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A comment on Gemini PDA: 20 years on, meet the all-new Psion Series 5.

Re:Gemini PDA: 20 years on, meet the all-new Psion Series 5 by ptx on Thursday November 30, 2017 @04:32PM (#15819736)
My main worry about this device is that it will, like most modern phones, quickly become useless due to lack of software updates.

They're building it with Android 7, which was before Project Treble[1], so future updates are at the mercy of all the chip suppliers and their willingness to port their ad-hoc drivers to newer kernels.

When the device stops receiving updates, it won't be safe to use on the Internet anymore and things like out-of-date SSL certificates will break things (see e.g. this video[2] for what browsing the web on Symbian and MeeGo devices looks like today).

[1] https://source.android.com/devices/architecture/treble

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGji6DPwIYY&t=820

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Re:Gemini PDA: 20 years on, meet the all-new Psion Series 5 by thinkythought on Thursday November 30, 2017 @05:34PM (#15820252)
It runs linux natively. Even if android stops getting updates, you can update that as long as you like
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Re:Gemini PDA: 20 years on, meet the all-new Psion Series 5 by ptx on Thursday November 30, 2017 @05:45PM (#15820339)
Not if it needs a forked kernel to support the hardware (at least not without a lot of work).

Also, most GUI applications designed for a traditional GNU/Linux desktop system are not going to work well with a tiny, high-resolution touch-screen.

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Re:Gemini PDA: 20 years on, meet the all-new Psion Series 5 by sbmassey on Thursday November 30, 2017 @09:05PM (#15821381)
I wonder how convenient it would be to run i3 with a browser and an emacs window or terminal on the thing. That would cover a lot of possible use cases for me.
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Re:Gemini PDA: 20 years on, meet the all-new Psion Series 5 by forapurpose on Friday December 01, 2017 @01:00AM (#15822239)
Is Emacs efficient with 2-finger typing?

With the handheld form factor revolution, we need text editors that use that interface as efficiently as Emacs and Vim use the full keyboard interface.

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Re:Gemini PDA: 20 years on, meet the all-new Psion Series 5 by michaelmrose on Friday December 01, 2017 @01:59AM (#15822430)
I would argue that the keyboard is already the optimal device to both input and manipulate text to the point where touch adds little.
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Re:Gemini PDA: 20 years on, meet the all-new Psion Series 5 by forapurpose on Friday December 01, 2017 @02:14AM (#15822471)
I wasn't clear: I meant that Emacs and Vim are optimized for 10-finger typing on full-sized keyboards. We need something for 2-finger keyboards typical on phones, or more broadly something optimized for phone input (maybe including gestures, for example).
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Re:Gemini PDA: 20 years on, meet the all-new Psion Series 5 by michaelmrose on Friday December 01, 2017 @12:46PM (#15825652)
2 fingers is so comparatively terrible that there is nothing on earth you could do to make it better than connecting a keyboard.
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Re:Gemini PDA: 20 years on, meet the all-new Psion Series 5 by stewbrew on Friday December 01, 2017 @02:56AM (#15822594)
VIM actually works pretty well on a phone as long as you find a way to input Ctrl and ESC.
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Re:Gemini PDA: 20 years on, meet the all-new Psion Series 5 by sbmassey on Friday December 01, 2017 @04:12AM (#15822804)
Maybe with evil-mode and some judicious key remapping one could get by.
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Re:Gemini PDA: 20 years on, meet the all-new Psion Series 5 by geofft on Thursday November 30, 2017 @09:31PM (#15821488)
That's a very good question - do we know what the kernel patches are and how they're licensed?
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