Hacker News Reader

As an ex Psion 5 user, I've often been tempted by the devices from Planet Computers: https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/gemini-pda-1

View on HN

The keyboards on them are excellent, but the software/firmware stories for their devices are awful. Frozen kernels due to proprietary blobs, and support for running full Linux distros is limited and lags by months to years. And they're expensive as hell.

But they keyboards are good enough that I'd still kinda like to try the Astro Slide 5G. I just don't want to order one only to wait years for it to arrive.

As an owner of Cosmo, I can confirm all of the above. The form factor is great and the keyboard is amazing, but the software story kills it all dead in the water. I wish someone could just do a dedicated Linux machine like that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com