Comments on: Ideal mobile text-editing device

By: Brian Ewins

Brian Ewins — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

This question’s a regular on slashdot, there’s never been an ideal answer. The regular candidates are ’second hand stuff’, like you mention plus education-market wordprocessors: alphasmart.com and quickpad.com. For slightly less money (140 USD), you can get a TI-83 and a keyboard from vernier: http://www.vernier.com/calc/tikey.html

Since you reminded me I went digging around for one of the alternatives that came up a few years back, which was a USB keyboard which you could detach to take to meetings; it was essentially a keylogger with a small display, so all you did to synch up was hit ‘play’, out the text came into emacs/vim/whatever; nice simple idea, but I can’t come up with the google incantation. Maybe someone else will remember who made it.

By: Brian Ewins

Brian Ewins — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Eek: looked up the alphasmart to see if you could load linux on it instead of palmos, and its worse than that, it doesn’t even sync. Forget I mentioned it.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/showproduct.php?product=2515&cat=493

By: shitse@web.de

shitse@web.de — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

for your needs a jornada 680 or 690 should be fine. I didn’t have any time to continue my porting efforts, but a debian port that should be enough for your needs is still available on jam.ueberalles.net/debian. http://www.jlime.net is a fdamiliar port for them. and netbsd works on it also. and while it has the same keyboard as the 720 it is a lot cheaper. the jornadas dont have 90% keyboard size,though. feel free to contact me if you have further questions or need help installing the debian port.

By: Decklin Foster

Decklin Foster — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Perhaps a Nokia 770? See:

http://770.fs-security.com/maemo-bt-plugin/
http://www.bleb.org/software/770/

I have heard you can also plug in a USB keyboard. Mine fits in my lap, although I don’t know what I’d do with the rest of the cable:

http://pfuca-store.stores.yahoo.net/haphackeyser.html

Together, all this is a lot more expensive, I’m sure.

By: Decklin Foster

Decklin Foster — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Perhaps a Nokia 770? See:

http://770.fs-security.com/maemo-bt-plugin/
http://www.bleb.org/software/770/

I have heard you can also plug in a USB keyboard. Mine fits in my lap, although I don’t know what I’d do with the rest of the cable:

http://pfuca-store.stores.yahoo.net/haphackeyser.html

Together, all this is a lot more expensive, I’m sure.

By: Marius Gedminas

Marius Gedminas — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Nokia 770 is a perfect device that runs vim and fits into your pocket. If you don’t need it to fit into a pocket, it may not be ideal for you. Besides, it is rather more expensive.

Re USB keyboards: yes you can, but you need a USB hub to supply power to it. This link might be interesting/informative: http://thoughtfix.blogspot.com/2006/09/nokia-770-laptop-conversion-v2.html

Perhaps an old second-hand laptop would be best? Although battery life might be a problem.

(The MIT $100 laptop (aka OLPC) would probably be ideal, but those won’t be for sale to the general public for a while yet.)

By: R. G. McKenzie

R. G. McKenzie — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I have an Alphasmart Dana. It’s light, small, has a seven-fingerkeyboard, gets good mileage (wattage?) and comes with usable built-in programs. It syncs as a Palm and connects as a USB-keyboard to “type” directly into OpenOffice (or Word, for Windows users).

On the other hand, it costs more than 100 CAD, is too big to fit into a shirt (, coat, or whatever) pocket and doesn’t run “real” programs. You can’t have everything.

R. G. McKenzie

By: Ben Armstrong

Ben Armstrong — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I just got my Eee PC yesterday. I will blog about it soon. Works great in the bus with Vim! The battery life at 3.5 hrs is not stellar, but it is acceptable. The price is OK at $400, even if it is a bit off of my ideal — but then the Eee PC does way more than what I was looking for.

By: Chocolove

Chocolove — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I’m using my HTC PDA with a bluetooth mini keyboard.
Not exactly a $100 solution, but if you already have a PDA (and if not - recommended), its a great solution.

I have Windows Mobile OS, not exactly open source, nor the best OS ever (usability is a joke). But on the other hand i have word/Excel, and GPRS+WiFi internet, so i can also get the pda version of gmail, which is great. plus the option to finish writing and backing up immediately, while checking email.

Efficiency is fun on the bus.:)

By: Ben Armstrong

Ben Armstrong — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

If you look at my “more recent articles on the Eee PC”:http://syn.theti.ca/articles/tag/eeepc, you’ll find I finally settled on the perfect device for me. Sure, it’s not my $100 ideal, either, but at $400, the Eee does far more than the requirements I outlined above. And with other devices like it in the wings from other vendors, I think they’re just beginning to catch on that there is great demand for this sort of thing, so I expect competition to drive prices down and continue to turn out better models in the few years to come.