The Itsy Pocket Computer

The Itsy pocket computer is a powerful information device small enough to be comfortably worn or carried. It was created to support research in user interfaces and applications. A 32-bit, 200MHz microprocessor and 32 MB each of flash memory and DRAM made it the first small handheld able to run traditional desktop applications such as continuous speech recognition, speech synthesis, multimedia, and video games. Itsy offers fine-grain control of the hardware to support flexible power management and monitoring. Comprehensive expansion capability via daughtercards makes it easy to extend the system. The Linux operating system, with extensions for a flash file system, resource sharing, and power management, eased porting of several advanced application environments (XWindows, Java and Squeak) and many applications. Our user interface experiments confirm that traditional desktop methods do not extend well to interactive applications on small devices, but that gestureand speech-based approaches have great potential. Our power measurements and analysis show that 300 – 900 mW, which our battery can easily supply, is sufficient to run a variety of the most demanding applications.