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Ever Improving Laptop
Every few months I see a new laptop that really impresses me, and
Hanno submitted one that does that with room to spare.
PaceBlade has a transmeta chip, PCMCIA, irda, USB and all the usual stuff... except that it features a removable ir keyboard, and can be used as a traditional laptop, or as a workpad sorta thing with a pen. Expected release around the middle of the year with a $2k price tag... I'm super skeptical of that price.
"<body bgcolor="..." > is deprecated in HTML 4 and later, as it is a presentational attribute and should be implemented in CSS instead."
That's as maybe, but this page uses neither HTML nor CSS to specify a background colour. The white background on the image, however, suggests that the designers were not allowing for the fact that many users may have a default background colour other than white.
There are well-designed sites which don't override your default stylesheet, and which still manage to look acceptable against different background colours, but this isn't one of them. The only example I can think of right now is Yahoo!, but there are a number of guidelines a web designer can follow to create a background-independent site, such as using transparent gifs without anti-aliasing, or using contrasting borders around images (the page under discussion would not have looked broken against a grey background if the image had a one-pixel black border).
This isn't anything new. My friend had a 486 laptop that was a tablet with a detachable keyboard. I remember watching him play populous on it and drooling. I was wondering why that type of device didn't win over laptops earlier. Are they going to work the second time around?
Joseph Elwell.
It isn't. I (the one who submitted the story) had this cool device on my hand, twiddling with it, yesterday on CeBIT at the Transmeta booth.
It had the polish of a ready-to-market product, with all connectors in place.
It did not run any applications, only a slide show, so it could still be be a hardware mockup. But definitely not cardboard.
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You may like my a cappella music
I'd like to see how that lovely screen actually looks with something running on it.
The device I saw had a pretty regular LCD screen running at 1024x768. Nothing spectacular, just a screen.
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According to the laptop's hardware developer I spoke with at CeBIT, the device contains regular PC-compatible components. He himself is not a Linux-fanatic, but he sees no problem running any x86 OS on it.
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What's wrong witha regular, full-featured laptop?
Most of all, they are not ergonomic. I use a laptop as my primary computer and I am sick and tired with the "keyboard firmly stuck below the screen" design paradigm. It forces me to a bad working position.
You can run a real, OS(W2k/Linux, etc.)
Same for this device.
Is it me, or are geeks getting even too weak to carry around a 5 lb notebook...?
Oh, that old argument again. I did carry a 3 kg laptop with me until a few years ago. I do not have a car as I live in a city with no parking space and a very good public transportation system and also have a bike.
I was surprised myself that carrying a "normal" laptop with me *is* a major strain, both because of its weight and of its size.
I am glad that the industry makes subnotebooks. My current laptop is 1.5 kg and I can carry it with me all the time without even noticing that it's there. Taking off half of the weight is a major difference.
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Only a slide show?
Yes, only a slide show. As I said, it could still have been a hardware mockup prototype.
However, I've seen a lot of prototype hardware on CeBIT yesterday and this one certainly was the best one I had a chance to get my hands on. Most of the otheres weren't even allowed to be touched and those that were felt shabby or had obvious manufacturing problems and looked, well, "homemade".
It was made from the right material, felt like a real product.
Definitely not cardboard and certainly more than vaporware. But if it will become a real, working product - I have no idea.
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I want a display based on the same tech as in the
IBM lin-watch. 740 dpi OLED!
Even just a 15" MONO display at that resolution would kick major arse...I mean, 11100x8140 on a 15x11 screen?! Palmtops at 2220x1480?!
That would be slicker than owl shit.
C-X C-S
There have been many "failures" which have helped to kick things along in the right direction. NeXT or the Apple Lisa are a couple of examples of products that bit the dust, but which helped kick things forward at the same time. This system may also be a failure and at the same time it may be the kick in the head that causes someone else to say, "You know, that thing would have been great if..."
Don't discount the shoulders upon which we now stand no matter how little some of them may have risen above those before them (every little bit helps).
In a place beyond time and space, in a land far better than this, look for me there...
http://www.paceblade.com/product/pacebook/images/f eatures_05-scroll_over.jpg
Wrong. Now I can code on my notebook like I can with a desktop - with the keyboard & monitor both at comfortable distances, rather than one or the other too close or two far away.
It looks too big to be a practical tablet, though.
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E_NOSIG
The PaceBook comes with a Transmeta Crusoe 600MHz processor, 4MB SMI Lynx graphics controller, 128MB SDRAM, 20GB HDD, 12.1" XGA TFT-LCD display with Windows ME or Windows 2000 OS. Optional accessories include CD-RW/DVD-ROM, wireless infrared remote control and CCD camera.
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
http://www.EmperorLinux.com/kiwi.html
Damn that's a cute little computer!
The price doesn't seem that out of the ballpark to me. The bill of material on this looks to be just about the same as a regular laptop, with the possible exception of whatever they are using to do the handwriting input. The IR link to the keyboard adds about $30 to the BOM, counting the extra battery for the keyboard.
Depending upon how they do the stylus, that could be the main factor on the cost delta from a standard laptop.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Actually, that sounds like a pretty good deal. PocketPCs (that's what they're calling WinCE these days) have no hard drive and tiny screens and the newest iPAQ is going to cost close to $600 when it is released. A good bargain laptop may cost around $1500 but a really tiny, ultralight mininotebooks with comparable abilities will usually set you back about $2000. If this machine will really cost $2000, that's just a small step up from an average laptop.
Does this
[body bgcolor="..."] is deprecated in HTML 4 and later, as it is a presentational attribute and should be implemented in CSS instead.
As long as websites have matted images at all, the world of 'content' and 'presentation' are inextricably mixed. PNG support is uneven and broken, and few people even know about it. It is within a creator's prerogative to make an image that assumes a certain background color. CSS is an optional component of the system.
When images depend on background, a [body bgcolor] is not too much to ask, and is a lot simpler than setting up a CSS clause or override.
We have to face it, there is just no one "right" way to make a web page. You can't just say 'bgcolor is deprecated' and expect every tool that's out there to break the old traditions and bow to the holy new standards.
"Be strict in what one produces, but liberal in what one accepts."
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A very basic laptop will run you $1500 but any mid-range laptop (Dell Latitiude C600 for example) will run you at least $2k. Did you look at this thing? It has features that blow a Latitude away!
Granted, everyone is entitled thier own opinions and you have yours, but compared to the current laptop market this is not bad for a unique versatile laptop like this...
the bastard child of an Apple iBook and my Colecovision...
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
Can't speak to the serial ports, but my Toshiba Satellite Pro 4200 has TV out.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
A VHS composite video output. This lets you plug it directly into a television set to put on a presentation for a small group, and it's great for playing games with the whole family.
My laptop has an S-video output connector on the left side. (Sadly, it's only active when I run Windows 98.) I got a 24-foot S-video to composite video cable for $24 at some Yahoo! store; it came with a free stereo audio cable. Or you can make your own adapter; it's merely a matter of mixing the signals on the luma and chroma pins.
Too bad my laptop's CPU is too slow (333 MHz Celeron-A) to decode DVD or DivX ;-) movies or to render Quake 3.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Why can't people learn to use HTML? Is it really all that difficult to state which background color you want?
<body bgcolor="..." > is deprecated in HTML 4 and later, as it is a presentational attribute and should be implemented in CSS instead. Some users prefer white text on a black background and have their default stylesheet set accordingly. (If you're using a Web browser that crashes when fed valid CSS, that's your problem. Mozilla has come a long way and is already an order of magnitude better than Netscape 4.x.)
Then I go look at it with Netscape under Linux which, thanfully, does not make everything glaringly white unless it is told to
Changing your "Window" color in Display Properties: Appearance will change the bgcolor of pages that don't specify a color in HTML or CSS.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Who is willing to have a low powered CPU?
Somebody who doesn't have a lot of money for batteries and will be using this thing for long periods of time away from AC power. "Low powered" does not necessarily mean "long execution time for a given program." Even then, document-editing programs are generally dominated not by CPU speed but by apparent latency; Transmeta's CPUs are powerful enough to run even the bloatware that is MS Office, but I see a potential problem with heavy use of GIMP filters. If you want to play 3d games, get a fscking game console. If you want to crunch RC5 keys, you don't need mobility; get a standard minitower.
Will I retire or break 10K?
About 2k, eh? Just about *all* laptops are about 2k. Sound familiar? Desktops were the same way until a couple years ago, then the major manufacturers finally started dropping price. At the time, I remarked that this might be a warning sign of "PC saturation" and I turned out to be frighteningly correct.
Laptops are still not saturated. As a consumer, I would like to see them saturate. They may be starting to a little. I have managed to find a few laptops in the $1000 range but I'd like to see major manufacturers advertising $600 laptops. That's right about my price point for a good new laptop.
It's really a shame that laptops didn't clone like the PC did. The race to see who can be thinner, lighter, more ergonomic has resulted in a slew of nonstandard parts. IIRC there were some standardization efforts but they were doomed in any attempt to produce something as useful as the ATX case/motherboard standard.
Anyway, I'm rooting for a "laptop downturn" to follow the PC downturn. If history repeats itself, a price war will precede it. I'm holding off on buying a new PC because I would like my next "PC" to be an affordable laptop with a docking station. Then I could have all the benefits of both stationary and mobile computing without having to buy two machines.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
This is of no intrest to a coder. "Wow, now I can code without a keyboard?? cool!" (Followd by repeated self eye poking.)
ender-iii
ender-iii
Its probably a cardboard mock-up.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
Almost makes me wish I hadn't bought my Dell Inspiron 4000.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Aren't most dongles parallel? (Not that I'd touch dongled software with a 10-ft pole, mind you). Parallel seems to be the cascadable device of choice (zipdrives, scanners, external CD-R's...) before USB completely takes over.
I think you got it wrong buddy. We keep Sales people employed. If we didn't create products that you could sell what exactly would you sell?
I hate this attitude that infrastructure people (HR, managers, salesman) have where they think they are the company. Without a product, there is not a company. We need your help to make things good, but YOU need our help just to have a job.
I agree that marketing and sales are very important. But some of those people seem to think they can do without the creative people and that just is not true.
A benefit of this division of labour is the simplicity of the viewer. There are VNC viewers on many different platforms.
~
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
It was called the Compaq Concerto. I did 3rd level tech support for Compaq back in 1995 and I can remember being totally in love with that machine. I was amazed pen based computing didn't take off at the time.
...Of course I am still amazed people put up with poorly backlit palms when they can get vibrant color...Just goes to show that the majority of people want to pay for crap and nothing extra, thank you very much.
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
What I want to know is, how does the Crusoe CPU run x86 code (e.g. OS binaries for Intel processors)? Does this require a special build or is the Transmeta chip able to just run Intel x86 native code with its VLIW instruction set?
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
...and all your redundant "yeah, but does it run Linux?" posts belong to us :-)
Seriously, it looks cool, but it's not a new idea: the Compaq Concerto, the recent Fujitsu machine someone pointed out, and (stretching waaaaay back), the GRiD computer.
The last of these was where the creators of the Palm (Jeff Hawkins, et al) started out. It was a pen-based, tablet-sized, x86 processor machine that could run DOS, GEOS, and (if prodded with a sufficiently large hammer) Windows (2.X IIRC). Unfortunately it was heavy, had a very reflective screen, and a slow processor to give it a decent battery life.
Where this makes to look some advances are in weight, battery life (thank you, Crusoe) and overall usability given a fairly zippy processor.
If you haven't fondled one of the new G4 Powerbooks yet, drop off your significant other at the video arcade and head on down to Frys. If you already have too much debt, I suggest leaving your credit card at home.
[Insert the usual disclaimer here]