SommitRealWeird

The Psion Gemini

So, I backed the Gemini and received my shiny new device just a few months after they said that it'd ship, not bad for an indiegogo project! Out of the box, I flashed it, using the non-approved linux flashing tool at that time, and failed to backup the parts that, err, I really didn't want blatted... So within hours I had a new phone that I, err, couldn't make calls on, which was marginally annoying. And the tech preview of Debian wasn't really worth it, as it was fairly much unusable (which was marginally upsetting, but hey) - after a few more hours / days of playing around I got the IMEI number back in to the Gemini and put back on the stock android image. I didn't at this point have working bluetooth or wifi, which was a bit of a pain too, turns out the mac addresses for those are also stored in the nvram (doh!), that's now mostly working through a bit of collaboration with another Gemini owner, my Gemini currently uses the mac addresses from his device... which I'll need to fix in the next month or so, else we'll have a mac address collision, probably.

Overall, it's not a bad machine, the keyboard isn't quite as good as I was hoping for, the phone functionality is not bad once you're on a call, but not great until you're on a call, and I certainly wouldn't use it to replace the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge that I currently use as my full time phone. It is however really rather useful as a sysadmin tool when you don't want to be lugging a full laptop around with you, the keyboard is better than using the on screen keyboard on the phone, the ssh client is "good enough" to get to what I need, and the terminal font isn't bad. I look forward to seeing where it goes, I'm happy to have been an early backer, as I don't think I'd pay the current retail price for one.

Posted: 2018-06-07 14:04 in Tech | permalink