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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...
Hmphf - frist posit?
Anyway, my solution is not a smartphone. I use an LG CU500, bluetooth tethered to a 12" G4 iBook. I get a real keyboard and AT&T (originally Cingular) gets me 3G in most places I go. Even on "edge" service, SSH is tolerable, 200ms-ish of latency.
When It Counts.
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."
When I read the headline, I thought "I wonder how long it's going to take for some fanboy to recommend the iPhone, despite the fact that it doesn't have a keyboard & is inferior for text entry compared to say a blackberry, or even some of the HTC monstrosities."
And there you were - right in the first post. Thank you for reaffirming my faith in fanboi nature.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I use Pocket PuTTY. I don't know if it is the perfect answer, but it works for what I do.
I'd like a relatively cheap smartphone or mini-laptop (think EEE PC)- under $200 would be great- that can connect to secure wifi or a cell network (with a reasonable plan) that I can use for SSH purposes / internet when not on my computer. Any suggestions on the hardware side? (I'm not the OP.)
Care about privacy? Read this!
When I read the headline, I thought "I wonder how long it's going to take for some fanboy to recommend the iPhone, despite the fact that it doesn't have a keyboard & is inferior for text entry compared to say a blackberry, or even some of the HTC monstrosities."
The iPhone is fine for typing text. And the fully dynamic interface allows for some interesting possibilities for shell control, along with more room for a wider view on the screen. Penny Aracde of course, put it best... "If you find such things unpleasant, then I suggest you develop a taste for forced labor because by the year twenty-twenty all that sneer is going to get you is a slot in the underclass boiling corpses."
Don't be so dismissive until you see what terminal possibilities might arrive with the SDK.
And there you were - right in the first post. Thank you for reaffirming my faith in fanboi nature.
Don't your eyes scratch a lot with that wool you keep pulling over yourself?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Behold the pinnacle of human achievement:
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone
i use the sidekick 3, which has a ssh application. it's been great and i'd recommend it to everyone who needs remote access to a box
Being my two phones of the past 3 years.
The E70 has a -real- keyboard, and runs Putty perfectly.
over the GPRS/3G network, or over WiFi, your choice.
The N95 has a regular phone pad, but I use a folding external bluetooth keyboard if I'm doing a lot of text.
and -every- feature of the N95 rocks. Putty runs perfectly, as always.
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
The iPhone is fine for typing text.
Yes, for short messages, typing in URLs, etc, it is fine.
What the submitter asked for is not fine general text entry, but the best choice, specifically for ssh. An iPhone (where every slash, period & ampersand is three taps away) is a poor choice for ssh text entry.
Don't be so dismissive until you see what terminal possibilities might arrive with the SDK.
Right, thanks - we're looking for a solution right now, not a possible solution that may come about one day.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
DS Lite, bitches. When you tire of SSH (and DSLinux + Boa as wearable web server), just VNC into your box through the coffeeshop's wireless. (I think it can play games too.)
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
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.
I would much rather just have a small non smrt phone and a EeePC or similarly diminutive laptop with a actual albeit smallish keyboard.
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
Seriously, I'd have caved in and bought an iPhone by now were it not for my need for SSH with a decent keyboard. Oh, and that I want a less restricted development environment. Some of the Android phones should fit the bill, if you can hold out a few months.
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
Presumably...could also be...Possibly....potentially better...possibility.... don't....what if they did add a model with a physical keyboard?...we do not know everything ...so much in the world may change...
Do you want to use a few more weasel words in your post? Qualify things a little more?
You'd make a great white house spokesperson.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
> How many handheld devices really have enough physical keys to make SSH useful to any extent?
Well, I'm bound to be wrong if I come up with an exact number, but at least 5 have been mentioned already : Nokia 770, N800, N810, E70, and E90. OK, the 770, N800 and N810 aren't phones and they supersede each other (though they do VoIP), but the other two seem to be worth investigating, if you ask me.
I use an E90, and the keyboard is functional, though I wouldn't want to use it in anger - for that, I use an Apple bluetooth keyboard which I take along with me when I know I'm going to be doing stuff like that.
Max.
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++
There are a couple of logical fallacies with your argument.
You are betting on some application coming out in a month, or less then a month. Your argument seems to be that once this application is developed, tested, etc. in less then a month, it will *instantly* be the best ssh application. That's rubbish.
You state that some unknown improvement made to the iphone, at some unkown point in the future might address all the issues theOP might have with the iPhone, and the OP should therefore wait with making *any* decision until such time as the IPhone has this improvement. This logic would extend to saying "and if the next model doesn't have it, wait some more". Thats ridiculous.
And, on the basis of this deeply flawed argument, you call the OP a "hater". That's playground logic. What are you, 12? Does your daddy know you are using his PC?
oh, and if you are still reading, please make sure you realise I am not saying *anything* about any of apple's products (just want to make sure you dont start changing the subject and calling me an apple hater as well).
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
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 used vi all the time via my Sidekick. All the keys are there, you just have to chord it. It's the quickest keyboard of all the "smart" phones I've tried.
It's also the most closed, so if your ssh host requires funky settings, you aren't going to connect. Rather unfortunate, since it's a rather nice interface, but more focus is on the proprietary ring-tones and other kiddie functionality.
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.Buy one and put the AT&T SIM card in the phone?
"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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