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The Ultimate Linux Handheld

Issue 147

From Issue #147
July 2006

Jul 01, 2006  By Doc Searls and Jim Thompson
 in
A geek tool for your shirt pocket.
______________________

Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal

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The Ignorami of the Media Reviewing the Nokia 770

jjp001's picture
Submitted by jjp001 on Thu, 07/06/2006 - 13:03.

The article reviewing the 770 was interesting and revealing. Interesting because it discusses a relatively new electronic niche product, and revealing because it shows how ignorant reviewers can be when handling such devices. Their attitude might be
"if it isn't Windows, it's not a real computer," or "Linux? What's Linux?" Even with publications such as Linux Journal available for quite some time now, there is still a problem with mainstream visibility of Linux. There is a blog, No to Windows, Yes to Linux, that attempts to describe what's Linux to such an audience, as well as the deficiencies of Windows and how Linux trumps it.

One clarification needs to be made within the article. Specifically, about the following fragment:

...For the price of a Nokia 770, you can get an HP iPAQ or a Palm Treo. Both work as PDA/cell phones and run lots of ready applications. But, both also trap the user in Microsoft's or Palm's silos (and carrier partners' silos as well)...

For the record, I have been--and currently am--a user of Palm OS-based PDAs since 1996, when I was asked to evaluated a 512KB version of the Pilot 1000 for a large local government agency. Ten years and eight PDAs later, I am the happy owner of a Treo 650, running Palm OS, which is a stable platform (at least no blue screens show up on the 650!). As for being trapped in Palm's silo, earlier this year, PalmSource, the developer of the OS, announced the availability of a new commercial-grade Linux-based platform designed for smartphones and mobile devices. The related Press Release can be found at URL http://www.palmsource.com/press/2006/021406_accesslinuxplatform.html.

Hopefully, the so-called Technical Editors of mainstream non-technical publications wake up, smell the coffee, remove their horse blinders, and see there's much up ahead besides Windows; there's Linux as well.

Julio J. Perez
Miami, FL

Julio J. Perez
Miami, FL

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