[ale] Is this a great country, or what ?

[Charles Shapiro]

In case you missed it, Cybiko (http://www.cybiko.com) is rolling out
their new model "Cybiko Extreme" this Christmas season. This means that
last year's model has moved from the "conscious decision" range ( >
$100) to the "impulse purchase" range ($50).  I picked mine up at the
Northlake Toys R Us for $49.95, and they seemed to have plenty in stock.
Discounted models are also allegedly available at Best Buys and Staples.

So for your $50 you get a machine a little larger than a palm which
contains a meg of RAM, a 32-bit processor, a tiny screen and full qwerty
keyboard, 2 lithium batteries, an RS232 interface, an expansion slot,
and a ->> radio link <<- .  The devices are designed to do
bluetooth-like radio communications within a 150-300 foot range.  All in
all, a pretty impressive technology package at this price point. Judging
from the manual, you can stick memory cards into the expansion slot in
some way, although I haven't explored that yet. The unit comes with an
assortment of games and apps, most of which are far k00ler if you have
two units.

On the down side, the user interface is clunky and the doc is
horrendous.
If you're used to a palm, the lack of a touch screen is disorienting (I
almost scratched my unit with the stylus even after I'd been playing
with it for a while), and the keyboard is primarily designed for
compactness. Stock models also lack a case of any kind, a curious
omission in a device designed to bang around in a backpack or pocket.
The quickstart guide features lots of exclamation points and is short on
specific instructions such as how to use the included DB9 RS232 patch
cord to download files to your device (try cycling power). You have to
download the PDF format manual off the web or buy a printed copy by
snail mail for $3 or so.  The manual is reasonably complete and gives
lots of non-obvious information such as how the published radio profile
works, how to check your battery level (!), and what the "wizard" switch
in setup mode means.

Cybiko also erred in their quest to make the device easy to use for
teenagers by tying it too closely to a single technology; figuring out
how to download files to it from Linux is -- shall we say -- exciting. I
still haven't found out how to obtain most of the apps allegedly
available from the website with the browsers I have in the house either.
Apparently it uses some kind of magic Lose fiddle to go directly from
website to cybicon without human intervention.

In spite of these missteps, I wasted far too much time playing with my
unit this weekend. The most easily available Linux interface for it, a
program called "cyucon", works but features a truly abominable user
interface. The guy who wrote it (Jeff Frohwein) apparently understood a
little bit about Unix argument parsing, but had not actually gotten as
far as getopt(3).  The result is that, for example, "cyucon -d<space>
/dev/ttyS1" will not open /dev/ttyS1, but "cyucon -d/dev/ttyS1" will.
Entering command and filename options is similarly fraught with peril.
All in all, it took me about two hours to figure out how to download a
file to the device from my linux box. Fortunately, mr. Frohwein
distributed cyucon as C source with a makefile, so I will probably
rewrite the annoying parts and republish a properly working and
documented version.

-- CHS
cshapiro at numethods.com

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