Slashdot Mirror
A Psion Palmtop Successor Has Arrived and It Runs Android and Linux (pocket-lint.com)
dryriver writes: A lot of people probably remember the 1990s palmtop computers made by Psion fondly. The clamshell-design palmtops were pocketable, black and white, but had a working stylus and a fantastic tactile foldout QWERTY keyboard that you could type pretty substantial documents on or even write code with. A different company -- Planet Computers -- has now produced a spiritual successor to the old Psion palmtops called the Gemini PDA that is much like an old Psion but with the latest Android smartphone hardware in it and a virtually identical tactile keyboard. It can also dual boot to Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Sailfish) alongside Android. The technical specs are a MediaTek deca-core processor, 4GB RAM, 64GB storage (plus microSD slot), 4G, 802.11c Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, eSIM support, and 4,220mAh battery. The screen measures in at 5.99-inches with a 2,160 x 1,080 (403ppi) resolution. The only thing missing seems to be the stylus -- but perhaps that would have complicated manufacturing of this niche-device in its first production run.
The Gemini PDA has been around for about a year - I was one of the backers. The more interesting one is this:
https://www.indiegogo.com/proj...
This will actually fully replace your phone with a Palm-style computer, unlike the Gemini, which I've since sold.
Here I am with several terminal windows, an IDE, half a dozen web pages, and a file manager open only using 1.7 GiB of RAM wondering what you're smoking...
As it stands the specs are damn good, if it had a GPIO bus it would be absolutely perfect.
But if you have ever played with these niche devices, it's all on how good the software is. I have a bunch of ARM devices with Linux and Android distributions that the dreaded "Not optimized for your device" or can't even install comes up on.
It's fine for calls. I open the screen, dial, then close the screen and hold it like a damn phone. Quality isn't great, but it's okay.
I find that a smartwatch of some sort is really necessary to use it as a phone replacment. I have a Pebble Time, and that makes up for not having an easy screen for notifications.
Don't bother with the optional exterior camera. Its godawful.
Many (all?) browsers aren't optimized for RAM usage. They'll eat as much as you make available. And aren't great about cutting things back if you like to have tons of tabs open. Think I heard Firefox was even shifting to the one process for each tab like Chrome has been doing (pretty sure that'll eat more RAM up than a pair of rendering processes for whatever you're looking at currently like it used to do).
But in general I agree...4GB isn't tons for a power-user oriented device (who I'd picture this being marketed to). Could be much worse too...