Cosmo Communicator

Somewhere at the back of a drawer in this writer’s house is an MDA Vario, also sold as the HTC Wizard. A mobile phone with a slide-out keyboard, this was an old idea when it came out in 2005, taking inspiration from the 1997 Psion Series 5 (mine’s in the attic–ED). Sadly, the MDA Vario promised much but, hampered by smaller dimensions and one of Microsoft’s various stutters in the mobile sphere, sadly failed to fulfil expectations.

We kept hold of the Vario partly on the off-chance we could find a Linux distro that works (or a kernel that compiles), and partly because