Form Factor - Handheld Pc, Or Zaurus-style? Options

[chiark]

Wow, this has really captured my imagination !

For me, the zaurus is too small for comfortable use, both in terms of screen and in terms of the keyboard.

Perhaps I'm too old, but for me the sweet spot of form factor usability vs portability is in the shape of the Psion Series 5, and the Sigmarion 3.

The psion's keyboard is great, the screen is adequate if a weird shape...

The sig3 runs an 800x480 screen with a very, very capable keyboard. If it ran Linux, well, it'd be *awesome*.

I'd love the screen real estate and keyboard size of the old devices with modern hardware. Am I alone in thinking that that is about the right form factor for such a device? We're not going for PDA replacement after all, but general purpose pervasive computing platform

[Da_Blitz]

i have seen that many people regard the c3000 as the largest that they will accept, i dont really care what size it is however as alot more can be done with a bit more extra space than most people relise

on the topic of eyesight, i have a small defect in my right eye leaving my left eye to over compinsate, so a small Z screen is no problem for me at all

even thogh i dont like to admit it, the new x86 chips arent bad in terms of power consumption and there is a nice thing or two you can do with xen when your laptop uses the same processor as you laptop.

basically you run 3 extra domains in addition to dom0
1. one to serve your HD over iSCSI
2. to interface to your video card and display things
3. one to do the processing

note 1 and 2 can be rolled into one.

basically you run X on 2 and tell 3 to display all your X windows on 2. 3 uses the harddrive exported by 1 to boot and is your normal / dir

when you get home you migrate 3 to your home machine porviding a nice speedup without any hassle and tarnsfer it back when you are done.

with a bit more hackery you could even make it so you can rsync 1 to the server so that you can hibernate the laptop but have your linux session still running on the server (or have its state saved with xen, wihch i belive is the futre of software suspend)