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It's working for the mobile phone industry. I'm paying (or rather the comapny is :-)) something like 5 quid a month (with 100 quid down at the start) for the computing device which I use to run my always-on telecoms application+alarm clock and anoyingly addictive pool game.

If you think of this box as a fixed-line equivalent of a modern mobule phone, rather than a PC equivalent it makes a bit more sense.

Mind you, Amstrad tried this in the UK with their emailer and that doesn't seem to have set the world on fire. ASDA (Walmart's UK tenticle) was more or less giving them away last I saw.

Amstrad developed an email telephone a few years ago that allow you to download and play Spectrum games. Unfortunately you can only download games from their (extremely limited) catalogue and you have to play them on the built-in screen.

It's a pity these machines do not have a small solid state drive. It would be great to transfer a few tape images to a TV console and start to play them as they were meant to be played. There are thousands of freely distributable games for the Spectrum and new games are being written.

I know the answer, and the answer is fixed functionality, ala something like WebTV.

Good idea; but unless it's very cheap, it's going to be a hard sell against a dirt-cheap PC that's loaded to the gills with gimmicky consumer-crap and a "fast" processor (and insufficient memory, because as we all know, it's better to spend lots of money on that extra 0.1GHz you can impress your friends with than a few pounds/dollars/whatever ensuring it has enough memory to work effectively).

Yeah; you can bet the salesman will entice those people with tales of what they can do with their computer; although they'll never actually bother doing most of it.

In this situation, your "safe" non-expandable box sounds like a poor sell; sad, but true.

If this sort of device takes off, it'll probably be in the market covered by the Amstrad Em@iler; that device is very cheap, because it is subsidised by the compulsory use of the manufacturer's own ISP. And even if such a device would be poor value compared to the PC in the long-run, we all know that a large number of people simply buy on the basis of the initial price tag.

The sort of people that buy the Lexmark printers because they are (marginally) the cheapest, then balk at the price of the replacement carts, so they buy another Lexmark because it comes with free carts anyway(!!!).

Anyway- consider this; the more the replacement ink is overpriced, the more the (perceived) value of the free carts that come with the printer (e.g. if a black and colour cart would together cost $200, Lexmark could claim that you got $200 worth of ink free with the printer). I *have* heard this logic used by someone replacing their Lexmark with another Lexmark, rather than buy new ink.

Canon can't boast such "great" offers, because their ink isn't sold in overpriced, chipped carts. So I must be a mug for buying a Canon (cough).

Heading off-topic... sorry. But the point is that consumers are generally not logical in the sense that you (and I) would like them to be; they will buy on the perceived value of "features" and "gimmicks" far above everything else.

Check out this Amstrad emailer thing. Amstrad are making a profit on them over here (UK). Small, really cheap, really simple computers built for text messaging, web, email, address book, Spectrum emulator (WOO!), faxing, answerphone, etc. Perfect for people who don't want a PC, for whatever reason.

It exists! Amstrad, who bought Spectrum in the late 80s, now sell a weird web-browser/telephone thing which has a whole shitload of Spectrum games on it. Of course i would've been a lot happier to see the good ol' CPC games, but you know, the Spectrum was an inferior system after all so it's probably easier to emulate ;-)

But back to the point. Virtually all of the Amstrad (Spectrum and CPC) games are legally available nowadays - and that's from the horse's mouth. I seem to remember a few developers who have been quite vocal about saying "hey guys, do what you want". Oliver Twins (of Dizzy fame) being one. Unfortunately i think Amstrad's 8-bit systems are the only ones that have this kind of permission. It's great for Amstrad nuts like me, but sucks for the C64 or NES or MSX fans of the world.

I'm sure there was a story in The Register recently, saying that Amstrad are pushing the emailer again, at a lower price.

I just looked, it's on their front page.

... that anyone who could come up with this couln't be from this planet.

Amstrad (aka Schneider in Germany) built a lot of computer with a Z80, running at 4MHz instead of 3.75 in the ZX81 iirc. I have an Amstrad CPC6128, 128Kb ram, colors, sound, 3" floppy drive integrated, etc. This is the machine who killed the C=64 in Europe.
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i got my ZX81 in 1982 i think, in kit, my father helped me to built it, i was 12 y/o :), and since i'm into computer...
you can still buy the kit, but last year it was something like 29.95 iirc, now it's 99.95 ish!
then i have had an Amstrad CPC6128, remember? it's the computer that "killed" the C=64... then a PC... 386SX16, SX33, DX4/100, P166MMX, PII300, etc
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