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Handhelds Software Hardware Linux

Inexpensive Handhelds for Linux? 50

Posted by Cliff from the a-penguin-in-the-palm-of-your-hand dept.
Dr. Manhattan asks: "My PDA was stolen on a business trip, and I'm looking for a replacement. I've enjoyed Palms for their simplicity and long battery life, but I'm not afraid to program and I'm considering something that can run Linux. However, my budget is rather limited; $150 is all I can spend. Relatively obsolete tech is fine, but I'm looking for: good battery life (my old Palm could run for weeks on a charge; I'm hoping for double-digit hours), dual expansion slots, all of the onboard hardware solidly supported by Linux. Does such a beast exist in my price range?"
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Inexpensive Handhelds for Linux? More

Inexpensive Handhelds for Linux?

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  • Hmm...
    http://froogle.google.com/froogle?price1=0 &price2= 150&btnP=Go&q=linux+pda&scoring=p&price=between

    Nope.
    • I wonder how many Slashdotters got curious and visted the site mentioned in the parent's subject line. I know I did!
    • Sure. What exact models should I put into Google/Froogle? Will your query pick up how much older iPaqs are going for on eBay? How many reviews list current prices and not historical ones?

      If you hit Google groups and look for "inexpensive handheld that can run linux" you'll see my (mostly unanswered) questions about it. I did STFW, and came up dry, but that doesn't mean that there isn't someone out there who knows more than me. Perhaps you are such a person, but you haven't provided evidence for that (yet)

  • here's a suggestion (Score:4, Funny)

    by Jane_the_Great ( 778338 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @11:58AM (#11348616)
    I'll sell you yours back for $100.
    • I'll sell you yours back for $100.

      Don't think I haven't been keeping an eye on eBay and such.

  • However, my budget is rather limited. [...] Relatively obsolete tech is fine, but I'm looking for: "features that are not considered obsolete in the least"

    I want my cake, and I better get to eat it too!
    • Relatively obsolete tech is fine, but I'm looking for: "features that are not considered obsolete in the least"

      My Handera 330 did all of that, and came out in mid-2001 (i.e. over 3 years ago). SD and CF slot (CF worked for memory, serial, ethernet, WiFi, GPS, etc.; SD was memory only). Could run on a Lithium battery pack or AAA batteries. WAV recording and playback, etc. It did it all with a 33MHz 68K processor, and you can't get much more obsolete than that. But I could still surf the web and SSH over Wi

      • Ohh web! What browser was that? I wonder if it has Bluetooth CF support - I'd love to tie that into my GPRS phone!

  • Zaurus SL-5500 (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:00PM (#11348641)
    You can get them for about $150 on eBay. They have 1 SD/MMC slot, 1 CF slot, 64mb of ram and an insignificant amount of built in flash. You can get a 1GB SD card and a WiFi card and you will have what you want. The one problem is that the SD/MMC driver is binary only and keeps you stuck on 2.4.18 until (if ever) an MMC only driver gets written and GPL'd.

    • Re:Zaurus SL-5500 (Score:4, Interesting)

      by n1ywb ( 555767 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:11PM (#11348791) Homepage Journal
      As an SL-5500 owner, I can tell you that the battery life sucks. 3 or 4 hours of use, a couple of days on standby, tops. Less with WiFi. It's too bad because other than that, it's a great device. The newer zaurii are much better in this department but out of your price range. Some of the older iPaq's have pretty good Linux support, I'm not sure about specifics. You're probably going to ahve to do some of your own research on this. Try google.

      • Re:Zaurus SL-5500 (Score:4, Informative)

        by Trelane ( 16124 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @01:02PM (#11349402) Journal
        3 or 4 hours of use, a couple of days on standby, tops. Less with WiFi.
        Well, that's with the 2.x series Sharp ROMs. If you upgrade to the 3.1x ROM from Sharp (which brings it, from what I understand, to be about in-line with the SL-5600, it does nice things like turning off any cards when they're not being used, and battery life becomes quite nice (I've gone for a week or more with one charge, not using wi-fi). Additionally, the new MP3 player in the 3.10 ROM can turn off the screen; I've gotten a solid 8 hours of continuous MP3 playing time. Unfortunately, last I used it, The Kompany's OGG player does not turn off the screen, and is limited to 4-6 hours.

        All that said, I've (in November) bought a PalmOne Tungsten T5, since it has builtin bluetooth (no WiFi, though. :() the DriveMode, and Linux syncs quite well with it and a few common apps. While I could never get my Zaurus to sync with Linux in the sharp 2.x ROM series, the 3.x ROMs out and out don't support Linux, and the protocol used is (yet) unknown. This, coupled with Sharp's withdrawal from the US market, caused my switch back to Palm. By no mistake, I still have my Zaurus as my sidekick, since it is truly a mobile computer (for instance, Calculon comes in quite handy in physics), and the OpenZaurus ROMs are quite impressive (though they definitely have lackings yet, esp. wrt. power management).

        • Re:Zaurus SL-5500 (Score:2, Informative)

          by Jahf ( 21968 )
          It really doesn't make that big of a difference for mine.

          I've used the old Sharp ROM, Sharp 3.x, and OpenZaurus of many flavors and none of them every gets -more- than 2 hours with WiFi or 4 hours without.

          Add on to that that you won't find a 5500 with a battery that is less than 18 months old unless you buy a replacement battery and he would probably get significantly less than that.

          If he needs double-digit hours there is not a 5500 in the world that will come to even 50% of what he needs.

          And using Open
          • Me? I gave up on PDAs completely, but I work from home and only travel a bit.

            You too? Ever since I started working at home, I have found no need for a PDA, too. Got an iPod Mini for Christmas and I just sync my calendar and contacts to it, as well as my motorola v60s, drag along the 15" PB for when I'm going to need to do work, and I'm set.

            At my previous position, I was in about 3-4h of meetings per day. The palm tungsten t2 was pretty helpful in keeping tabs on what I had to do on a daily basis. The
    • If you just want an organizer you could go for a VR3 [ebay.com] and get good battery life. Forget the expansion cards though. And devolepment is static.

      The other option is a Sharp Zaurus, but forget long battery life. The newer models are better, but well out of your price range.

      Or you could try finding and IPAQ- iPAQ H3100, H3600,H3700,H3800,H3900,H5400, and H5500 series. Or SIEMENS Simpad: CL4, SL4, SLC, T-Sinus, GMate YopY, M&N Ramses. Still same problem with battery and usually less choices on expansion

  • linuxdevices.com (Score:4, Informative)

    by tchuladdiass ( 174342 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:07PM (#11348736) Homepage
    linuxdevices [linuxdevices.com] has a fairly comprehensive list of what is available. Unfortunately, you'll be disapointed. Your best bet might be to get an older Compaq iPaq and put Familiar on it. But the Compaq's don't have a built in keyboard, and the SD slot might not be supported under Linux.
    To get a device you'll be happy with, it will cost from 300 - 800 dollars -- i.e., one of the Sharp Zaurus lines. They have built in keyboard, good display, sd & cf slots, etc. But support from Sharp is lacking -- they keep on discontinuing models, they totally screwed their community (by pulling the plug on the community development site). Of course support from zaurususergroup.com is good. But again, they are out of your price range.

    Or, you could hold out till Palm comes out with their linux-based distribution. You might even be able to upgrade to it on existing arm/xscale based palm devices (which again might be out of your price range by a couple hundred).
    • Just another thought regarding the Zaurus (in case he finds a cheap one on ebay). I have a SL-5500 and the battery life can be somewhat lacking (I don't have any hard figures). Also, the synchronization software is kind of crappy.

  • Zaurus on ebay (Score:2, Informative)

    by descendent ( 849341 )
    The Zaurus SL-5500 fits your requirements for hardware and software (SD and CF expansion; runs linux and java natively; hardware fully supported by OS) but it's battery life is nowhere near double digit. With a good battery, I've had about 3 hours of solid use per charge, or somewhere a little less than a week of just standby. Plus, it started at $400 retail, so now on ebay it's running at $100 for a starting bid, only to go up. There's one on ebay now for about $165 [ebay.com]. If you're willing to go over budget sl

  • Nope (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by LWATCDR ( 28044 )
    Sorry but not in your price range.
    Plus Linux PDA are still in the "hacker" or "geek" area so the lack of programing could make difficult.
    The Dell Axioms look very nice. Now if they would just run Linux....

    I hear the new Palm OS will run Linux as the base much like Mac OS/X runs BSD.

    I for one would really like to see Apple create a new Newton. Xscale 600 mhz, BSD, airport, ,bluetooth and all the yummy UI goodness that Apple seems to have. down pat.
    It would probably come with a hard drive so it would be an

    • Re:Nope (Score:3, Interesting)

      by NoMoreNicksLeft ( 516230 )
      I waited for the PowerNewton. It never appeared.

      I waited for the iNewton. It never appeared.

      I waiting for the Mini Newton. It won't happen, either.

      Jobs hates anything that the other, unmentionable CEO might be able to get credit for.
    • A new Newton would be great! It is still the only device that recognizes my handwriting more than 70% of the time.

      • I think sharp could do a good job too, but I'm not sure about English... At least in Japanese, I can get a wide box that I can write an entire sentence in, which is then recognized in one go. It actually seems to work better than char-to-char, whi is already pretty good. I think English is more difficult because there are way fewer differences between the average English letter, than the average Japanese char, and even fewer when stringed together into sentences. 'Th' can get transformed into 'R', 's' becom

  • It's time (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SpaceLifeForm ( 228190 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @01:15PM (#11349557)
    For the hardware manufacturers to seriously address Linux. Someone (just one to start) needs to build some hardware that is ready for Linux and makes the specifications available for free.

    And I'm not just talking about handhelds, but the entire spectrum of hardware. Especially hardware that is difficult to find Linux drivers for. Video and soft-modem for example.

    And obviously, handhelds preloaded with Linux, or at least easy to install GNU/Linux on them.

  • I have used both of these PDA's and while they ARE very good, and can be quite useful, you aren't going to get anywhere near the battery time you're used to. I was severely disappointed in the battery times of that PDA. I took it on a trip and used it alot as an MP3 player, which it was good at, except that I was always having to change batteries and charge them on the car charger. Pain in the butt!

    But it wasn't limited to what you get when you play MP3's. A few hours max for the battery, really. The keyb
  • ...I need to get a Palm for one of my classes this semester, and was thinking along the same lines. I just need something cheap, I already have an iPod, so I don't need mp3 capability, stuff like wifi would be nice, but I don't really NEED it...


    I was considering the PalmOne Zire21 [palmone.com]. Anyone know if/how well these work with Linux? Someone suggested LinuxDevices.com, and I couldn't find anything about it on there.
    • I was considering the PalmOne Zire21. Anyone know if/how well these work with Linux?

      Yeah, it should work fine. Google groups says it does. And, so far as battery goes, the 21 is supposed to a lot better than most. Note that the screen doesn't have a backlight, so you'll need good illumination to read it.

    • If you're looking for WiFi I give my PalmOne Tungsten C an excellent rating. Built-in keyboard, extremely long battery life (best of any palm, 1 hour of WiFi and 2 hours of standalone and my battery is still at 90%), and plenty powerful. The headphone jack isn't standard sized (sized for 2-way headsets w/ mic) but you said you had an iPod. Only complaint is no bluetooth, however it appears Pretec has a SDIO card.

      The Tungsten C however is expensive, if you're looking for cheap the Zire 31 is what I reccomen
  • The best palmtop computer ever made.
  • Sorry to throw in a way-off-topic post, but I'm selling my ipaq 3650 after not using it for a year. It has familiar with Opie installed and worked great while I was using it. Alas, I have no use for it now, but contact me if you're interested.

    Damien

  • No (Score:2, Informative)

    by md81544 ( 619625 )
    I own a Zaurus SL-5500. The battery life is OK-ish with a battery extender (basically a box with four Mi-Mh AA rechargeables in it. Gives me about four hours). As a geek toy it's brilliant. I'm running OpenZaurus on it, and can SSH onto it from my other machines, and use it to control devices about the house, and, of course, it's interesting to use it with Kismet as a wireless "warwalker".

    BUT... I wouldn't dream of using it as a PDA. To my mind, a PDA should be diary and addressbook (and maybe to-do

  • iPaq h3800 series on eBay! (Score:3, Informative)

    by Paul d'Aoust ( 679461 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @04:11PM (#11351966)

    I'm happy to inform you that you can get an iPaq h3800 series handheld on eBay for about $100-200, depending on its condition, the number of accessories, etc. The h3600 and h3700 series had problems with battery life, but the h3800 series solved that (mainly by putting a bigger battery in, but also by adjusting the requirements of the backlight). The h3800 also had an SD/MMC slot and Bluetooth.

    HP is a huge sponsor of the handhelds.org project [handhelds.org], which aims to get a good Linux distro on the iPaq, Zaurus, and (I think) Jornada handhelds. They run you through the installation process (and how to back up your original flash ROM in case you want to go back to Windows PocketPC) and provide a package management system and a host of other fun things. There are even a number of desktop environments:

    • Opie [handhelds.org] which is based off TrollTech's Qtopia (which I think is the enviro used in the Zaurus handheld). I can't comment on it much because I haven't been paying attention to its development.
    • GPE [handhelds.org], which I'm more interested in, because it uses lots of freedesktop.org standards like HAL, DBUS, gstreamer, etc, and I'm a GNOME fan myself. The website is pretty spare, but if you search the mailing lists, you realise there's a lot more going on than meets the eye.

    Both of those desktop environments are available in the Familiar distro, which is the standard iPaq Linux distro. Familiar provides an X server, Python, Perl, ssh, vnc, etc, etc, etc, so if you don't mind programming, you'll probably feel quite okay.

    There's another distro based on Familiar called Intimate [secret.org.uk]. It's closer to a desktop distro, so you can install KDE, GNOME, the Mozilla Suite, Fluxbox, etc.

    One caveat: The iPaq installation HOWTO says that you need either a serial cradle or a CompactFlash sleeve for your handheld, so before you bid on an auction, make sure it has one of those two features! Not all iPaqs sold have CF sleeves!

    (Get this: after you install the bootloader, you get the base system uploaded and bootstrapped using... Zmodem! remember Zmodem?)

    • I'm happy to inform you that you can get an iPaq h3800 series handheld on eBay for about $100-200

      Now that looks interesting! Skimming the docs it appears that the onboard hardware is, in fact, supported. I tremble, though, because:

      Get this: after you install the bootloader, you get the base system uploaded and bootstrapped using... Zmodem!

      Cute. I would probably enjoy doing this (I am a geek and all), but our next baby is due any day now and I don't think I'll have much time to tinker for a while. Stil

    • Holy crap that's attractive, and I already have a Zaurus 5000D.

      Do the GPE PIM applets, particularly Calendar (I think that's it's name...) sync with /anything/? I've been having no end of trouble getting Opie's calendar to sync with anything that isn't the awful Qt Desktop crap or MultiSync, which isn't an option because it doesn't sync with my calendar-of-choice (a iCal format file, accessed by many Mozilla Calendar apps via WebDAV). Calendar syncing is a requirement for me, to the point where I'm becomin
  • For starters, nothing modern has battery life anything like the Palm III used to have, especially not on anything capable of running Linux acceptibly.

    Second, you're not going to get anything with a significant nifty factor for under $150. You could get one of the lower end Zires from Palm, or stretch your budget some and get a Tungsten|E, or you could find something used and hopefully not too beat-up from someone else -- and that's about it.
  • For $150 it would be tough. You could go for an older device like the iPAQ 3670 which there used to be a distro of linux for but you would probably have to get one used.

    Of course the PalmOne Zire, Zire 21, and Zire 31 are all under $150. None of dual expansions though (only the 31 has an expansion). More on the Zire 31 here:
    http://www.davespda.com/hardware/pda/palmos/device .php?139 [davespda.com]

    Sony also had some options, the SL10 and TJ25...but you only get memory stick as the expansion option which I personal

  • get an MS Smartphone instead (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Get one of these instead. [amazon.com] Smaller than a PDA. Easy to write C/C++/C# code on. (Slowly) Network connected, for a fairly reasonable fee. Not too expensive if you sign up with a carrier. And you don't have to carry both a PDA and a cellphone. Works as an MP3 and DIVX player too, expandable up to 512MB miniSD (soon 1GB). The SP3i [expansys-usa.com] has a nicer joystick, but is a lot more expensive (no carrier lock-in/discount).
  • Get a Fujitsu Pencentra 100 or 200 Tablet. (i think those are the correct model numbers anyway...) It'll be a bitch to get Linux on there, but it IS doable. It has two PCMCIA slots (you can put in a CF card reader) and takes IrDA. Decent battery life too. It's just huge. HUGE. Definately in your price range though.

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