ta daa!!
Now the ZUG forum has opened up a bit I thought I'd come back ;-)
Oh and yes the new Battlestar ROCKS! Being in the UK I've seen them all and watched (and recorded to VCD) each while biting my lip and shaking with excitement, gripping stuff - not that I'm one for watching TV per se but I couldn't resist after watching the miniseries, it was so DAMN GOOD ;-) Check out Ragnar Anchorage:
http://www.galacticastation.com I'm there from time to time.
The news that a new season has now been picked up is great, can't wait.
The connection between the Yopy and BSG is obvious eh? ;-)
To the main point, I loved my 5500, I liked the 860 but I had major dislikes too and it ended up not being used, I spent a fortune and was too scared to use it. So I got a Yopy and it's my kind of machine.
It's a blank canvas out of the box, if you want a PDA in the normal sense it's not the best choice, the apps on non-Korean machines have the odd typo as they aren't great at English - that's my only complaint. People who want to sync with this and that won't like it. I prefer the way it does work however, it uses a web interface to access it's on board PIMs. There's a java method too. I don't bother with PIMs too much, it's not the reason I bought it, and I don't get the impression that many Yopyians do. I just FTP into it and use it like a regular computer. It came with core apps like Dillo, Sylpheed, Gpaint, VideoLAN client, Gqmpeg, Gqview, rxvt, Hancom Office, xRick, Doom and stuff, MySQL, Boa webserver etc. etc. I was amused by Doom being included, these guys know their priorities I thought ;-)
It has a StrongARM SA1100 206MHz and 128MB RAM (not flash which was a gripe I had with the 860) and the battery goes for about 8 hours if you're not using a microdrive. I can't advise about wifi but the vendor does sell them. I don't know if things have moved on with pdaXrom but X on my Yopy feels much faster than my old 400MHz 860. It could be called a bulky machine, it's subjective I guess, it feels just right for me in my hand and feels solid. I don't worry about it falling out of my hand and it doesn't feel as fiddly as my 860 did when opening it, I was always centering the screen. When in the dock it feels solid too, you could beat someone to death with it. It's connected to my Ubuntu box via the same method as my old Zaurii. ifconfig brings the connection up and down from the desktop. Like I said before I FTP, I use gFTP and did have to make some changes to the client but I can't remember what, timings or something.
When I bought it, I was after a pure X/GTK machine and used it for a while before I found out about Qtopia 1.7 being available. It's a double tap operation from the filemanager to install it and it runs as an application under X, it's fast and I've got all my old Zaurus favorites, Opie-Reader, zBedic, ZUC, portabase and Interstellar Flames all running great. I also posted a hack to run Qtopia apps direct from the menu under X without loading Qtopia's GUI which is handy for Opie Reader. I have a 1GB microdrive now and moved a lot of stuff out of internal memory to it and symlinked back, works great. The MMC driver is a bit more fussy but I only use it ocassionally. A wee hack lets me use Ogg Vorbis which is my preferred format for music, it's my music box and I take it out all the time - bass and treble controls are a great feature. I'm currently working on a portable video solution for watching movies using mplayer. Full gcc is installed along with perl, GTK devel stuff and Qtopia dev stuff too, all works great and I've ported a few Agenda apps using the machine itself. Cross compilers are available naturally, I've also had a go there too. There is an independent project YopyNG which is working on a new kernel and I think they *may* change the default GUI or offer a choice, we're running a poll on YLUG to see what people want. I may try and port Qtopia 2.1 or OE. Installing some ipks can be a pain, we usually decompress them and make a tarball. I've got some Agenda apps, X apps, iPaq apps and Zaurus apps too, I like it. Actually my machine is loaded up to the max ;-)
Gmate sell only via YopyPDA (
http://www.yopypda.co.uk), I know the guy who owns it - a real nice guy. It costs 219 pounds and is shipped worldwide free of charge. The wifi package is 259. Some say the Yopy was discontinued, this is not so, the Yopy is not differentiated between models and the victim of many rumours. They don't sell as many as they did, they did have a arrangement with NATE and sold quite a lot in their native market of Korea but that's no longer the case. They also stopped selling via their old vendors. Only the YP3700 is available, the other machines including the YP3500 are the ones which are discontinued. Gmate are working on some new things including a GSM jacket, an evaluation model should be with us soon. As to whether Gmate will make future Linux handhelds is another matter. My next machine will probably be an Archos or something, but that's a long way off. YopyPDA also develop hardware including a robotics kit which I really like, I've got some cool pics of a robot with a Yopy brain.
Our little user group which I'm co-admin of is separate from the Korean group and is growing every day. I really like the machine, it's just what I was after really, it's very Battlestar Galactica with the whoosh-whoosh LEDs, it appeals to the sci-fi fan within me ;-) It won't appeal to everyone and the Zaurus is a more user friendly machine out of the box. But Qtopia is installed quickly and that's where the most activity is ;-)
I'm glad this forum has expanded to include other embedded Linux devices, I will drop by from time to time now, provided things don't descend into the 'my machine is better than yours' mentality, if this new forum is to work we have to embrace the diversity within the greater community. I hope this is of some use, feel free to ask any questions ;-)
Take care all and my sincerest thanks to everyone who's PM'd me. ;-)
Long live the fighters! Long live Linux! Long live Trolltech!
