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With more and more applications being moved on to the Web, the physical requirements for computers have diminished. We can now get information, read and reply to emal and participate in blogs etc. without the need for extensive storage, fans, red hot processors and chipsets, elaborate graphics sybsystems or optical drives. Why not create an appliance for kitchen, coffee shop or in-bed reading or study that is light, cool and with a screen large enough to be perfectly readable for Web use. PDAs and cell phones don't have enough screen real estate to really represent most Web pages. They're OK for specialized portable applications that have been written for the very small screen. But they are next to useless for most Web pages. Tablets are just laptops with touch screens. To hot and heavy for easy use anywhere. I propose a thin (half-inch) and light 12-inch screen (1024 x 768) mated with just enough electronics to provide Internet access. A keyboard could slide out or be represented virtually on the screen. WiFi or WiMax could provide the access. An OLED or electronic-paper type display would work well. If you need storage, a CF or SD card could provide all you need without moving parts. Today's WSJ reports on the return of the "thin client" idea, but this time with the emphasis on cheap (pennies) Internet access. WYSE is now producing such a chip. We seem to have had almost every other combination of screen size and capability, but this very useful combination seems to have been overlooked. It is the opposite of a PDA. Big screen, low processing power, complete Web-centric. -wick
WickSmith, Aug 15 2006
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Perhaps. You'd have to market it right, and have a guaranteed infrastructure behind it.
They did try with appliances liek the 3Com Audrey, but failed, at least back then.
The fact is people want control, and with sub $500 PCs on the market, people really would sooner buy one of those, than have their data out there somehere relying on the whims of some company to be there, and keep it secure.
I see your point, and I remember the Audrey. But times have changed. People don't expect one computer to do everything. This is not the device for storing your valuable data. It's not for writing long white papers or treastises. Not for spredsheets or PowerPoint. It's just a reading appliance, thin and light enough to be really comfortable on your lap. And even in the era of $500 computers, people are spending more than that for PDAs and fancy phones.
as for email, Almost everyone has some Web access to their email, even if they normally access it with a mail client. Increasingly, businesses are providng Web interfaces to their applications, so with the proper authentication, you could even access company information and write short notes. But that's not really my idea. I am looking for a a real "dynamic book" or "dynamic newspaper" that would support video, sound, Flash, java and RSS feeds -firmware upgradable as Web technology advances. I see it as being about the size and weight of a copy of Wired Magazine. You could read it in bed, in the kitchen in the morning, at the airport -- wherever WiFi is served. And Instant On, since the OS is in non-volatile RAM a la PDA.
Don't think of this as a computer. Think of it as a portable Web appliance.
This has already been done by Microsoft, and one Linux vendor. It's a thin tablet with just enough on it to browse the web, with the stated objective of "data consumption" in exactly the situations you describe.
Thanks, Toasty. Perhaps you could point me to one of these units. The ones I have seen are much heavier and more capable than the one I envision.
The Linux product I remember is called the Pepper pad: http://www.pepper.com/
The microsoft product, if I recall correctly, is called the Origami.
Well, Toasty, you are almost right. This sort of approximates what I was talking about, but the Pepper Pad is apparently a terrible implementation of some bad choices.
It does have a slow 20GB hard drive, for one thing. This makes the unit slower and hotter than it needs to be. Strike One
The screen is small and low resolution Strike Two
USB is 1.1 Foul ball; count holds
No CF or other card storage Another Foul ball; count holds
Instead of being limited but quick, the PP is, according to users, staggeringly slow. The browser apparently loads off its very underpowered hard drive and is not compatible with many modern Websites. Strike Three
This device seems like they had the right idea to start with and then got scared and started adding stuff that made it slower, hotter and less useful. If you look at some of the early WinCE devices of eight years ago and enlarge the screen, update the software and browser technology and add modern flash storage, you would come close to what I am looking for.