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Comment by SamReidHughes | Hacker News Reader

This is wonderful, and I want to want this, but this seems like a fine RMS torture device. A 320 pixel screen, divided by 80, is... 4 pixels per character. Time to bring out the old HP-49G mini font. And I find myself thinking, "Oh, I can plug in an external keyboard." But that wouldn't be copyleft hardware. But I want to want this, and I want to get this. Imagine that! My own little copyleft computer, that lives in my pocket and only talks to me, and doesn't talk to any of the bad computers.

Imagine the shock, when you're listening to music on your headphones, and your friend asks, "What are you listening to?" And you pull this thing out of your pocket.

By the way, it's slightly hard to find, so here's a closeup of the keyboard: http://sharism.cc/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/kbd1.png

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The Ingenic 4720 is a nifty little device to run Linux on, but good luck getting any decent video out of this thing. I'm working on a 4740 @ 330MHz and the performance is...um...non-optimal.

They leave the place for alternative layout (i.e. Russian) on the tiny keys, nice!

Other than that, can anyone explain why RMS favors MIPS-based Loongson CPU and these guys - MIPS based Ingenic XBurst ? How are these CPUs any more open than any other (i.e Intel, or any ARM core)

As far as I know, RMS doesn't care, it's just that by commercial accident, systems that are particularly open in other ways have tended to be MIPS based.

My understanding is that he objects to the non-free status of the firmware present on other devices.

Also I call bullshit on Ingenic XBurst. Ingenic won't release any public documentation on what these extra opcodes are or what they do.

Is there a shift-key anywhere there? Seems it'd be hard to do any writing / case-sensitive filesystem work without one. And if it's the up-arrow, what's the down-arrow for? Subscripts?

shift arrow is on bottom left. I got one when I found out it could easily run guile etc. so that I have a tiny scheme interpreter to play around with at coffee shops etc. Once you get used to typing with your thumbs it is really not that bad. the biggest down side is no built in wireless. there is micro sd though so in theory if someone starts making micro sd wireless cards again you could use that. As it stands you have to connect it to your computer via usb ethernet and forward internet that way.

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