A (tiny, but) usable, physical keyboard on a device that lasted _ages_, fit into a suit pocket and was eminently practical. The age of the PDA is long gone (heck, I'm typing this on an iPad mini), but we still haven't caught up with some of its best bits.
Of all places I stumbled on it at an op-shop - in ~2012, I think it was. The box looked a bit sad but the unit itself was literally new.
...and I can tell you that if you've ever read stories about how fragile they were I can confirm all of them. The entire LCD hinge assembly broke on mine after only a few months, and I had to thread wire into and around the (~1mm no. 2 plastic >.<) chassis to recreate the pivot points for the LCD to close right. Thankfully it looks completely unscathed, the battery compartment's just a bit funky.
The hardware was, in short, terrible, but the OS was amazing.
I'm convinced Symbian EPOC was built by a bunch of unbelievably optimistic, unfazeable software developers or something - C++ hadn't even been standardized yet (wow much 1998) so the EPOC SDK is a mix of scary, disastrous and hilarious... but the OS and UI design were still, in spite of this, absolutely awesome.
My favorite feature was the fact that the UI had real windows, with titlebars. And dragging the titlebars would drag the entire window - not an outline, the whole window. It was amazing. ("Look!! I have a desktop in my pocket!!")
And then there was the programming language that came built in. I mean, they crammed a fully-functional physical keyboard into the thing, so I mean, duh, you add a programming language to it cuz that's what you do when you have a real keyboard.
OPL was equal parts confusing and awesome, but, because it was so BASIC-like I started hundreds of tiny projects that I never finished. There are some pretty amazing little applications out there written in OPL, but most things were done in C++.
Probably the coolest thing I did with OPL was discover that the system was fast enough to handle full-screen haptic scrolling - my stylus was starting to get old and scratch the LCD, and using my finger would have felt weird, so I never finished it - but it was pretty awesome to know that this bytecode-interpreted language was fast enough to handle SurfaceFlinger-esque full-screen content scrolling on a 640x240 LCD.
What did your 36MHz ARM7TDMI-based gadgets do?
Yeah, that's the problem. Lovely hardware, completely useless in the modern world. It does have a PCMCIA type 1 slot in which you can attach a sufficiently old wifi card but finding such a card that supports WPA is practically impossible, and finding an EPOC driver for it even more so.
I did run Linux on it for a while, but Linux of a 32MB 190MHz ARM is not a happy experience.
(EPOC, while being a terrifying but hilarious disaster on the inside, manages to get an astonishing amount done in very little space. Even the 640x480 screen looks big. UI-wise it's a really nice bit of design.)
You may be interested in following this project:
For one thing the dimensions: it is a real brick and I don't understand why that is in 2016. All the flip-top Sharp Zaurii SL-Cxxxx were at least 5mm slimmer, and they were made a good ten years ago.
Then there is the keyboard, which is pushed all the way to the bottom edge, which makes it difficult type when handheld. It is clearly optimized for gaming, with prominent space given over to joystick controls. It lacks a bottom row containing a spacebar, which makes for awkward typing.
Even though the Pyra has a 5" display, its dimensions are no less bulkier at 140x84x29mm. I would have expected a lot more progress given the hardware advances made in the last 10+ years.
Heck you could put something like the Intel Compute Stick or the Zotac ZBOX PI220 in a case, add an LCD and battery, and end up with something more compact and powerful than the Pyra.
It is 3x the capacity of the C3000, and runs the full width of the Pyra.
Never mind that they also made use of the thickness to fit 4 shoulder buttons for gaming (or other things), and two full size USB-A ports (one of them claimed to support ESATA as well via an adapter).
Nevertheless, I am sure we can all agree that its design does not make efficient use of internal space. There is a lot of room for improvement to make the device more compact. Yet this does not seem to be a priority for the creators or many of the end users.
For comparison take a modern device that is comparable in dimensions like the Sony Xperia Z5 Compact at 127x65x8.9 mm. Sony fit an LCD and 2700mAh battery in just 9mm of thickness.
As for the large battery, it seems gratuitously huge. Do we really need 6000mAh in such a device? This is like 2.5x a typical phone with a comparable processor.
This is a great device for some use cases. But it is not practical as a PDA.