Before the advent of smartphones, there were PDAs a.k.a Personal Digital Assistant. Primarily meant to be used in the landscape orientation, PDAs featured a slide-out QWERTY keyboard to help you easily compose long emails and make you look professional while at it. Well, an Indiegogo campaign is now looking to bring the PDA back.
The Gemini PDA pays homage to the Psion Series 5, which launched over 2 decades ago, with its design. That’s not surprising since Psion’s founder Dr. David Potter is the Honorary Chairman of the board of Planet Computers — the company that owns Gemini, while the keyboard is designed by Martin Riddiford who created the original Psion Series 5 keyboard.
The Gemini PDA features a 5.99-inch 18:9 FHD+ display, a deca-core MediaTek Helio X27 processor clocked at up to 2.7GHz, an ARM Mali GPU, 4GB RAM, 64GB of storage space, a 5MP front camera, stereo speakers, and a 4220mAh battery. The wide clamshell design and the physical keyboard means the Gemini PDA weighs in at a hefty 320gms. Gemini will be offering the PDA in two different variants: one with only Wi-Fi connectivity and another with Wi-Fi and 4G connectivity. Interestingly, the PDA features two USB-C port which you can use to connect other peripherals like keyboard and mouse.
The Gemini PDA will run on Android 7.1.1 Nougat, with Linux being the secondary boot option. Since the device is primarily meant to be used in landscape orientation, Gemini will optimise a number of apps for it and the physical keyboard. A dock will also be included with the PDA using which one can connect external monitors to the device. The PDA will feature a dedicated voice button so that one can interact with the PDA purely through voice commands even if the device is in their pocket.
Since the display folds towards the keyboard, it would be difficult for one to identify incoming callers. To solve this problem, Gemini has included five LEDs on the aluminum lid of the PDA. The colors of these LEDs can be customised so that one can easily identify the incoming caller without looking at the display.
The Indiegogo campaign of Gemini PDA has been running since April 2017 and it has raised 284% of the total funds required. If you want to grab the PDA for cheap, back the Indiegogo campaign as you can then have the device for only $399 (Wi-Fi+4G variant). The final retail price of the Gemini PDA will be $200 higher.
