Handheld device
On Thu, Mar 18, 1999 at 12:20:34AM +0000, Luis Commins wrote:
> Maybe you missed http://www.anachreon.com/hispec which was gravitating
> towards the Motorola MPC8240 but has now switched to the Mup21 (am working
> on redoing the site....in between washability tests for the t-shirt prints)
I am less and less convinced by Chuck's ability to deliver his promises
into widely usable products, independently from his technical proficiency.
After Christophe Lavarenne's witnessing, I am definitely disgusted.
Looks like if we want some FORTH processors, DYOP is better,
but then, it won't bring either performance or price.
For a handheld dream machine, I'm getting more and more interested
in ARM-based designs: Psion Series 5 is readily available and runs Linux!
PLEB looks quite promising. Samsung semi has lots of interesting parts;
http://www.calcaria.net/
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~pleb/related.html
http://www.intl.samsungsemi.com/
As of the casing and I/O,
in case the appliance can be very small,
it would have something of a gameboy keypad on front,
next to a LCD, with buttons on edges;
all needed external connectivity, I see utility for
USB (and/or otherwise high-speed serial or IrDA), possibly sound AD/DA,
and a plug external 5V power supply; possibly a pen and/or a tilt detector.
display software-revertible for left/right handed persons.
No need for ROM cartridge, ROMs, expansion RAM, etc:
use FlashROM (preferrably from an external power source)
and/or battery-backed up RAM (with a robust OS).
With larger casings (see Psion, Libretto, etc),
it would be possible to have all of the above plus
more batteries, better LCD, keyboard, and possibly harddisk and/or PCMCIA.
A 320x240 display would allow to play doom (and console emulators :)
A 480x200 display would allow reasonable 80x25 ASCII text.
A 480x300 display would allow reasonable 80x25 non-english accented text.
A 640x480 or better display would be just great.
Hum. Enough dreaming. Time to go to sleep :)
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