"Tight" PDA/Handheld Console

david-currie writes: "Looks like a company called Technopop is developing a Gameboy-styled handheld console based on the Pentium I called Tight. This will allow you to download and play games like Quake and Tomb Raider and provide PDA features They also announce a titanium case and $100 price-point, which could be very nice ... " Total vapor of course, but it's a nifty goal.

Comments

Re:Marketroids won't allow cheap Titanium

[schporto]

Gee I wonder why?
From McMaster-Carr:
12"x12"x1/8" Acetal Copolymer = $10.74 (in black)
12"x12"x1/8" Titanium = $364.90
Funny how that basic material cost factors in.
-cpd

Slashdotted again - how to prevent endemic problem

[billstewart]

So beia and technopop are slashdotted - the usual fate of small companies with cool products that get mentioned here. Guess I'll just have to sit around imagining a Beowulf cluster of the things until their site recovers :-)

How can we prevent this in the future? Now that Slashdot has been Borgified by the Andover folks, they've got enough funding and computer resources to cache the front couple of web pages and pictures for the articles they post, so that most of the load can be absorbed there and only the small percentage of people who read the deeper links will have to hit the real site.

Technical comment:Yes, I know this only helps people who have real html pages, and doesn't do as much for javascriptified dancing animated Shockwave voice-recognition GUIs making it hard to find the actual content. I don't feel bad about this :-) And even then it takes the initial load for the first page, even if it doesn't make it easy to get everything from the cache.

Shameless commercial plug: Caching is your friend. In addition to the server capacity at Slashdot and the caches at your ISP, there are caching service vendors such as AT&T (that was the plug) and of course Akamai. Caching also does a better job of speeding up pages that use real HTML (and also imagemaps), and again I don't feel at all bad about making well-behaved user interfaces get better treatment.

Re:Slashdotted again - how to prevent endemic prob

[_fuzz_]

From the Slashdot FAQ:

Slashdot should Cache linked sites in case of the Slashdot Effect

Sure, its a great idea, but it has a lot of legal implications. For example, commercial sites rely on their banner ads to generate revenue. If I cache one of their pages, this will mess with their statistics, and mess with their banner ads. In other words, this will piss them off.

Of course, most of the time, the commercial sites that actually have income from banner ads are able to defend themselves from the Slashdot effect. So perhaps we could draw the line at only sites that don't have ads. They are, after all, much more likely to buckle under the pressure of all those unexpected hits. But what happens if I cache the site, and they update themselves? Once again, I'm transmitting data that I shouldn't be.

So the quick answer is: Sure, Caching would be neat. It would make things a lot easier when servers go down. But I'm just not interested in dealing with the legal aspects, or the overhead required to ask permission (and do you really want Slashdot stories to wait 10 hours while I wait for a reply from someone in charge of a website to ask if its ok if I cache their server?). I wouldn't want people to cache Slashdot without asking my permission, so it seems only fair that I don't cache others either.
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Based on Pentium ?

[edmz]

When are we going to start seeing devices based on Transmeta chips ? Thats not vapor anymore.

Pentium Jokes

[Smitty825]

Does this mean that the Pentium Floating Point Bug jokes are going to become cool again? If so, I'll be cool again! =-)

Hmm

[Signal 11]

You could also use it as a convenient space-heater/hand-warmer given the CPU they're using. Should sell well in Minnesota this winter.

Good reasons for the higher price

[G-Man]

FYI, the Palm V case is blasted aluminum, *not* titanium.

Titanium is stronger than steel and (I think) lighter than aluminum. It doesn't corrode. It obviously can stand a lot more heat than plastic, provides *much* more protection, and probably doesn't weigh much more. Now if it was common and cheap why would we even bother with the other materials?

Because it *isn't* common or cheap, and it is very hard to work with. It's a metal reserved for high-stress and temperature environments -- the SR-71 is skinned in titanium. Before composites every aircraft designer would have loved to build a whole plane out of titanium, but only a few could afford it.

Titanium is just one of those raw materials (unlike steel, silicon, or aluminum) that is relatively rare and expensive. Like I said, if it was common we'd make everything from it and we wouldn't think of using steel and aluminum in cars, airplanes, and cases any more than we'd think of using tin.

Personally, I have doubts about making a titanium case by itself for $100, much less a whole computer. Maybe Magnesium, but the thing is named "Tight", not "Might".

Why the dig at BeIA?

[sugarman]

It seems that this thing is little more than a dig at BeIA. From the product specs, they claim that BeIA is of no use, because it requires 32MB of space, yet the machine is going to have 64MB on-board? So what? With that size display, it's not like you need that much Video Ram, and 4 year old PC games can run just fine on what's left.

Also, they state that some of the things that BeIA includes is not required? Bullshit. Protected memory, and a reliance on a GUI interface? Well, how do they think people are going to choose things with a D-pad? With a CLI? And wouldn't protected memory be a bonus, to keep your little toy from crashing while in the hands of young-uns?

Nice try kids, but trolling BeOS users is pretty weak. This thing will never see the light of day.

Drain the Batteries

[bjb]

Great. Stuff a Pentium 55C in there and watch your AA batteries get sucked down in 3 minutes. Lithium doesn't make a difference. The Pentiums are hogs anyway. Why not just go with a color palm pilot? Or for that matter, why not just get a color GameBoy? The merging of the two doesn't make much sense beyond bragging rights.

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It's Possible!`

[zpengo]

Here are some screenshots done from a TI-92 calculator...a much smaller scale, admittedly, but it's definitely possible.

http://www.ticalc.org/arch ives/files/fileinfo/40/4042.html

http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/36/3 634.html

http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/34/3 439.html