Your Ideal Handheld

One can never have too many ports!!

You got that right!

-stingraze

one of the best thing about older laptops is that they always have the ports you need!
I see laptops nowadays that only have 1 usb port, and if you want more then you have to use an adapter...

100%! My Surface devices either have 1 Usb or 1 USB-C port. It's a hassle! But a 15 year old laptop has every port I'd need, including a telephony modem!

Ugh, some changes aren't for the best.

Nothing worse than only having a single USB-C and needing to use a port expander dongle for HDMI, SD and some useable USBs!
Except possibly having only 1 USB like on the Toshiba Libretto W100! Makes it a real pain trying to do a clean install of Windows!!!!

A kind soul bequeathed me a PinePhone/physical kb, and for sheer portability, along with current wifi/data/bt capability, I'm starting to feel this might be the way to go. It's slow, but with Manjaro/Phosh base, xfce desktop, and a Debian container for x-86 programs, it is indeed a mobile computer. Two batteries, so power life is good, and instant-on.

Big learning curve and somewhat unhelpful help at its forums, and laggy app starts, but price is right and it'll fit in your back pocket. I do wish for a backlit kb, and the hardware is still pretty beta. I wouldn't use it as a phone, though some folks do.

Jake

I designed another ideal handheld with the help of DALLE 3 using ChatGPT.

It turned out pretty nice, after a lot of tries. Inspired by SONY's PDA in the 2000's.

I also made another one that is less SONY-ish.

-stingraze

Edited by stingraze 2023-12-29 10:22 AM








Attachments
----------------
berlin-handheld-2023.jpg (95KB - 0 downloads)
ideal-handheld2.jpg (85KB - 0 downloads)

That second one looks amazing, love the industrial future aesthetic!

Indeed, the second one is lovely.

The first one ist just like 2000s Sony-Design. I have a Sony world band alarm clock from that era that looks similar (and was one of the last of the famous Sony shortwave radio receivers)

Thank you! I'm glad you guys liked it.

The first one does look like the UX-50. But two 'U' keys?

Yes, Two U keys... That's the drawback of designing with Generative AI.

And... 17:99PM lol Or maybe that was a timer?

Edited by stingraze 2023-12-30 6:42 AM

I'm thinking of a device with the 320LX/Jornada keyboard, a capacitive touchscreen, a wide display similar to that of the Nokia Communicator devices and the early CE handhelds and a mouse. It could be a touchpad (a good one, in that case), a trackball or a wired mouse that could be stored somewhere in the device. My idea is that of a device that's very productivity aligned like the HP handhelds but not limited to the pen-based touchscreen which is an accurate and inexpensive choice, but not always a comfortable one. Possibly, both a left and right mouse button.
A 9x-styled interface or even Windows CE would work well, knowing that it DOES in fact support the right mouse button (from experimenting in VMs). A low resolution display somewhere around 240-272p would be a nice fit. Overall, no desktop interface really works well with the mobile hi-res screens that you would find, as an example, in a smartphone.
In the case in which the vertical resolution could be turned up for a 5:4 or 4:3 format display, the keyboard could be re-engineered into something like the ThinkPad 701C's butterfly keyboard to allow it to be comfortable for typing but being compact to carry around. This COULD work, but I'm more aligned to the wider device. Would fit nice in a pocket of mine.

It does look a lot like the UX50 but also like something from Halo. Love it lmao

I haven't played Halo because I'm a PlayStation person, but I've always wanted to play it.