Drobe Launchpad | Who would want an A9home PDA?

Who would want an A9home PDA?

Published on 24th Apr 2008, 23:36:29, source is drobe.co.uk
By the Drobe news desk

So close yet so far

RISC OS in the palm of your hand with a touchscreen and half-decent embedded processor. Sounds great? Pictured below is, essentially, a Samsung ARM9 processor card, as used in the A9home, attached to a baseboard and a 5.7" LCD touchscreen.

The touchscreen side.

The electronics underneath.
Images from Simtec. Click for larger originals.

Built by the same talented electronic engineers behind the RISC OS-powered AdvantageSix A9home, the kit includes two USB ports, a standard serial port, an SD memory card slot, Ethernet networking, audio out and other sockets - plus movement sensors allowing it to do a digital Etch A Sketch impression. All with a 400MHz processor and 256MB of RAM.

Sadly, it is in reality a technology demonstration, an advanced prototype if you will, to show how such a tablet-like device can be put together and is not generally available nor designed with RISC OS in mind. How ROS applications could ever be used on a screen less than six inches across is another matter entirely, of course.

Still, for those who like to dream we understand such a mini-machine will be present at Saturday's Wakefield 2008 show running NetSurf, albeit the GTK port of the web browser on a little GNU/Linux installation.

Links
Wakefield 2008 show website
The A9 website

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