{"id":485,"date":"2009-10-30T22:02:34","date_gmt":"2009-10-31T02:02:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/?p=485"},"modified":"2009-10-29T09:54:08","modified_gmt":"2009-10-29T13:54:08","slug":"review-zipit-wireless-messenger-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/2009\/review-zipit-wireless-messenger-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Zipit Wireless Messenger 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_3034-2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So I must thank my good friend Andrew C for picking one of these up for me at his local Target<\/a> store and shipping it up to me in Canada.\u00a0\u00a0 The device itself is about the size and form factor of the Gameboy Advance SP<\/a>, however there is a lot more under the hood.\u00a0 The Zipit2<\/a> boasts a 320×240 colour display, 312MHz XScale (ARM)<\/a>, 32MB RAM, 8MB flash, Mini-SD<\/a> expansion, backlit querty thumb keyboard, D_Pad and music controls, 802.11 B\/G, and a 1000Mah LiOn battery. \"IMG_3034-1\"<\/a> The retail price is $49.99, but as you can see it was marked down to under $25!<\/p>\n

For the casual consumer, this device allows for IM<\/a> with AIM<\/a>, Yahoo<\/a>, and MSN<\/a>.\u00a0 It appears they also have a gateway to a wide range of US cell phone providers (and one Canadian – Fido<\/a>) allowing for SMS<\/a> messages to be sent \/ received.\u00a0 It will play music and display photos from the Mini-SD card.\u00a0 There is also support for internet radio.\u00a0 While you need to use your own WiFi<\/a> to connect to the internet, you are reliant on the zipitwireless.com<\/a> site for the IM connectivity to the device.\u00a0 The 1st year of service is free and after that its $29.95 a year.\u00a0 If you’ve got teenagers and not enough computers, this is a great solution.\u00a0 Another benefit is a side-effect of the limitations of the device – no malware or virus issues, constrained functionality results in a limited amount of mischief they can get into.<\/p>\n

Oh yeah, and it runs Linux.\u00a0 So of course the hacking community<\/a> has has its way with this device and you can now get an “open” Linux build<\/a> for it. \u00a0There is also a fairly dated wiki<\/a> hosted by zipitwireless, however the irc<\/a> logs<\/a> seem to be fairly current. \u00a0I was particulary excited to see<\/a> that the ScummVM<\/a> was able to run Full Throttle<\/a> – something I plan to setup as I actually own the original game.<\/p>\n

I’ll update with another post once I’ve got the firmware modified – you knew that was coming right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I must thank my good friend Andrew C for picking one of these up for me at his local Target store and shipping it up to me in Canada.\u00a0\u00a0 The device itself is about the size and form factor of the Gameboy Advance SP, however there is a lot more under the hood.\u00a0 The … Continue reading “Review: Zipit Wireless Messenger 2”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gadgets","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":490,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485\/revisions\/490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}