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Agenda Unveils Linux Handheld

LinuxWorld sees debut of monochrome model to ship in October starting at $149.

By George A. Chidi Jr., IDG News   

The demonstration of the Agenda VR3 is offered as a signal flare to attract Linux software developers before the product hits the market in October, says Roger Richards, president of Agenda.

"We wanted to introduce this to the open source community. We believe we have months of time for this community to modify the thousands of Linux applications on PCs to work with the VR3," he says. "We believe that this handheld has the hardware and memory that [Linux] applications will need in the future."

The Agenda VR3 4-ounce portable computer uses a 2.25-by-3.25-inch (160-by-240-pixel) gray-scale LCD screen and a 66-MHz processor. It comes with 8MB of memory and from 2MB to 8MB of flash memory, depending on the model. A 33.6-kilobits-per-second modem is optional. The VR3 ranges in price from $149 to $249.

While the VR3 comes with its own productivity suite, the current paucity of Linux software for handheld PCs makes its initial usefulness an issue, but the future bright, says Dan Kusnetzky, an analyst at market researcher IDC. "It really revolves around what applications they want to package with the device," he says, noting that the easily modifiable operating system will lend itself better toward new applications than to porting Windows programs onto a handheld.

Agenda's Web site is accepting preregistration orders for the VR3 and indicates it will be available in October.