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Popcorn Computer’s Pocket P.C. Open Sourced
- numpad0 6y agoConfusing name but not related to Microsoft’s obsolete Pocket PC platform
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoThat was immediately where I went. I loved my little iPAQ back in high school.
- postpawl 6y agoI could only afford a Handspring Vizor. iPAQs were so high-end.
- paulie_a 6y agoI totally forgot about the handspring, I had one in high school. Great device!
- rietta 6y agoI still have two that still run. I wonder if the Computer History Museum in Roswell, GA, would take them as donations.
- numpad0 6y agoI’ve only used WM5/6 but compared to PalmOS it genuinely sucked so
- app4soft 6y agoJFTR, There is SunVox[0] — free modular music studio for Palm OS, Windows CE (Pocket PC & Windows Mobile) and much more. [0] https://warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/ https://warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/
- kube-system 6y agoI could only afford an iPAQ but I really wanted a Jornada.
- bitwize 6y agoI wanted a Sharp Zaurus. They had a pretty good Japanese hacking community.
- tluyben2 6y agoI had an iPaq and a Zaurus: the quality difference was miles removed: the Zaurus was so much better at everything (for me) but the iPaq and gprs so that was a reason to hold onto it. Zaurus is still working and running Linux today, iPaqs, multiple, are all dead even though used less. Build quality was robust even though it had a swivel screen (which was also great).
- ornornor 6y agoI still have a zaurus 860C in the box never used, and I can’t find anything to do with it. The build quality was amazing, and so was the Silicon graphics display.
- DEADBEEFC0FFEE 6y agoThrough work I think I had them all. Various palms, psions, iPAQ, Dells. Good times.
- amanzi 6y agoI preferred my Casio Cassiopeia.
- hyko 6y agoYes! I had an E105... What an awesome little computer.
- wtvanhest 6y agoI saw the title and remember how when the battery died it wiped the memory. Brutal
- Stierlitz 6y ago'numpad0: “Confusing name but not related to Microsoft’s obsolete Pocket PC platform” I suspect such retrospective revisionist reports are designed to precisely do that, render confusion. For instance, according to wikipedia, Windows NT was never designed with the Internet in mind. Whatever that's supposed to mean.
- softwarejosh 6y agowhat can i do woth it, its twice as expensive as a flipper
- bgorman 6y agoIt runs Linux, has a keyboard and has a 1080p screen. I doubt the flipper even has a MMU.
- emberdaway 6y agoSome Flippers have an i.MX6 running Kali Linux, but they do seem like completely different products. Many more radios, but many fewer buttons and pixels. It's nice that we have so many options for tiny computers these days, but sooner or later, someone is going to have to find something useful to do with them. The UI and developer experience has never gotten quite good enough to drive a market the size of smartphones or laptops, so...what are we doing here? Is it time to acknowledge that the masses don't particularly want general-purpose computing machines? That there isn't much of a market for anything that isn't plug-and-play? That's a depressing thought.
- asveikau 6y ago> someone is going to have to find something useful to do with them Looking at that pocket pc website... If that usb c port could drive a display it might be interesting to dock that thing and get a full desktop experience. Then take your work with you when you are ready to go mobile. On buses and trains or other places where it might be clumsy to use a laptop. I guess this was a thing many people have fantasized about for a long time but nobody has really made practical. I guess laptops, phones and tablets being separate entities is good enough.
- easton 6y agoIs that going to be a great experience with an Allwinner R8 and 512 mb of RAM? The PocketCHIP had similar specs but a much more low res display, and it chugged under load.
- joezydeco 6y agoHoly cow look at that silkscreen. Five-digit component numbers? Populating this board is like Where’s Waldo...
- emberdaway 6y agoAnd the PCB has 10 layers! They must have had fun designing it.
- microcolonel 6y agoKinda does beg the question whether ten layers were really necessary, but I'm not a board designer.
- phendrenad2 6y agoI see a pretty fine-pitch BGA on there, so I'm guessing it is (but also not a designer)
- joezydeco 6y agoBGA isn’t usually the reason for 10 layers, it’s high speed signals like SDRAM that need isolation and timing.
- banks_h 6y agoNot sure why you're getting downvoted, you're dead on. I just finished routing an LPDDR4 bus (high speed + low voltage => worst case signal integrity) between two BGAs with signals routed on only 3 layers. The catch is that you need each high speed bus to be comfortably sandwiched between solid copper planes. Layers dedicated to reference planes start to add up quite quickly when you've got RAM, eMMC, ethernet, wifi, camera input, display output, SD card, etc all crossing over and through each other.
- imtringued 6y agoThe stackup pdf only has 3 digit component numbers. What you're probably seeing is that someone paneled the PCB 16 times.
- shakna 6y ago> Our goal is to ensure that we get all aspects of our products mainlined so that custom kernels will not be required. I love these kinds of projects, but after being burned by the PocketCHIP, who also said this but never made it there, this is isn't somewhere I want to go again.
- emberdaway 6y agoYeah, ditto. Why can't mainline Linux support come first? Then they could sell a working product. Crazy, I know. Investing in difficult R&D problems to produce a quality product is not a good business model. It's so much easier to churn out a working devkit and ask for pull requests. Sorry for the snark and pessimism, but that's what happens when you keep getting burned. This statement does not inspire confidence: >Finally, to ensure that Pocket P.C. has great software support out of the box, we have requested embedded development help from the community. Why is software always an afterthought with these projects? Especially a project like this, which has clearly seen an enormous amount of effort put into the hardware design.
- voltagex_ 6y agoThe only example I have is the LibreComputer S905X based board - it took years of work with a small team to get the kernel changes upstreamed. Hell, look at the Raspberry Pi - I think mainline support is pretty recent.
- aspenmayer 6y agoThis project shows a lot of promise. > TRYING TO BUILD THE ULTIMATE RASPBERRY PI COMPUTER (ZERO TERMINAL V3) https://n-o-d-e.net/zeroterminal3.html https://n-o-d-e.net/zeroterminal3.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiJqUWfR90I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiJqUWfR90I
- tonyarkles 6y ago> Why is software always an afterthought with these projects? Especially a project like this, which has clearly seen an enormous amount of effort put into the hardware design. This can go either way, in my experience. I’ve worked with software developers who do a terrible job with hardware, and hardware developers who do a terrible job with software. Best I can tell, it’s a problem that’s existed since we started making computers. In some ways, I think it’s arrogance. The rockstar software developer believes that software is infinitely more complex than the hardware it runs on. The ninja EE believes that software is trivial. And they both assume that they can effectively do each others’ jobs.
- stephc_int13 6y agoI would buy something with slightly different specs and design. - square screen, possibily of higher resolution - high quality tactile switch keyboard, optimized for thumb typing - useable in bare PCB form (maybe with a two PCB sandwich) - similar design aesthetics as the pocket operators from Teenage Engineering, but built as a powerful full featured pocket computer for hackers
- afandian 6y agoThat was the Blackberry Passport hardware-wise.
- hinkley 6y agoLooking at the circuit board is reminding me if a thought experiment I entertain from time to time: we keep trying to make the single purpose keyboard smaller so we have room for everything else in a compact device. What if we didn’t? Instead of removing the volume, can we put something in it? Take this one for instance. How many layers does a keyboard trace need? 2? 3? How many things can you stuff on the backside of the keyboard? Between? Under?
- StaticChamp 6y agoI wish there was a video on the website. What are the use cases?
- newsbinator 6y agoWhat are some interesting use-cases for this? I can imagine sys admins would like this for remote admin. I can't think off the top of my head why general hackers would keep this in their pockets most of the time.
- theon144 6y agoIt's got integrated LoRa, so I assume they're targeting a lot of hackers or people working on IOT stuff "in the field", as it were. Well and I'm not one of those, but I'm still seriously considering getting it - or rather, the cheaper version without LoRa. I can't really tell you anything from the top of my head, but back when I had my N900, it found so many unexpected uses constantly. Having a full-blown Linux machine in your pocket is a seriously different game than any of the current gen of smartphones.
- noir_lord 6y agoI just want someone to take this form factor[1] (and crucially build quality) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5#/media/File:2005-04-16_Psion_Serie_5mx_PRO_24MB_beschn_unscharf_scharf.JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5#/media/File:200... and shove modern hardware/screen into it running stock gnu/linux.
- alectroem 6y agothis may right up your ally! https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/gemini-pda https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/gemini-pda As far as I can tell, it can dualboot linux and android (or even sailfish OS!)
- sschueller 6y agoYes it dual boots, I have one. The issue is that only last week they got the modem to work under Linux and there are still many open issues. I wish they opened their development including Android as there are issues that the community could fix much faster. As for use cause. I don't know. Nice to have a keyboard but I'm carrying two phones around now which is kind of stupid. The front display it total garbage, slow ui and useless. Their next model seems more practical as the screen is on the outside allowing use without having to fold open the keyboard which is kind of annoying on the gemini.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Stierlitz 6y agoAccording to Wikipedia, Palm copied the “Pocket PC” from the PDA, who knew. Or was it Microsoft first named the “Pocket PC” the “Palm PC”. So as to render confusion in the public mind and steal market share. That's probably when Palm became “a newer entrant into the Pocket PC market” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_PC
- imglorp 6y agoSharp may have predated that around 1980. They were called pocket computers but the model name was PC-nnn surely implying it was a PC. https://sharppocketcomputers.com/ https://sharppocketcomputers.com/
- dangoljames 6y agoAll I can say about this is 'Raspberry Pi 4 8GB @75$US' and available right now.
- darksaints 6y agoJust out of curiosity, what kind of resources would be needed to be able to develop something like this with a risc-v processor? I know the architecture is in its infancy, but it would be awesome to have stuff like the popcorn pc or even a raspberry pi on a risc-v architecture for tinkering with.
- Const-me 6y agoYou can’t render anything complex on a FullHD screen with a low-power CPU. Need a GPU. Risc-V doesn’t have it yet, Pocket P.C. does. ARM Mali ain’t nVidia or Apple, but still, it’s not too bad for a mobile device, and orders of magnitude faster than rendering stuff on CPU.