Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

Announced today :
https://c1.iggcdn.com/indiegogo-medi...zqeaifgvoe.jpg
https://c1.iggcdn.com/indiegogo-medi...g4uvqfvqoi.jpg
https://c1.iggcdn.com/indiegogo-medi...c6mihylnya.jpg
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/cosmo-communicator#/

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

Compared to Gemini PDA :
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/g...le-device--2#/
- almost same dimensions :
Cosmo : 17.14(W) x 7.93cm(D) x 1.6(H)cm
Gemini : 17.14(W) x 7.93cm(D) x 1.51(H)cm
- same weight, approx. 320g;
- same internal screen, 5.99 inch, 2160x1080, 403 ppi;
- external display, 2 inch, 570 x 240, 300 ppi;
- CPU Mediatek P70 (8-Core);
- 6GB RAM x 4GB, 128GB x 64GB of internal flash;
- external camera with 24MP;
- backlit keyboard.

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

I'd rather like to have Official Full SFOS support on the Gemini instead of a new device. And as rcolistete pointed out there are a lot of similarities between the Gemini and the Cosmo. The only thing I actually do miss on the Gemini is a backlit keyboard.

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

So happy they add a backlit keyboard. I appreciate the extra screen as well. Don't really need the camera but nice. The nfc and fingerprinted reader not sure if I trust on a device that defaults to android.

So do these devices require android blobs or can I run a clean machine with only Debian/Maemo-Leste/sailfish (I know this also uses android blobs).

x

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

Currently Android is required if I'm not mistaken, but they promised that to change in the future. That was for the Gemini though.

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

IMO, that will never change. Or at least not while they use MTK. I get that none of the current major SoC maker is not interested in linux as 1st class citizen but still, there are lousy ones and the terrible ones and MTK is at the bottom of them all.
Qualcomm is probably the best choice but we can see how that goes with sailfish, a year and a half after the announcement and with the device from SONY open program there are still HW related issues that don't exist on android part of the story. :(

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

I am not sure if Gemini/Cosmo keyboard is any good (I trust Nokia N900/N950/Neo900/Fxtec more in this regard). Backlight is not bad, but I would wish for RGB backlight. Programmable.

External touchscreen is interesting, and has got to be capacitive to be protected against scratches, but I do hope that the internal huge touchscreen is resistive, for pressure-sensitive drawing. And external display should have lots of physical buttons around it, from accept/reject call, to volume wheel of speakers and microphone, to scroll arrows/navigation wheel, to half-press camera button.

External display better be OLED, for ease on eyes, and readability in the sun. Internal display could be black-and-white e-Ink, for books and emails and web pages?

Fingerprint sensor, LTE, Bluetooth, NFC are nice.

In short, where is the source code for the hardware, so that somebody could clone this device into something MTK-less and more Linux-friendly?

Thank you. Best wishes.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Per aspera ad astra...

[EDIT]
Fxtec is pretty similar: AMOLED screen, 6GB RAM with 128GB storage (EMMC, presumably), stereo-speakers on the side, 3.5mm (TLS) headphone jack, fingerprint reader that's not integrated into the power button, and of course the big wooping sliding keyboard.

But all the same, I can understand desire to hide the large screen from external scratches, by making it into a communicator form factor. But generally, I prefer slider. And, I miss resistive touchscreen. And RGB backlight.
[/EDIT]

[EDIT2]
Yes, external display is AMOLED, thanks for that at least. Internal display is Colour FHD+ (18:9), probably LCD I guess? 18:9 aka 2:1 sounds fairly nice - hip to be square. Space Grey Metal sounds very annoying - how difficult will it be to change it to something light, like shiny silver? Absence of talk/stand-by time is frustrating. FM radio is likely receiver-only, no transmitter. 3.5mm jack, is it going to be TRRS, or five-contacts? Any mention of volume buttons/wheel or 2-stage camera shutter key?

And will it run Maemo Leste? And will it be possible to put resistive touch screen on main display?
[/EDIT2]

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

Gemini keyboard is excellent. It has exactly the same feel as the original Psion, and I love it.

Sadly, it's probably the only good thing I have to say about the Gemini :(

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

Is anybody from Cosmo Communicator/Gemini looking at this thread? Because active support for running Maemo Leste would be appreciated.

[EDIT]
It's rumoured that Mediatek chips have firmware that should be open-source, being derivation of GPL-licensed code, but Mediatek doesn't release it.

https://www.xda-developers.com/have-...e-license-fee/

[Edit2]
https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/...iatek-devices/
[/Edit2]

If it applies to this particular chip as well, I would appreciate it if Cosmo Communicator put pressure onto Mediatek to release source code, and all tools require to build the code and flash it onto the chip, to Cosmo Communicator - and buyers/owners of these devices.
[/EDIT]

Thank you. Best wishes.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Per aspera ad astra...

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

There was a Cosmo Communicator update a couple weeks ago that I overlooked at the time. I've just pasted in what I think are the highlights, but the interested can read the whole thing here.

Who's gonna have a device in a retail customer's hands first, F(x)Tec, Purism, or these guys? Faites vos jeux . . .

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

Well, Planet were happy to take my order and my money for 'in stock' accessories and not ship for three months, so I won't hold my breath.

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

Don't let Dave999 read this or he will surely call it a scam :D

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

Dave is gone...long gone...
Dave ain't here man..

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

Am I the first one here who has received Cosmo? The first impression is that it's quite polished and tuned Gemini, however, I haven't found a way how to get to a meaningful recovery-mode and do anything else than stock Android :-/

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

Sorry, we're all waiting on our F(x)tec Pro1s.

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

#Me too . I've bet on both horses :)

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

I also bet on these two, but neither of them reached the finishing line yet.

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

I received a DPD trackingnumber from the UK this evening. As the e-mail was sent to my indiegogo-address, cosmo seems to have the lead today.

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

Cosmo made the race this morning. Congratulations!

The device is really huge:

https://i.imgur.com/oVcApWz.jpg

Lenovo X250, Samsung S4 Mini, Apple iPhone SE, Motorola Moto E, PlanetComputers Cosmo Communicator, AA-Cell for scale (was out of bananas)

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

Congratulations! I didn't bet on Cosmo Communicator, only on Fxtec Pro - haven't got a tracking number from them yet :-/ .

Please report whether Cosmo Communicator can boot Maemo Leste ;-)

Thank you. Best wishes.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Per aspera ad astra...

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

Looking forward to hearing about your experiences! Like to see how camera performs and how well can debian be made to work!

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

I use my Gemini with Android 7 + Debian + Sailfish OS.

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

I'm currently compiling a list of good and bad things, I'm going to post this list, once I could test the device in the wild. I still need to wait for a new nano-sim.

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

As promised. some first thoughts and experiences

Cover display:

• If an alarm goes off you cannot snooze or stop it from the cover display
• If you open the cosmo when the alarm goes off, it asks you for your PIN first to unlock the phone, then it pops to the home-screen, and the
  alarm is still ringing in the background.

=> It's uneasy to stop / snooze an alarm if the device is closed.
If the device is open when the alarm goes off, you can stop / snooze it normally on the internal display.

See: https://imgur.com/a/RxiNAls as an example for the lock screen and the alarm blazing in the background.

• The cover-display is laggy, entering a PIN to unlock the phone is a gruesome experience, as its animations are always 500ms to late.

Other oddities:

• If you turn on the keyboard backlight the devices shows the "charging" icon.
• Uneven lighting of keyboard and cover-display LEDs.
• The device is full of google-software. The searchbar on the homescreen can not be removed.
• When using the main screen, the device suddenly locks sometimes, and you need to enter your pin again.

Look an feel / Keyboard
The device feels really solid and typing on a real clicky keyboard again is a good thing. When using it in both hands, i can thumb-type on the keyboard, my girlfriend cannot.

Typing-speed.net results: Cosmo: 164 strokes/minute, Notebook: 244 strokes/minute, whilst cosmo was thumb-typing and notebook freestyle.


Music:

• This device can really get loud. Listening to music on the inbuilt stereo speakers is possible, but the audio quality is meh. Just use high quality headphones. Always.
• Cover Display can show the current played track when using a player like VLC, this is cool! Playback controls do also work, but are laggy.

Camera:
I took some shots with the Camera, as well as with the Cameras of an iPhone SE and an Olympus E500 see here:
https://imgur.com/a/ldEtLfs


Telephony:
Works, call quality is quite good. You can dial from the cover display and pickup calls. Nevertheless, the laggy display is unusable for dialling numbers, or selecting a contact from your address-book, especially if you have ~200 contacts in it. The order of the contacts is by first name, even if you change the order of the contacts in the Contacts-App.

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

^ all this is with Android?
I wonder how other OSs fare.

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

Still running on Android. Somehow the phone does not vibrate when a call is coming in, even when the "vibrate on call" setting is activated. It just makes a short "bzzt" vibration and that's all. When I'm calling someone and the called person picks up, the phone vibrates again, this was unusual for me at first, but I think it's a nice feature.

There has been the fist update for the cover-display which not now introduces landscape mode, but the display is still as stubborn as before. Also the alarm clock does not work and sometimes the display does even not react on touch (for instance to mute the microphone during a call, or to switch to loudspeaker). On the other hand the display is always on when a call is active (no proximity sensor) and I suddenly muted the microphone with my cheek....

The display is nice to see status updates, but is no real solution in order to operate the phone.

Currently I'm placing calls like this: Opening the device, entering my long pin, choosing the phone app and the dial and close the device again. I terminate the call with the outer displays keys.

The device is still very solid and fun to use. I discovered myself mostly thumb-typing which is a little bit hard as the device is huge, because when using it like a desktop I'm regularly hitting the screen with my fingers thus placing the cursor on an other position which results in text garbage.


If you are around at 36c3 in Leipzig we can meet and you can have a look for yourself.

EDIT: I wrote "not introduces". This was a typo. It should have been "now introduces" and some rather minor typo-fixes

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

I did not verify the contents of the following link, yet:

https://wuffs.org/blog/pulling-apart...emfota-updater

There seem to be MAJOR security issues with the OTA Updater of the cosmo.
and the content of the website makes me switch back to my S4-Mini with aokp, once I'm back at home.

I had a short glimpse at the mentioned OTA-Update for the Cover display.
(the website says, the CODI updater updates from here: http://fota.planetcom.co.uk/stm32fla...e_versions.txt which is only available via http, and the binaries which are flashed to the outer display are also only available by http). If i would like to persist malware on a cosmo, I'd chose the CODI subsystem.

I need to verify the URLs with wireshark once I'm back home.

Edit: This is the authors twitter thread for this issue: https://twitter.com/_Ninji/status/1201275091297931268

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

Isn't there a problem (or held as a problem) with F(x)Tec Pro1 OTA updates too? A host provider which was caught of snooping or something but which it seems is back in business (and I believe which is now well monitored so can be trusted I think). N900 with Maemo Leste will be the winner in the end.

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

Today I've had the time to install iptables-mod-tee and kmod-ipt-tee on my router.

and forwarded all traffic to my notebook where a wireshark was running with:

By doing so, I could confirm with wireshark that the CoDI updater starts looking for updates here:
http://fota.planetcom.co.uk/stm32fla...e_versions.txt

Planet Computers has reacted for the "Digitime Issue" detected by ninji in the blog post I mentioned earlier. See: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/c...r#/updates/all Update from Jan 15, 2020 • 7:32AM

The OTA-Updater is going to be fixed by Digitime, at least they say so.

There are also going to be new updates for android and the CoDi. Let's see if they also fix the MITM-Issue on the CoDi Updater.

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

Today I upgraded to the latest (yesterday) release of Android for Cosmo. In addition to the Android update there is an update for the Cover Display.

The SSL issue of the CoDI Updater has not been fixed yet, my wireshark reported the following URLs:

http://fota.planetcom.co.uk/stm32fla...e_versions.txt

http://p2w.pripla.com/stm32flash/V1....2_1_1_1_13.bin

http://p2w.pripla.com/stm32flash/V1....e_1_1_1_13.bin

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

Cosmo released a partitioning tool along with rooted Android and their version of Debian (Gemian). Gemian is based on KDE and seems to be working a lot better than the Gemini version - even has hardware acceleration enabled - Youtube videos and desktop affects included.

Unfortunately the awful framebuffer mirroring that they use means that USB-C to HDMI is not currently working, but still - good progress.

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

I have an USB-C DisplayLink device, and just saw that the current driver has ARM binaries, might be possible to get it working.

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

Now I only need to find the kernel-headers with mediatek driver includes, since the installer is looking for them. :(

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

Install cosmo-linux-kernel-headers.

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

Already did, but the includes are not in there.

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

What includes does it need? Kernel sources are at https://github.com/gemian/cosmo-linux-kernel-4.4

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

Really happy they released the instructions for flashing linux.

Is there any telephony capability when booted into linux? Ofono?

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

Not as of yet...

Re: Planet Cosmo Communicator
 

These will do nicely:

https://github.com/gemian/cosmo-linu.../power/include

Do you know why there is no kernel-source package in the repo?