SFOS on Gemini PDA, possibly?
asked 2017-03-01 12:40:20 +0300
On Monday, a new project was announced on Indiegogo for a PDA with a physical keyboard, that will be dual-boot Android and linux: see https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gemini-pda-android-linux-keyboard-mobile-device-phone#/ . On Monday, I asked on the comments page about porting SFOS to it, and got this response from Davide Guidi (a campaigner):
Thanks for the comment, very interesting! We are at 4YFN, stand P4, at Mobile World Congress and we will go and visit the Jolla stand tomorrow. We have not considered it so far, but you never know!
Maybe, just maybe! It would be interesting to hear if they did talk to someone from Jolla and if anything came of it.
A integrated physical keyboard would be a pleasure, I miss the old Nokia/HTC/Samsung/Motorolas/Sonys with a keyboard. It will be rather big for a smartphone with 5.7 inches, but manageable. Sadly it looks like they are using this awkward british QWERTY with vertical enter-key, US-Layout would be far better.
hoschi ( 2017-03-01 14:23:41 +0300 )editI'd buy this device if Sailfish were ported to it. I'm old enough to remember the original Psion Series 5, which was a truly terrific piece of kit. I still have a Nokia E7, which was excellent but not as nice to use. My original Jolla phone isn't getting any younger, and I definitely don't want to use anything that doesn't run Sailfish. This Gemini would be a perfect PDA phone, and if it runs Linux, there's chance it'll run Sailfish! I'd get involved in the porting effort myself, but I'm only a hardware engineer and have no time left after applying the flamethrowers and hammers to new electronic designs.
NXM ( 2017-03-01 17:27:29 +0300 )editNice device, I never used a psion organizer, but I have used a few alphabetic keyboard phones (Siemens SK65, Nokie E75, N900), and I miss that, especially the N900 was a very nice, feature-rich and powerful device for its age. What I don't understand is how they comfortably implement voice call in the Gemini.
Do you need to use Bluetooth or a wired headset for phone calls? How are you notified of an incoming call? - I didn't see vibrating alert in the specifications.
Personally, I believe it is important that this device is able to fully replace a cell phone to get wide market adoption. Siemens once had a small organizer (IC 35) in the age of the communicator and "regular" cell phones, It didn't gain much market acceptance, most people probably didn't want to carry their phone and the organizer.
If this device supports sailfish os, I might take another look into it, right now I don't feel like getting a compact linux computer with a touchscreen but no trackpoint (and I'm not interested in android).
How easy it is to port sailfish os on this device probably depends on the support for the MediaTek MT6797X and the other hardware. This CPU uses a 2+4+4 configuration and may suffer from the same problem as the Xperia X in terms of CPU core allocation (Always uses the slowes [or in this case maybe fastest, most power-hungry] cores first)
Cmdr_Zod ( 2017-12-01 11:47:48 +0300 )edit