Wrapping everything up!


Re: wrapping things up...

"Please acknowledge with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday."
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I come back to this board every few months to receive an update on the Pyra, and nothing pleases me more to see that Evildragon is still in charge and that things are making progress. I look forward to the day when Pyra is out there and I can replace my aging Pandora's with the new-school Pyra. Until then, soldier on ED, and everyone else on his team that is making wonderful devices like this a reality. The world needs you more than ever.
 
I was desperately waiting for the Pyra for years. Now I have discovered the PLANET GEMINI and it is a beautiful clamshell device . I don't see how the Pyra will compare with the Gemini. Let's hope we get the Pyra before next Xmas.
[doublepost=1546142001,1546141658][/doublepost]Everyday someone delays the production of the Pyra, someone else out there is developing a better unit. Any more delays on the Pyra and it will become outdated technology. Evil Dragon should have got funded thru INDIEGOGO or KICKSTARTER and shopped around for better manufacturers.
 
If ED had gone to kickstarter, and it took anything like this long he'd have the commentards sending him hatemail by the bagload.

I'm not sure the Pyra is getting any more outdated now. It was vaguely well specced when it was announced, but in terms of raw grunt it's been overtaken by most phones and things these days. None of those run linux well though, and for some of us that's an important thing. And the Gemini doesn't even have decent game controls built in.

One thing none of the other devices have is the upgradability that the Pyra's design implies. I'm sure our crew of unpaid developers will be able to wring incredible feats out of the OMAP5 chip, but there'll be a hardware limit to their capabilities. Hopefully then, a replacement CPU board will come out and the adventure can start anew. I guess we shouldn't forget that that upgradability was invented by ED so that he could extend the lifetime of his case moulds and other bits and pieces, being aware that he could have sold a good few more Pandoras if pin compatible chips hadn't stopped being purchasable, but it doesn't mean it won't have any benefits for ourselves.
 
Well, as I'm selling and using the Gemini myself, I can tell you a few things about it:

1. It's good to use on the table, but not in your hand. It opens up to a fixed position (which isn't a very good one) and it actually wears out. I'm lying in my bed now and have to hold the screen while typing, otherwise it would close itself.

2. The keyboard is... well, not that great. It would be good if the keys all reacted well, but often while typing faster, a keypress isn't recognized, so you're pretty slow.

3. Typing in the dark is almost impossible (due to missing keyboard backlight)

4. It's great for Android - but don't expect to use it for Linux. It's not really optimized and struggles to run at the high resolution the screen has. LibreOffice runs incredibly slow - it's not usable. It runs a LOT faster on the Pyra.

It's a cool device, I use it as a smartphone (as it has a keyboard built-in), but I wouldn't want to use it to type longer texts.

About outdated specs of the Pyra:
Hm, I'm not that sure about it, actually. Yes, high-class smartphones have SoCs that are a lot faster.
But not mid-class or cheap smartphones.

But each time I check out what SoCs are available (for a possible upgrade), they often aren't really an upgrade speedwise. Yes, they use less power for the same tasks, but speedwise, the A15 was pretty good.
 
2. The keyboard is... well, not that great. It would be good if the keys all reacted well, but often while typing faster, a keypress isn't recognized, so you're pretty slow.

@ Everyone:
I can confirm this.
First I liked the keyboard a lot. Then I realized the mentioned issue. I would prefer the GPD devices (Maybe not WIN 1, but the others) over the Gemini.
I don't have one but I used it at the Gamescom.

1. It's good to use on the table, but not in your hand. It opens up to a fixed position (which isn't a very good one) and it actually wears out. I'm lying in my bed now and have to hold the screen while typing, otherwise it would close itself.

What???
That's bad ...
At least the Pandora stays in an open position when worn out ...

Pyra is fine.
Web browsing could be faster. Compiling could be faster.
Still running the Prototype at 1GHz without cooling from Micro SD.

What I worry more is Debian. The software is pretty much outdated.
I could not compile a Qt application I developed at University because it needed a class that was available in Qt 5.8. Debian has 5.7 in its repo.
 
Jup, same here.
I use the Gemini VERY much every day (about 10 hours actively).
I like it a lot and it is a huge improvement over other Android based devices.
But the Linux support is... not satisfying to say the least.
The display wears out so it drops on your fingers when holding it upside down.
The voice quality is okay...ish and bluetooth is a bit unpredictable after two days of uptime and no reboot.
The keyboard has the mentioned issues but I type fairly fast on it and for me, it is even good for thumb typing.
I would not want to miss the Gemini as my primary smartphone, I can use it for remote support, VPN, SSH etc. but it is no real Linux device.
So the Pyra will be that for me.
I also preordered the Cosmo from Planet, because it enhances my "primary smartphone" with a good camera and a backlit keyboard.
I cannot wait for the combination of the Pyra and the Gemini/ Cosmo.
Together with my Nextcloud (which I use to sync all my setting, customers data etc.) I will have ALL THE MOBILITIES!
 
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I think that at the moment the OMAP5 is not yet running at the highest clock speed. Additionally I guess that the Askarus browser is the default one from the Repo and therefore not yet tuned. A browser can be potentially tuned in many ways: Compilation with vectorization enabled, usage of GPU rendering, etc.

Gesendet von meinem SM-N9005 mit Tapatalk
 
My experience with the OMAP5 devboard a lot of the responsiveness depended on the Xorg video driver used. While I haven't played with the devboard in a while (too lazy to setup another SD card), I felt the desktop experience was faster in older versions of PyraOS before it introduced slow modesetting drivers and such.
 
I'd be happy if it plays YouTube and html5 sites.

And I’m happy if the Pyra plays everything from my Pandora,
The Gameboy Familie would be cool for the first two months
At first it’s a Pandora Device for me, whit a better case
At second, I want it to be my new Main Computer..
 
And I’m happy if the Pyra plays everything from my Pandora,
I wouldn't hold your breath for that myself. I've heard some speculation on how it could be done, but current approaches would take a lot more space than ginge did on your pandora. But with Ptitseb's super build system, and Wally and others helping out on the app front, a lot of stuff can be simply recompiled with slightly different flags, so I'm not sure how valuable a ginge type layer would be in reality. If there's the odd bit and piece that ptitseb didn't build and doesn't have publically findable source probably from the early days of the Pandora, you might need to flag is up so that someone can wrap the appropriate softfp libs with the old binary and get it running.
 
All of the above about the Gemini is pretty much true. That said, it is the best clamshell keyboard phone currently available. I also have a Cosmo on pre order.
 
That's surprising. Are none of the recent-ish blackberry keyboard devices any better? Granted, they all have very much smaller keys, but they were still perfectly reliable when typing out texts and other notes back when phones had similar sized keys in the early 2ks. I did a lot of typing on my Psion 5s as well, and it sounds like it's not as good as that was either which I didn't expect.
 
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