It's Critter Time!

Before smartphones I was a real big PDA/palmtop computer user. I started with an old iPAQ that quickly bit the dust, then I moved up to a Sharp Zaurus SL-5500. It was a portrait form factor PDA with a slide out keyboard, and it ran Linux natively. It was pretty good. I used it for taking notes and playing music. I was kinda a nerd about compressing my music with OGG Vorbis to get as much play time as I could out of my low capacity CF cards.

Later I upgraded to an SL-C1000, pictured above. It was like a little laptop! It was Japan-only, but that didn't matter so much because of the custom ROM scene. I ran a distro called pdaXrom which basically gave me a full Linux desktop. I remember using AbiWord and Midori for word processing and web browsing respectively. It could also run Firefox, which would take a good 90 seconds to boot up, but it was necessary for getting through my college's captive login page.

Oh, and games - pdaXrom was just desktop Linux, and a good number of emulators would compile and run just fine. I ran GBC, SNES and Neo-Geo emulators. I played all the way through Super Metroid on it. The Neo-Geo emulator had cores written in ARM assembly, so it could run full speed; the ROMs needed to fit in memory though, so only earlier/smaller titles would run. Mostly I just cared about Puzzle Bobble though.

After the SL-C1000 I got a Nokia N800, which was a downgrade really. It didn't have a keyboard. The touch screen was pretty ok though. But it couldn't really run games. I didn't care as much at the time though because I was using my MacBook more for gaming, browsing etc.

Anyone else mess around with these? HP Jornada type stuff. I guess there's a little overlap with cyberdecks, but I'm talking commercial products.

I'd love love love to have a pocketable actual fucking computer with a keyboard but I'm not prepared to spend the money they're worth used now. Android with a keyboard is not a computer to me.

Been thinking lots about old Psions, since I really do mostly just want PDA functionality. It'd be cool to have a full computer of some sort but if I'm doing that I'd want it to run modern Linux and at least be fast enough to have an encrypted boot disk. Kind of surprising no one has really done that with a pi based system yet, but I guess the power usage on those isn't very low from a true mobile context, and you can't get non backlit monochrome screens easily now...

Oh yeah, those mini laptops by GPD are super tempting, I really want to get one and put Linux on it. Hard to justify the cost right now though.