jailbreak") iPhone can indeed perform terminal functions, including ssh. Of course one may not wish to do that their phone, but the capability does exist.
As far as typing on the keyboard, I've had no problem, though I will admit that I'm not as fast as I used to be with Grafitti on the old Handspring PDA, but I don't believe that's because my tapping isn't nimble enough, just that it seems to second for the characters to pop up on the display. Haven't gotten fast enough to see if my outracing the buffer drops too many characters.
AZspot
so of all the handhelds on the market, the one that most definitely comes close to a reasonable portable ssh, imho has got to be the nokia n810. people pooh pooh maemo, but the thing will run debian and probably something like ubuntu mobile or something..
nevertheless.. the best -class- of device is still something like it or the iphone/ipod touch/ type devices, an openmoko, palms, blackberrys; something that is already halfway a computer. If it is itself a standard platform and a keyboard will at least pair with if it doesn't have its own, it's a reasonable tool to ssh with.. a lot different than 3 years ago.. was UMPC even coined back then?
Anyway, the n810 stands out among them only because of it's hardware keyboard, it's not perfect, but you can use it for much much longer than would be comfortable with a screen keyboard. As treo and blackberry users can probably tell you, there's nothing wrong with having a hardware keyboard when that's all you can have at the moment. hell there -is- a software keyboard (like on the 800s, and 770s), but I could never imagine using it. The n810's more of a computer all by itself than most anything that doesn't approach an ipod touch or something, and arguably still better for general computing because it ISN'T a PDA, it isn't a phone at all really, it's just a damn small UMPC with a choice of distros (at least for the brave,) and tons of apps.. Frankly I think maemo is pretty darn good considering it's limited audience, there's a LOT more ports, and even repos, than I had expected to find before I got one.
Yes, it's One More Device(tm) besides a phone, but some of us don't really care. And who cares if it's made for the general population or not, either; the question was about SSHing with a smartphone.. or handheld it seems is a better tool (term?), and what better for SSHing but a standard client? Yea, the iphone is a phone AND a shell prompt.. but people are fooling themselves about that soft keyboard thing, i mean really...
I wonder if there's even a comparable WME device.. I mean.. i wonder if it would be more ideal even if there was, simply because ssh would still be such a foreign program on that platform..
oh well, that's my $0.02
-m
US$0.02++
I don't know what smartphones will let you plug one in, but you're going to at least want a laptop-sized keyboard.
I actually like typing with this keyboard (wired version), and it's small enough to fit comfortably in a backpack, pretty much no weight to it at all. The wireless version could probably fit in a briefcase, and it speaks bluetooth, so I'm sure there's a phone out there that will work with it.
The other possibility is to ask why you want a smartphone, and not a real laptop -- not like it costs more than the iPhone anyway.
The iPhone is nice, but you can't beat a real keyboard, no matter what you're typing on.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I use the HTC Mogul (hate Sprint, but *shrug*.)
Challenges:
No escape key.
No builting software for remapping buttons to other keys.
Pocket Putty doesn't support arrow keys correctly, initially.
Solutions:
Bind an escape key using a button remapping tool.
Set these, for whatever your most important connection is:
HKCU\Software\SimonTathan\PuTTY\Sessions\SessionName\NoApplicationKeys: 1
HKCU\Software\SimonTathan\PuTTY\Sessions\SessionName\NoApplicationCursors: 1
After that, the device is pretty usable over ssh. Not perfect, but it's a good start.
Simple check list:
- Does the phone use a standard type of wireless signal that your carrier supports (e.g. GSM900)?
- Can you find instructions on how to set up GPRS on Cingular?
- Do you want to pay the full, unsubsidized fee for the phone?
If you can answer yes to all three of the above, you've got a winner."I guess one could buy a bluetooth keyboard to go with the iPhone"
No, you couldn't. Don't assume iPhone would do anything that a windows mobile device does (for the last five years I might add). No, no, no. When Apple says bluetooth they mean precisely two (out of more than 20) profiles: Hands-Free Profile (HFP) and
Headset Profile (HSP). That means NO keyboard (and "no" many other things like quality audio out - and no remote control for that matter, no serial profile=no bluetooth GPS, no file transfer over bluetooth, no [about 20 times more no]).
I second using the n810 for ssh, you can easily use your current phone and connect via BT and GPRS/3G.
The keyboard on the n810 is much better than the regular smartphone keypad. I have a N95 and although I've installed putty on it ssh'ing from the tablet is much more doable.
And it runs Linux. What more could you ask for?
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Also the single tasking environment Apple is forcing on the iPhone world is vastly disapointing in this regard. If you need to swap out to another application for something (say, the browser to look something up) your application gets suspended in a way almost certainly guaranteed to cause timeouts and there'd be no way to set up any kind of 'keep alive' functionality.
Sure the iPhone has a lot of potential, but as a hardcore geek toy it unfortunately falls flat on its face.