for those looking for an off-the shelf nearly ready to wear outfit, you may want to check out the sony vaio pcg-u1 and the upcoming pcg-u3. the u1 goes for the us equiv of $1300 or so, and there will probably be a price drop now that the u3 has been announced. i've been using the u1 for a while now, basically it's a crusoe 866mhz with 384mb max ram and the same toshiba 1.8mm 20gb drive used in the ipod. the weight is about 2lbs with battery, the dimensions are about 8"x5.5"x2" at the back with the battery. the u3 has a 933mhz crusoe and can take up to 512mb, but otherwise appears to be the same in a sleek black shell. the 6.4 inch lcd panel does up to 1024x768, and is very crisp even at the lowest brightness levels. pcmcia, memorystick, 2x usb, firewire, vga, audio in/out and a dc out ports are all built in. the vga port is nonstandard and the cable comes extra. dc out port is also nonstandard and seems to be a passthrough to whatever voltage is feeding the unit at the moment. (i.e.- 16 volts when on the ac adapter and 11-12v when running on battery). the size is comparable to the the portable dvd players as seen in compusa et al, with the exception of the battery which is external and adds about 3/4 inch towards the back (the new hicap battery takes up the whole footprint, unsure of the height on it). and most importantly, the power draw. the u1 with it's standard battery under normal usage gets about 2-2.5 hours running x and xmms. compiling a kernel drops that down considerably. before you think that's way too low, the standard battery is rated 11.1v, 1800mah. going by acpi's numbers: usage avg watts ------------------------- normal use 8.5W lcd brightness 0% 6W heavy disk i/o lcd @ 100% 14W light use lcd @ 0% 5W that's pretty damn good in my book! i believe the new battery is 5400mah. my testing with a similar capacity battery got over 5 hours hard use. the keyboard has a soft feel, and while other users haven't had issues, i've damaged the plastic frames on 2 of the keys. although it's only visible on one key, and doesn't affect operation much. touch typing is possible with practice, the keyboard layout is just standard enough to throw you off on the non-alphanumerics until you get used to it. the construction is pretty good, having survived a few accidental drops while running without issue. works well with the twiddler2 with the usb adapter under X, though i don't think the bios recognizes it and i've had issues working with it in console mode (my previous laptop was the same way). the vga dongle isn't too large, but it could be smaller. unfortunately, there is no direct video out at this point in time. the harddrive is slow. noticeably so. once everything is open, things pretty much fly. the graphics adapater is a pci radeon mobility 8mb. 3d acceleration doesn't work on the pci radeons using gatos, but that's not a big issue for my wearable application. i currently carry it in my bag or on my hip. ultimately i'll put together a slipcase with belt hooks which will allow me to flip the monitor open whle in use similar to the chest mounted displays i've seen. i do have a wrist strap i threw together, but it's all a bit too unweildly for regular use. did i mention the screen is incredibly easy to read? on a more generic note, has anyone played around with the software suspend code (i believe it's in the main 2.5 kernels, i'm using the 2.4.18 port)? this is a nice generic way of putting any machine in hibernation which i have found to be somewhat useful. Currently i have some problems with resuming from inside xfree86, but i'm sure i've just overlooked some things. i know the vaio is not an open solution like the charmed boxes or homebrews, and being a laptop doesn't make for a real upgrade path, but i think this is a well balanced base which allows you to go from desktop to gargoyle to laptop without batting an eye. --francois -- Subscription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.blu.org Please, *PLEASE* don't subscribe through a forward/expander/false domain
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