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More Itsy in the News

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the its-about-that-time dept.

DJ Jose wrote in to note that the Compaq Itsy is making the PR rounds again. We've mentioned this a few times in the past (seems that every few months it gets some new publicity). For those who haven't been here all along, Itsy is a tiny little butt kicking Linux box that I lust after and occasionally have erotic dreams about. But lets not talk about that now.

8 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. Dont forget.. by AmirS · · Score: 2

    .. That this sort of thing is meant to use voice recognition (The 200Mhz StrongARM if enough to hack it apparently), so everyone stop complaining about how small it is.

  2. Updated link by Tekmage · · Score: 2

    I was about to moderate this one up a notch, but the URL seems to be a bit out of date:

    http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~pleb/

    --
    --The more you know, the less you know.
  3. Kaffe by Tupper · · Score: 2

    This uses the same Kaffe Java virutal machine which was featured in the earlier story about Kaffe's MS extentions. It good to see a great product like Kaffe showing up in different contexts like that.

  4. Re:Cost? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    The rock'n'scroll idea is cool. Check this guy's page: http://www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/rek imoto.html He has a paper about it, and a lot of other cool stuff about small computers.

  5. Re:freeley available kernel? by razorwire · · Score: 3

    For some reason the link in the CNET story ("Compaq says the kernel for Itsy is freely available") leads to some sort of slideshow. Check out this page instead.
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  6. Is smaller better? by tmhsiao · · Score: 3
    While the Itsy looks cool and everything, depending on the application, I'd daresay I'd prefer a larger device.

    If we're talking about a PDA, I might not mind something so small (my primary concern being the input interface--Graphitti?--where would you write?). But for more general purpose portable computing, I think I'd go for something about 4"x6" or 5"x7" (somewhere around the size of a Star Trek DS9 data report pad).

    I'd love to see 3com (or someone else) put together a device this size for electronic books, general web browsing and the like.


    Then again, I also want an ntp client, procmail, and Perl in my VCR, so it'll never not know the time and so I can program it by e-mail (TiVo, maybe?). But companies never listen to me . . .

    --
    "My God...It's full of ads!" -Fry, about the Internet, Futurama
  7. rock and scroll... by z1lch · · Score: 2

    But Compaq doesn't intend to market the Itsy at retail. "This research could influence future products, but there are no plans to bring this to market," Frazier said.

    but...but...but...apart from being Linux based and running generic PDA functions in savvy style...it plays DOOM!

    not sure about the COMPAQ coined "rock and scroll" to describe the navigation through the video game universe by tilting the Itsy forward and back. hello! rock and scroll?

    more info on this product tease here. what about a limited edition then eh?

    she wore an itsy bitsy teeny weeny...hey i'm rock n' scrolling!

    --
    BLAMMO shaken not stirred
  8. CE devices may make decent Linux platform by Jay+Carlson · · Score: 2
    When the Itsy first got announced there was nothing like it available for sale. There still isn't anything that completely matches up, but we're getting closer. LinuxCE is a project to port Linux to CE PDA hardware. No kernels yet, but the boot loaders are coming along. People who can read Japanese should check out the NetBSD/hpcmips project which is apparently at least booting the kernel. Warner Losh has an excellent page of links about the MIPS-based PDAs from a OS-hacker's perspective. It looks like most commodity machines are pretty much contained in two chips each: one CPU+glue, and one "companion" chip. Good documentation from the chip vendors is available.

    The closest shipping match to the Itsy are the Casio E-15 and E-100; with 69MHz/131MHz CPUs and 16M of RAM, they're somewhat larger machines than the 8M 486SX/25 I bought to run Linux 0.12, and you can get larger CompactFlash cards (IDE interface internally) than the 60M SCSI disk that was home for a few years. Both Casios are a bit bigger than the Palm III, although I suppose you could get an Everex Freestyle if you wanted the exact size.

    If Digital---uh, I mean Compaq---had seeded the right places with proto hardware, I think the excitement about this project would be more justified. I'm glad they're finally releasing their port (dunno where, but this slide has it as a bullet); if nothing else, it will make work on other Linux PDA environments easier. But the commercial marketplace is serving up almost everything the Itsy hardware has except the prototyping ability today. That's where to funnel all that nervous energy you get when you think about how cool it would be to have a Linux PDA.