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Re: [s-t] Poetry in motion (fwd)

Oh, and Simputer purportedly to ship soon.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: 08 Jul 2002 11:05:27 -0400
From: Miles Nordin <>
Subject: Re: [s-t] Poetry in motion

>>>>> "gj" == Gordon Joly <> writes:

    gj> written specifically with the Agenda VR3 Linux-based PDA in
    gj> mind.

I have one of these.  The hardware is a beautiful, cheap, low-end PDA,
but the software REAKS.  It's both slow and useless.  It's slow in
that Linux with X11 is ridiculous in 16MB FLASH, 8MB RAM.  Actually I
don't really know why it's slow---it could also be some hardware
mistake, like execute-in-place with poor cacheing of the FLASH---but
in any case it's pointlessly slow with response times to screen taps
of about three seconds.  It's useless in that it has no more
capabilities than a calculator wristwatch or a celfone: time, todo,
contacts---and it is missing the wristwatch's ability to ring because
they were never able to get the alarm feature working.  Even if they
did, the hardware has no speaker/vibrator!

All the Agenda's marketing, including fraudulent photos of the
device's screen on its box, claims they have ``email, fax, browser''
applications.  They to not.

    gj> and Sharp Zaurus Linux-based PDAs, with X-Window installed.

Which AFAIK the Zaurus does not, thank god.  From what I've heard, the
Zaurus will use QT/Embedded, the KDE GUI middleware with the X11 layer
removed.

The Zaurus marketing is really neat because unlike the Agenda they're
following the true Linux tradition by challenging Wince
feature-for-feature.  This could be a major coup for the Japanese,
because it could put Japanese CPUs back in PDAs.  Wince PDAs used to
spread out over three different CPUs: Hitachi's Super-H, ARM
a.k.a. Digital a.k.a. Intel's StrongARM, and NEC's VR-MIPS / Toshiba's
TX-MIPS.  Then Microsoft and Intel cooperated to make Wince
StrongARM-only, thus extending the Wintel empire into the PDA market.

Now that Intel is messing with the StrongARM, the usual stupid Intel
bugs are showing up in StrongARMs.  see ``StrongARM [revision-] K
bug'':

 http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-arm32/1999/03/

Thank god the X-Box has failed so heinously to put Intel CPUs in game
consoles.

I wish the Zaurus had a keyboard.

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