What’s up with Agenda and the VR3 Linux PDA?
Feb 1, 2002 — by LinuxDevices Staff — from the LinuxDevices Archive — views
Agenda's U.S. phone and fax numbers have been disconnected (with no forwarding number), and Fry's Electronics and Tiger Direct are now sold out of “the last hardware that Agenda dumped to them in late 2001,” a source said. A notice posted recently to the Agenda mailing list reportedly said that Agenda Computing U.S. is “temporarily” closed. The website is still running, but orders are reportedly not being fulfilled.
The Agenda developer community is said to be continuing its work on current projects, but some developers have now switched to other projects such as the Sharp Zaurus.
Agenda Computing Germany, on the other hand, is open and accepting orders, and will ship to the U.S. The German company has said it is “not the same company” as Agenda U.S. and will therefore not honor Agenda U.S. warranties — and also that they are continuing the development of the product, according to sources.
Two models are currently available — a “developer edition” and a “commercial edition”, which differ mostly in cosmetic details. Both have 8M of RAM memory and 16MB of Flash. Agenda's German website shows a “Pocket Ethernet” option (developed in Potsdam) which fits within the VR3's snap-in expansion adapter.
Perhaps the first Linux PDA to be released for sale to the general market, Agenda's VR3 is a full-function handheld computer with a 160 x 240 pixel backlit LCD. It is based on a 66MHz 32-bit NEC VR4181 system-on-chip processor, and has 8MB of system RAM and 16MB of built-in flash storage. For I/O, the device provides an RS232 serial port along with an IrDA interface. The VR3's operating system is Linux-VR.
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