9

Gemini PDA 4G

REVIEW

he era of the personal

digital assistant (PDA)

was brief but glorious:

from the pocketable

pen-driven products

of Palm to the

robust clamshell creations

of Psion, the PDA was the

must-have accessory for the

nineties road warrior. The

promise of a hackable, hand-held

computer has been tantalising geeks since then.

The birth of the smartphone, though, put paid to

the PDA – until it was dragged back from the dead

by Planet Computers, courtesy of a highly successful

crowdfunding campaign.

The Gemini PDA is inspired by the warmly

remembered Psion Series 5 family of PDAs, supplied

to us for direct comparison by The National Museum

of Computing (tnmoc.org). The Gemini is a sleek

clamshell which opens up to reveal a touch-sensitive

display on the top and a compact, yet surprisingly

usable keyboard on the bottom.

Its internals, though, couldn’t be more different.

The Gemini is, to all intents and purposes, an Android

7.0 ‘Nougat’ smartphone, with an added keyboard.

A MediaTek Helio X27 processor packs ten cores of

varying power and performance ratios, there’s 4GB of

RAM, and 64GB of storage with microSD expansion

• though this comes at the cost of losing the second
  SIM card slot in the 4G model, which can be used as
  a somewhat bulky phone.

A MODERN APPROACH

The screen, too, is an unsurprising demonstration of

the improvements made in the state of the mobile

computing art over the last few decades. While its

FHD+ resolution and impressive brightness are a

great improvement over the monochrome LCD of

its spiritual predecessor, there is visible masking

at the corners which gives it a pleasingly rounded

appearance at the cost of a handful of lost pixels.

While sold with Android, the Gemini isn’t restricted

to Google’s mobile OS: Planet Computers has, in a

twist on the traditional locked-down format of most

commercial Android devices, released images for

running a customised Debian Linux distribution or the

mobile-centric Sailfish OS – or, if you’re willing to split

the 64GB storage three ways, the ability to choose

one of the three at boot time.

T

Gemini PDA 4G

By Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree

A modern take on an old form factor

GEMINI £599 (£499 WiFi only) planetcom.co.uk

Below

The metal hinge

starts out somewhat

flexible, and appears

too loose

Right

Installing Linux turns

the Gemini PDA

into a fully-fledged

portable computer