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]

no i agree with you on that. its just the way i said it

basically i expect that it will be used as a primary device but if you are someone that carries the laptop version in your bag and you leave it with wifi on in low power mode then you can use that as your main machine (because it has better specs) and use the Z with vnc to interface to it

however you can use it in its own right. actually i was hopeing that most people will leave it with the network on usb enabled and run a webserver with javavnc on it so that when you plug it into a machine you can then use that machine as a terminal for it

i dont think that mobile computing and some other closely related areas has been fully explored. i think that having all your data moved from one machine to the next is the way to go

on a tangent there is a funny thing you can do under linux with usb flash disks, you know how everything is in a users "home" dir on linux. well with pam_mount and another module for doing ssl work for certs within pam you can set it up so that to login a user simply plugs in there usb drive, and types a password. at which point they are in there familiar enviroment

what goes on behind the scenes is, pam_mount mounts the usb drive as /mnt/usb then the ssl cert in /mnt/usb for the user is decrypted using the users pass if this pases then /home/<user> gets symlinked to /mnt/usb. login begins as normal

of corse if you have an ssl cert then you can check it against an ssl service to see if they can login or replace the ssl part with another certification method (AD for example) but the main part is that you can set it up to put the users files on the flashdisk

what i amtrying to do in the long run with this hardware is 4 steps beyond that