

More on the Samsung Linux Handheld 238
Max von H. found the
following on PalmStation: "It seems Samsung is about to ship out a Linux PDA this summer, and it will be called Yopy. Neat, isn't it? " A little slow link, but definitely more interesting then most of the other data on the Samsung devices we've seen in the past. It looks like it's mimicing a lot of the wince stuff... also appears to have a camera option. Nifty stuff
tho.
Love it. (Score:1)
Ohh.... (Score:1)
Re:but.. (Score:1)
Product info page (Score:4)
Well, (Score:2)
According to this picture [gicom.de], it plays mp3s and has support for wireless email. No voice recording, though.
It does look pretty nifty. Beats WinCE any day. *And* it plays Ricky Martin songs, so you know it's good!
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
Product info page link at Samsung (Score:1)
Sweet... (Score:3)
Anyhow, here's the picture with the specs [gicom.de]. It's got a 200Mhz ARM chip (probably for low power consumption) and 32MB RAM. Anyone have more info on this?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].
Wow... (Score:2)
I'm basing this totally on aesthetics right now, as it definately appeals to my sense of what a palm-held device ought to look like. I think I've found MY next MP3 Player. Looks like ARM has gone a long way since the last time I checked its progress. Way to go.
Taken from the specs page
Strong CPU of High Performance
Is anyone able to narrow that down a little bit??? I'd kinda like to know what I'm up against if I'm to use this thing for anything other than appointments and MP3s. I'd also like to know how much storage space is available on those "CompactFlash" cards anyway...
Also, anybody have any idea why they chose to create their own 'Yopy browser'? Seems like after going to all the effort to port the OS and get ARM going, they'd just use one of the browsers readily available to choose from. The Linux scene is definately hopping with them.
Again,
D'oh! It does have voice recording! (Score:2)
Now, on the poster in this picture [gicom.de], it mentions voice recording as a feature. Silly me.
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
Looks like... (Score:1)
Windows CE! At least a bit too much for my tastes... I used both WinCE and PalmOS device, and for what I've seen on the pictures, they seem to reproduce the "Bad Things" of WinCE, like the "start bar" at the bottom of the screen, etc.
Of course, maybe all this can be modified by the user... That would be the ultimate cool thing!! Also, anyone knows if there's writing recognition like for the Palm?
JulyenWhat can it do? (Score:1)
btw: it isn't a slow link at all, at least, for people living in the Netherlands.
Re:Samsung/Lineo press release (Score:2)
Another big mistake (Score:5)
Radio Button (Score:1)
I wonder what it will do. Possibly a radio card or something>
WHUZZA?
The Picture With The Button [gicom.de]
Jayson Byrne
Re:D'oh! It does have voice recording! (Score:1)
compact flash (Score:1)
--
Compact Flash cards (Score:1)
I use a dinky 8mb card with my Nino 510 which helps out a lot with my five zillion avant-go subscriptions :)
-Ed
Re:Wow... (Score:2)
Strong CPU of High Performance
Is anyone able to narrow that down a little bit???
If you look on the right side of this pic [gicom.de] it appears to have an ARM running at 206 MHz, and 32 MB RAM. Not too shabby.
Course, to me it looks just like a WinCE ripoff but with crappy fonts (i.e. the "START/" button...), but what do I know. At least MP3 and a web browser are nice.
Re:but.. (Score:1)
Word Ignore for Moderation? (Score:2)
Then I could read the couple decent AC posts without having to read at +2 and hoping some poort sap that reads at 0 or 1 moderates them up.
Compact Flash (Score:4)
--
A wireless pocket Web server! (Score:1)
Games! (Score:2)
Better Specs? (Score:2)
The reason I ask, is it would be pretty easy (?) to run the distributed.net client(s), and if it has a reasonably fast processor, it wouldn't be a waste.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
Re:Samsung/Lineo press release (Score:1)
So that's that the "Embedix Browser" looks like...
It scares me that this machine is more powerful than my old P133. Man, did it suck before X had decent Mach64 support, and I could only run it in 320x200. I guess that's something like this PDA will be, except without a real keyboard...
It entertains me that Microsoft had to make an entire new OS to do this, whereas Linux had an ARM port, and can be stripped down sufficiently without creating a new API.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].
Re: (Score:2)
Start Button? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
The specifications (Score:5)
Re:Ohh.... (Score:1)
Looks neat but.. (Score:1)
What about apps? (Score:3)
While a Linux handheld would be cool in its own right, I see very few references to what applications this thing is going to run. Have they been developed by Samsung? If this is going to be a useful PDA, then I hope they are going to have to have some decent PDA-style applications to go along with it.
I'm a little suspicious that none of the screenshots are showing any scheduling programs or other PDA-mainstays.
--
Lets just hope... (Score:1)
Better Specs from one of the pics (Score:2)
Slow link (Score:1)
the
MIRROR!!!!! (Score:3)
yopy mirror [anagram.ns.ca]
Re:Word Ignore for Moderation? (Score:4)
Threshold -1, Flat mode, and newest first
One of the problems with the current mod system is insightful comments are often missed because they are so far down the story that the moderators have used up their points on trolls before they get to them.
--
Re:A wireless pocket Web server! (Score:1)
i *don't* like the start button.
Handwriting Recognition? (Score:3)
What good is xterm... (Score:4)
Questions I have:
1. Does a keyboard peripheral exist or is one planned?
2. Can you get beneath the desktop? It would be great if they allowed the user to customize the interface. They could even create new interfaces later and let you switch between the one you want.
3. The battery is listed as 1400mA Recharge Li-Ion. Has anyone heard any estimates of how long it lasts? (esp. when used as a continuous MP3 player.)
4. I want the power! Can the user trash features they don't want to make room for features they do? (If I don't get the camera, I don't want the baggage.)
5. Okay, if I do want the camera, am I stuck with just one choice? Price?
Nitpicking aside... looks way cool.
Work as if you don't need the money,
Love as if you've never been hurt, and
Dance as if no one's watching.
Re:but.. (Score:1)
-----------------------
Re:Man...and I just bought a Palm (Score:1)
Just wondering, how did this post get rated -2?
Re:Looks neat but.. (Score:2)
I would assume the compact flash slot in the top is different than storage space, and thus you can swap out compact flash just like removable storage. i.e. one for apps, one for games, one for mp3's, etc. This is one of the things I really liked about the Newton, it had two pc card slots for extra swappable storage.
Stuffing linux into a PDA (Score:3)
Re:Another big mistake (Score:1)
Hand Writing? X Windows? gcc? (Score:1)
Re:Another big mistake (Score:1)
Ick (Score:2)
So how does one actually get one of these puppies? (Score:1)
Re:Word Ignore for Moderation? (Score:1)
How about -2. There is a post at score -2 in this article, search for it if you don't believe me.
Where were the pictures taken (Score:2)
(although I get a feeling that the first 100 off the line will be going to VLNX/ADVR and
Excuse me, but it is hard to type with all the drool gushing on my keyboard....
Re:Word Ignore for Moderation? (Score:1)
Re:Moderate this down. (Score:1)
There should be a point of moderation where this post is deleted
Like -2, Then these trolls will get pissed and stop posting if they can't view thier own comments
Re:A wireless pocket Web server! (Score:1)
What I think... (Score:4)
Now as for all this talk of playing quake or other games, I don't think it would be very good just for the fact of the strange resolution that it probally has, and that there are only two buttons and a directional type pad, would make it bad to play.
All I have seen on this is the pictures on the link from this story, and the info on samsung's page, but from what I can see, it looks just like Samsung is trying to hop on the Linux bandwagon.
It does look like a nice palmtop though, so it might be a good product. I'm just worried about the actual customizability.
Body double? (Score:2)
Nifty CPU (Score:2)
ARM9E-S, because it includes DSP instructions. The spec sheet for the PDA says it has a 3D audio codec (probably dolby because the ARM9 dsp can handle that) plays MP3s and MPEG video, all of which the ARM9E-S is perfectly suited to do. You can go too this website http://www.arm.com/Pro+Peripherals/Cores/ARM9ES/
to find out some more about the CPU. Its a really nice CPU, puts out about 200 something MIPS and uses about 1.3 or 2.5 mW/MHz depending on the what voltage its running at.
Re:A wireless pocket Web server! (Score:1)
One time Ultima 7 pissed me off (seeked to the disk too much) and I had too much RAM (32MB back then) so I loaded into a ~17MB compressed RAM drive, and then I didn't have to listen to it access the disk anymore. RAM drives are cool.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].
Why get a Samsung when you can get a Transmeta (Score:1)
Re:Word Ignore for Moderation? (Score:1)
this thing is going to cost a fortune (Score:2)
I wonder how much my car is worth...?
.:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:.
still to small for true handwrittings... (Score:1)
back to reality, and a device with a future
what are the possibilities for a handwriting recognizer to run under Linux?
Does such an app exist... and if so is it free?
Is it at all feasable to waste space and time with such an engine for such a small screen size...
I have previously had a PalmPilot, and while i was very satisfied with it, I never really used it for taking notes... does anybody have some good or bad experiences with taking notes on a screen of this size??
UI Development (Score:1)
First, the User Interface is a disaster. The Start button makes me sick and the fonts look like a throw-back from the DOS days. And it might be a good idea to interface through USB, as Linux 2.3 [soon to be 2.4] supports USB. Win98 supports USB. [Free, Net, Open]BSD[i] supports USB as well.
And maybe you should chat with the XMMS team before you finalize your MP3 player's interface. It looks kind of gawky [gicom.de].
But, look. It's an awesome CPU. Nice and healty memory, and look at that LCD!
Re:A wireless pocket Web server! (Score:1)
Re:Stuffing linux into a PDA (Score:2)
No, Linux has a lot of new Unix baggage. Remember Unix was devloped on a machine with 40K words (I think 80K bytes) of memory. It has grown quite a bit over the years, but don't make the mistake of thinking Unix == big-bloated-OS.
Now, I expect even a trimmed down Linux to take a lot more space then PalmOS, and it looks like the Samsung PDA hasn't learned the lessons of Palm, so the apps may not be what you want, and that start button definitly isn't as nice as a full screen launcher plus a few buttons for extramly common programs.
The QNX kenrnel is indeed very small. However the 32K kernel includes context switching, semaphores, and (non-network) nessage passing. No TCP/IP, no GUI, no filesystem, no serial ports, no way to talk to a user at all. Once you add the same sort of things PalmOS has QNX starts taking up real space.
As a former Nokia9000 owner (GeOS PDA/phone), I have to say GeOS wasn't bad there, but the Palm was much better. Of corse GeOS started off as a desktop platform, so if they can make the transition, why can't Linux?
P.S. the sukyest thing about the Palm is that a buggy app can not only crash the whole machine, it can destroy data (since it is all in RAM, and there is no MMU). Hopefully the ARM Samsung chose has a MMU, and they use it.
Re:Another big mistake (Score:3)
I personally use a Newton as my main PDA, and while it's interface is beautifully simple, the OS underneath is in fact very advanced. It is fully object oriented (based on a self like language), and has all the needed features like a good device driver architechture, multi threading etc etc....
Hopefully we will be able to use their hardware, and provide our own gui... would be nice to finally get a worthy replacement of the newton
USB? (Score:4)
It mentions USB port in specs. I am wondering
does this USB port allows only to connect this
PDA to computer, or does it also allows to
connect various devices to PDA?
Connecting USB keyboard or ZIP drive
could be pretty cool option!
Re:Stuffing linux into a PDA (Score:1)
What is the idea with having a real OS in it, then? The application base! Easy to develope! Anyone could just get a cross-compiling gcc and port their favourite hello-world application over. And if this thing ever gets a keyboard, I can see emacs ported over ;).
Of course, there are small os'es that provide POSIX interface (isn't QNX one of these?), but still, it's less hassle to port from exactly similar environment.
About usability (desktop) - hey, I don't care, I could write my own. (And somebody will almost certainly write a palm3-clone for this thingy.)
WOW! This thing must be waterproof! :) (Score:2)
Getting moderated down into oblivion (Score:2)
Just wondering, how did this post get rated -2?
Well, if you take a good look at his post, you'll see that he mentioned both Internet Explorer and Windows 95, yet he did not even make one juvenile anti-Microsoft comment. You see, we're at Slashdot, and that kind of behavior is just unacceptable here. Hope this helps.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Re:Slow link???? (Score:1)
Wearable applications? (Score:1)
That said, this might very well be another possibility in some ideas I have been tossin around for a wearable linux based machine I plan to build over the summer. My previous plan called for using some pc104 boards and building a cheezy led based i/o device till i could afford a spiffy glasses mount. With this, I could use the color screen when I really needed that functionality, yet still have the leds for my more minute to minute uses. More importantly, though, will I be able to hack a way to hook up a twiddler to this thing for typing? And for that matter, how open will the interface be? I might want to hack around the windoze based interface and get something much more basic and fvwm-like to save resources for other things, like context-aware applications and the such.
Just my $0.02US... I'd appreciate any feedback from those who might be more knowledgeable about these things.
Tell a man that there are 400 Billion stars and he'll believe you
Re:The specifications (Score:1)
This was posted the day I got my visor to sync under 2.3.48!
Well now I have to save enough money to buy a Linux PDA instead of the still to be anounced color visor
Enjoy
--
What a PDA should be (Score:3)
First, a PDA should definately run Linux, or maybe NetBSD. These are pretty much the 2 most scalable OSes out there (at least in the downward direction) that don't sacrifice any of the functionality or compatibility you get on larger systems. Having a unified platform between the desktop and the handheld is important for developers, and neither wince or PalmOS does this.
Plus, Linux is extremely stable, which is very important in the embedded market. Think if you're on a vacation and your PDA fails. "Darn honey, my handheld just crashed. I've lost the road map, our music for the car, the photos we took at the grand canyon, and my notes for my meeting on Monday." Not a good thing.
Secondly, the interface should not be a "desktop-clone". Multiple cascading menus are far too much clutter for a PDA screen. The UI should be simple and intuitive and targeted for handheld applications, not desktop ones. PalmOS does a very good job of this. Wince does not. It's my opinion that PDAs should use some version of X so that development is easy, but none of the current window managers are going to do very well on such a small screen, so a new interface is necessary.
Thirdly, the device should have advanced multimedia and productivity capabilities. It should have things like an MP3 and movie player. It should have a word processor and a spreadsheet. It should definately have a graphical web browser. Wince has these things, PalmOS doesn't. It's my belief that a Linux PDA should have all of these applications, but they should have a much simpler interface than their desktop cousins.
Re:What good is xterm... (Score:1)
where the heck is the rj45 ethernet port ? i'd love to have plug and play ethernet connectivity built into it.
Re:Another big mistake (Score:1)
Re:What about apps? (Score:1)
Re:If only you knew what you were talking about... (Score:1)
I'm TOTALLY sure that the linux pda will SLAY any WinCE device.
My Opinion (Score:3)
-Will it sync with Linux?
-When/Where can i get the source?
-looks a good deal bigger than my PalmVx.
-seems more aimed at portable multimedia than PDA
If i bought one it would not replace my palm. It would however complement it nicely. Although Yopy can do PIM stuff, it would seem more useful as an MP3, portable video, radio, and internet device. BTW, i like how it will use a mobile phone to connect to the internet instead of requiring that you buy a new device and pay exorbitant prices for mobile internet.
Re:beowolf? (Score:1)
Re:What good is xterm... (Score:1)
Stuffing linux into a PDA does make sense. (Score:1)
What "baggage" are you referring to? Unix is fine for PDAs because you can simply remove those pieces you don't need. And 32M of RAM is more than plenty - lots of people ran Linux on 486's with 8 or even 4M.
As far as why Linux is a good choice, it's because the standard is there and people are familiar with it. Jumping to something like QNX just slashes your developer base. As well, think about the future - even two years from now, that processor is going to double in power and the RAM will increase, and pretty soon all the reasons why you chose QNX have dissappeared.
If I'm going to be carrying something like this around in my pocket, it better be tailorable to exactly what I want it to do. Linux is the way to make this possible.
It should just have one button... (Score:2)
Re:Price? (Score:4)
Re:Psion Should Make a Palm-form handheld! (Score:2)
Cebit is still on, go there - see the Ericsson palm sized Epoc device with bluetooth, GPS etc. See Psion demo Quartz in their stand, see Symbian demo Quartz in their stand.
Specifications (StrongARM SA-1110) (Score:5)
The crinkly bits compared to a palm are:
The pictures [gicom.de] on the original page indicate that Linux will run out of 32-megs of ROM and 32-megs of RAM. It also looks like SAMSUNG is going to try to take advantage of all the chip's features (the disappointing thing about Palm is that they didn't take advantage of all the Dragonball's features).
The thing to remember is that Samsung is like only putting together a reference design from Intel with a reference implementation of Linux (probably from Lineo [lineo.com]) and standard off-the-shelf apps (like MP3 players) with minor modifications. The PDA-style apps are probably the Lineo PDA suite [lineo.com]. Getting all this to work well in a limitted power budget will be tough enough. The first version will probably not contain any wizbang features beyond this.
The burning questions I have:
Re:Compact Flash (Score:2)
Don't forget that you could stick an IBM Microdrive [ibm.com] in that CF slot instead :)
-- qube
Not if the open source community can help it! (Score:2)
Don't like their GUI? Great! Write an X app to replace it.
Makes me wonder what they're using on top of X for window management...
Virtual goggles & palmtops (Score:2)
Of course, the proper input device for such a beasty is probably still under debate. If you have a complicated desktop possible, then one of those handheld cording keyboards would probably be more efficient than a stylus arrangement.
Re:Wearable applications? (Score:2)
LCD's get exponentially harder to build as the size goes up...
this means tiny ones are dirt cheap, and big ones are really expensive.
a 1 inch color LCD screen is a only a few dollars.
Samsung Linux PDA, Release in May (Score:3)
our product would be available by the end of May in US and Europe.
Thanks again.
Best Regards.
Paul H. Yoo
Sales & Marketing
G.MATE, Inc.
E-mail: paulyoo@gmate.co.kr
Tel: 82-342-738-1241
Fax: 82-342-738-1212
******************************
----- Original Message -----
From: "Doug Littlefield"
To:
Sent: Monday, February 28, 2000 8:50 AM
Subject: Linux PDA
> Looks Like a winning product.
>
> Where can I buy this?
>
> Thank you
>
>
They use the W-Windows, which is GPL'ed (Score:2)
-russ
Re:Radio Button (Score:2)
-russ
Re:Where were the pictures taken (Score:2)
-russ
I REGISTERED YOPY.ORG. MAILING LIST TO FOLLOW. (Score:3)
-russ
Re:What good is xterm... (Score:2)
-russ
Re:What good is xterm... (Score:3)
2) It's Lineo's PDA software. I don't know if it's open source or not.
3) 10 hours is one estimate I heard
4) Hey, this is Linux. Do what you want. They're using W-windows, which is GPL'ed, so you have your freedom.
5) No idea.
-russ
(OT)Word Ignore for Moderation? (Score:2)
--
http://yopy.org has a FAQ file and mailing list. (Score:2)
-russ
Re:I REGISTERED YOPY.ORG. MAILING LIST TO FOLLOW. (Score:2)
Not only did this guy register a domain name that he really shouldn't have, but he is now spamming