I believe at the time, the FAA required that a 'hardware RF kill switch' is present on mobile wireless device to be allowed to bring on board the plane, or use during flight.
Flex-cable use inherited from Sony WalkMan devices. Sony did a great job stuffing a lot of gear into portable devices. Form factor, physical keyboard, and mouse are incredible. Never knew these existed.
Classic Sony 3D envelope design. It’s like a camera inside. I find it quite impressive for the mid 2000’s considering that it is basically a pc in a very small form factor. Just look at how tiny the motherboard is, yet it still has a cooling fan and a mechanical harddrive inside. There’s a lot of different engineering disciplines involved to design this. To me, this seems a lot more impressive then a modern smartphone with only a single Soc inside. This product also seems very bespoke and a bit quirky making it quite interesting.
I couldn't agree more! This was still a few years off the dreaded netbook style laptop that compromised every component (EMMC Storage, the worst processors, tiny ram, no accessories etc). Sony doing what Sony did best.
Well said. Sony made some incredible portable hardware. Used electronics stores in Tokyo have lots of bespoke mobile devices from a lot of Japanese makers; Sony wasn't the only one but was among the best. Many "ancient" devices still are used in factories, labs, and hospitals so still pricey.
I wonder if you could tease out (or just find online) the pinout of the front assembly connector and then 3D print a new, and likely thinner, back with modern guts of some sort. Like a Raspberry Pi to test the concept, then move to something more powerful like a LattePanda once proof of concept is done.
Planet Computers recently released sliding-keyboard phones & PDAs. Astro Slide 5G, Cosmo Communicator, and Gemini PDA. Android & Linux OS. UK-based and designed by some of the original PDA developers!
The display is 1024x600 pixels. Very fine pixel density for it's time. If you need help with drivers or Sony apps, then I have them for XP and Vista and even some Win 7. I have much experience with this model and hope you get it working. It's a fun machine to mess about with.
I really hope that I can too, but I'm not sure how I'll fare with reballing RAM if that's what it comes to. I may get in touch for the drivers in the future!
@@a531016Sadly the community concluded it was impossible to upgrade the RAM because of memory controller design but my hope is you can at least replace the bad chips.
Do NOT touch the gold contacts on ribbon cables or boards. That boosts the probability of failure. I think the issue was contamination rather than physical damage but can't recall.
Try booting Memtestx86 from USB to check the ram. It's available standalone, but it's often included on Linux ISOs/bootable USBs in the boot menu as well.
Yep, I wanted one of these very badly back in the day but just couldn't afford it. There were a very few similar devices as well, like from Winbook, but all of them were out of my reach.
