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Casio's Lin-Win Hybrid Laptop To Ship Tomorrow
Xuff writes: "As reported by News.com, Casio is going to begin shipping a laptop with both Windows ME and a stripped down version of Linux. The 2.1 pound laptop has a 600mhz Crusoe and 20 gigs under the hood, along with an 8.4 inch screen. It will retail for $1,999." It's a nice to see the tiny laptops mentioned last year actually emerging.
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
> There gets to be a point where laptops become too small to be usable.
they're too *big* today. My first laptop had a 40x8 display (but you could use a shift key to see another 8 lines) and *no* popup lid; the display was above the keyboard. With slight reconfiguration, you could have fit a 512x392 display instead.
some days, I even filled the 24k memory . . .
hawk
And if they could code HTML they might even be able to sell something. No wonder dotcoms are falling like flies.
(try looking at the LX pages in Netscape if you don't understand what I'm talking about).
The prices aren't very cheap, either, compared to the Casio's $1.999.
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Niklas Nordebo | niklas at nordebo.com
I run an Acer 312T which is about the same size from a couple of years back (800x600 8.4" screen , P233MMX, same size and weight as The Perl Cookbook, V90 modem, 2 PC slots, USB).
It runs SuSE 7.1 like a dream (I upped the disk to 6Gb and the memory to 80Mb) Small keyboards take a little getting used to, but it makes all those emacs compound keystrokes easier, and using a small laptop like this on a crowded tube train is much easier than one of those behemoths I see people with.
With APM enabled, and tweaking kflushd to let the disk spin down for long periods of time (once emacs has loaded all my files), I get much better battery life under Linux than I did under Windows (nearer to 2 hours than the less-than-one-hour under Win98).
This new machine is a bit better from the look of it (battery life, built in network card, and I guess the Cruesoe will make it a bit quicker), but not worth me upgrading yet. So if you can't justify the cost of these but you like the size, look around for a second hand 312T or 313T instead.
T
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
Why don't they put Win ME and XP on the same laptop too? Then it'd be win-win for everyone.
Unfortunately, this Casio (as well as many recent laptops) uses ACPI, for which the support is still a bit lacking.
I've seen the Fujitsu models (called LooX here in Japan), but the keyboard feels *really* cheap on both of them. In the end, I went with a Thinkpad (with a great keyboard).
From the Casio page:
"SOFTWARE SWITCH
A; Windows Millennium, B; Tool"
...which would seem to indicate that Linux is called "Tool" now.
Pity they don't actually acknowledge the people who developed it... and do they provide source code, I wonder?
Linux does have power management (I'm working on my Linux laptop right now) and my laptop runs 4 hours on Linux, less than 3 hours on Windows.
However, your mileage may vary.
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You may like my a cappella music
A friend of mine works at Nike on clothing product development, sort of the R&D end of Nike. Her current work is in wearables, and though their initial market is athletic performance monitoring we've had some fascinating conversations about what she has seen and her take on where it's headed.
All the components are in place for wearables to begin entering the consumer market EXCEPT for the market pull at the current price point. It's becoming common place for everyone to walk around with their ear-buds in place while talking on the cell phone. Not much of a leap there to putting on goggles.
The keyboard is a little trickier. What I'd love to see is a 'Johnny Pneumonic' style virtual keybord, but without gloves or anything in my hands. Perhaps a camera captures the reflection off my fingernails, or some sensor correlates which muscles are being activated in order to determine hand position and finger movement.
Perhaps the more interesting thing is if we allow traditionally 'hard' interfaces to become software, and therefor highly configurable, what will those interfaces morph to look like? The keyboard is a metaphor that we inhereted from the typewriter which is a mechanical efficiency built on top of printing technology. Keyboards are good UI's, but so is voice, or eye movement, or facial expressions. I know that's just dreaming at this point but those technologies do exist.
When an existing technology faces market pressure to change but is reaching its limitations it creates market conditions which are favorable to the creation of disruptive technology. And that's where we're at. It's already showing up in everywhere from shopfloor controls to Webvan deliveries, but it won't be long before these are consumer devices.
bnf
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Man that's tiny.. I thought my 15" screen on my Dell was bad, but running resolutions greater than 800x600 on this thing will simply be a strain on the eyes.
On the plus side, it's nice to see companies shipping machines with dual-boot configurations rather than just Windows or just Linux. This is probably the way to get consumers to use try out Linux--rather than give them only one or the other, give them both.
I wonder how Microsoft feels about this, however. And I wonder if they will do anything to try to stop this.
This is not your laptop, ok. There are already TONS of laptops which have 10 inch screens, and are as big as the screen. To get any smaller you need a smaller screen. What's the matter with a 10 inch VAIO that you seem to need to slam this machine, as if it's trying to be a 10 inch VAIO. It's not a 10 inch VAIO. It wants to be smaller. I'm sorry if I'm repeating myself but I can't understand why someone finds offense with a laptop smaller than what they want when such laptops as they want already exist.
Maybe you want a laptop which use some sort of space warp of bag-of-holding effect. A roll-up screen might be the best way. But those aren't here yet, so we HAVE to give up mondo displays to get to near-libretto size.
KLAATU, BORADA, NIh*ahem*
I am certain that's the first time this has happened.
Actually, we've had LAN parties there, brought in a TV/VCR combo and watched Anime (Patlabor and other family friendly stuff), played (pen and paper) RPGs and generally used it as we wished. I do *lots* of noctournal activities (Rocky Horror, Live Action Role Playing, etc), and I am a big fan of 24 hour Diners. If you're a regular, getting access to power outlets is easy (even if, like at Steak and Shake, you have to plug into the ceiling). I've even gotten the use of a phone line to dial in and irc. And this is all at many different locations - you'd be surprised how cool some of the night wait staff and management is.
24 hour diners are a haven for cops, hookers, goths, punks, gays and other freaks - hackers, otaku, role players and other fringers fit right in.
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Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Recently, at a late night conversation at Dennys, I explained the difference between the various "DV" connectors (basically, they are all the exact same, just under different trademarks).
It wasn't until someone pointed it out that I realized how odd it is... Apple has a poetic word like "Firewire" that you might expect from a company like Sony (with its Playstation, Walkman, etc.), while Sony has "iLink" despite Apple's fascination with the i- prefix (iMac, iBook, etc).
I've noticed that most new IEEE 1394 ports are labeled "DV" or simply "Video" on the outside of the case. Sorta like the PC I saw in a hole-in-the-wall PC repair place... the USB ports were labeled "Mouse" and "Keyboard".
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Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
-jhp
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
not a victory for consumers, however. this configuration lacks an important option - the freedom to decline windows and save $100.
You just haven't looked hard enough.... :-)
apt-get install picturebook longrun jogdiald
or download from
http://samba.org/picturebook/
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/cpu/crusoe/
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pascal.brisset/vaio/
then you'll get, among other things,
setbrightness [0-254]
vaiobat (read battery status)
longrun -f [economy|performance] (set power saving mode; you can also change specific settings)
jogdiald (which I use to get page up/page down events from the jog dial in X)
(Hopefully bits of these will make it into the kernel before much longer.)
- Toshiba Libretto L1/060TNMM, 600 MHz Crusoe, 2.4 lbs
- Fujitsu LX-S, 533 MHz Crusoe, 2.2 lbs
- Fujitsu LX-X, 533 MHz Crusoe, 3.3 lbs, DVD reader
Impressive stuff, and all models have been released for at least 4 months. Now, where can I trade some karma for a 50" plasma display?Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
I believe it's a 15mm pitch (Thinkpad, Stowaway size is 19mm). I've used the Japanese model and it feels OK although a bit slower than the full-size model (except of course all the punctuation is rearranged on the Japanese model).
I've always heard from people running Linux on notebooks that power management isn't there, with the result that Windows 2000 gives you much better battery life. Is Crusoe tuned for Linux? Does Linux now have Power Management features? How can they claim increased battery life when switching to Linux?
I couldn't find any mention of Linux on the page linked to in the posting. However, I did find this on that page, which initially amused and confused me: ;^) Then I understood that they were (probably) talking about different types of batteries. Oh, and that the large type actually gives you more battery time as well, that kind of screws my initial "theory"... Anyway, I think this is kind of expensive-looking, somehow. I'd rather go with a Sony Picturebook. I'd pick a Sony over a Casio every day, basically.
Battery Type: Lithium-ion
Operating Time: Standard Type about 4.5H Large Type about 9.0H
Operation hours depends on usage situation.
I first thought they said that you get twice the battery time by changing to a smaller font in the interface...
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
That's what I was wondering, too, then I bought my kneetop Doesheepa MIB3000. First I inflated the keyboard (wondering: how many times am I going to waste my breath on this? then, I found a small compressor available for just this purpose on Adiposebrain!) and hooked up the tiny display, which is about the size and shape of a 12-sided die. Imagine my surprise when it projected my Bjornix Jobbit desktop on a light mist of water vapor and negative ions. Hopefully, there will be kernel support for the aromatherapy module soon.
It's nice to see them following Apple's lead and abandoning legacy ports... no standard serial port, no parallel port on this machine.
;-) . The iBook is a better deal for me, but this Casio laptop is pretty nice.
It compares nicely to the new iBook, however.
The iBook is larger @ 4.9 pounds, but has 2 USB ports, 12" display, and no PC Card slot and a 6-pin FireWire port, which means you can connect bus-powered FireWire devices. Plus it has a groovy case
Interesting they call it a serial port and not FireWire, wonder if it means something or was a simple mistake
Yes, it does mean something. It means that this isn't made by Apple. FireWire is simply Apple's trademark for the standard which is IEEE1394.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
These things are great, I suppose, but people are forgetting the ultimate purpose of a lightweight portable computer: providing a secure terminal. Even if you carry around a floppy disk with PuTTY everywhere you go, you're still trusting the system you run it on; in contrast, if you carry around a laptop running OpenBSD, you can plug it in anywhere and have a reasonable expectation of security.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Why... seems to have enough power to run any OS out there... unless there is something they aren't telling us.
My only complaint... 8.4" screen. They should have made the push to the 10" screen. Oh well. Back to "studying" for finals.
Later.
It also ignores the fact that 1024x768 on a 21" monitor is substantially different from the same resolution on a 15" monitor.
So as you say, it should be a user preference. There should be a global scale multiplier. This would be useful also to allow for squeezing things up really tight on the odd occasion you find yourself sitting in front of a 640x480 monitor.
Rich
wow. fell a long way in a short time. Even the computers are making fun of linux, "tool" indeed.
$2600 is cheap?
Just think, you could carry TWO of these around at about the same weight of the average laptop. Who needs to dual boot? :)
I am certain that's the first time this has happened.
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--hongpong.com
There gets to be a point where laptops become too small to be usable. In the early days on laptops, when this issue came up because regardless of the physical dimentions of the laptop, the keyboards were shrinking, and the displays were routinely only 60% of the size of the laptop lid. At this point there was a lot of overhead for various system componants which have now been shrunk down to miniscule sizes.
Now, instead of getting small keyboards because of the mechanicas of keyboards, or small displays becauce of the technology of displays, the only barier is the overall physical dimensions of the devices. We're getting smaller and smaller user interface componants merely because of the overall physical dimentions of the box (I realize someone pointed out thet they could have gone with a 10" screen where they went with 8" here, but as a general rule, this is valid I think).
So, I ask, 'How Small is Too Small?"
There comes a point where the shrinking size of these devices will make them unusable. Alternative user interface technologies like Retinal Scanning Displays and Optical Response Pointing Devices will come of age not because the technology has matured, but because we simply can't efficiently use treditional laptops that are any smaller then they actually are.
--CTH
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--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
The "higher resolution = smaller controls" setup is pretty silly, really. What we should have is a system where the text and the user interface are sized independently of the screen resolution, and merely get more detailed as resolution increases past the point where they would become too small to use. (I know you _can_ do this sort of thing for text and so on in most operating systems, but it doesn't work automatically, or at all for icons, pointers, scrollbars, and the like - and it should.)
With a screen that size, and a keyboard that looks to be not much wider.. is it even POSSIBLE to type? It's hard enough on a regular sized laptop keyboard, I can't imagine shrinking it any more. (either that or the pic they have has a larger screen) 2000 is still too much for me to buy a laptop tho