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Affordable Wearables May Arrive By Christmas
Rhinobird writes: "I was just catching up on some stuff and ran across this article on New Scientist. It describes a new Hitachi wearable computer which is planned for a release of Christmas 2001. More info can be found at Hitachi's site here(1) and here(2)." These will come with Windows CE officially, but unofficially, how long could it take to make them run other OSes as well? At $2000, wearables might finally hit a lot of toylists.
I won't buy one of those - I can imagine walking down the street surfing the web, an then being attacked by some drunkard yelling: It's the Borg, get 'em!
And then (seeing they are running a Microsoft OS), CodeRed III r00ts them all, and everybody turns into remote Zombies attacking anything open source!
No Thanks!
Those baseball hats that carry 2 cans of beer are the pinnacle of wearable utilities... Affordable too!
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
These will come with Windows CE officially Great, can't wait til I have to piss really bad an can't unzip my pants due to a BSOD =)
How long do you think it'll be until there are law's against wearable computer's while driving like the NY cell phone ban. If talking on the phone is distracting, what about P0RN!!
Here is a photo of an IBM prototype.
Interesting example display (tiny, very clear, may be a complete mock up): I can't tell whether or not it's MS Windows, but it's surely Netscape.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
How soon we forget! You can get the source to Windows CE and modify it to do whatever you want (not BSOD, for example). And IIRC, you can distribute any modified code, as long as it isnt for commercial use.
Wouldn't it be much simpler to linux-ify Windows CE, than to CE-ify Linux?
This is just a stock SH4 machine with custom peripherals. *BSD has been ported to many such devices, and so has Linux (Dreamcast being the first that comes to mind, but there are SH4-based PDAs which are probably supported too).
... to develop" a device like this. They look serious about it, but for now, it's still vapour.
If demand exists, and if the product rolls out in quantity at a decent price point, distributions for pick-your-favourite-*NIX will be out in short order.
Bear in mind that all we've seen as a "license agreement
At $2000, wearables might finally hit a lot of toylists.
:
For some reason, i first read that as
At $2000, wearables might finally hit a lot of toilets
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
I don't know if I'll be able to afford to give this to both my boss, and my inlaws..
I love the idea of wearables. I'm sure most people who are at all acquainted with technology feel that way. But I'm afraid I don't see the market for them at this juncture.
Just look at the pda market. Palm and Handspring are on their last legs; Apple killed its Newton project; Sony's deriving some marketing value from putting its brand on every dog turd in sight but hasn't made much revenues. What the wearables market is supposed to be two years from now is what the pda market ought to have been two years ago, but instead we're left with a collapsing industry.
For the most part, people don't want to be chained to a machine of any sort. They'll spend obscene amounts of money on a computer they can shove under their desk, but they can't bear to carry one in their back pocket. To draw another analogy, look at the cellphone market. A few years ago, everyone was all excited about having one. Today, people purposefully leave theirs at home so they don't have to be just a phonecall away from the office.
Frankly, it'll be at least a decade before people start being amenable to the idea of integrating technological augmentations into their own personal space like that -- about how long it'll take for the generation weaned on mainstream internet usage to have an income to buy these things with. Before then, I'm just not holding my breath.
"we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!" --Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
$2000? For fuck's sake why would I pay that for an underpowered little computer? For that money I could have two or three high powered desktop systems, or better yet, one of those Apple titanium thingies if I wanted something portable.
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
This video shows a demonstration gone bad. It appears that a Windows CE handheld playing ancient Miami Sound Machine music shorted out while Balmer had it in his pocket.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
I'll just wait till they release the underwearable computer, which ought to be *lots* more fun... ;-)
My current wristtop (that I wear every day) was purchased in 1986 and does log & trig and metric conversions.
I'll never get used to what is being passed off as "wearable". To me, wearable means wristtop.
Second, the linux port (Debian!) for this processor is already stable, homepage: http://www.m17n.org/linux-sh/, all we'd need to know is what kind of display it will have.
Step 1, post a few sentences that bears some semblance to the story:
"Rhinobird writes: "I was just catching up on some stuff and ran across this article on New Scientist. It describes a new Hitachi wearable computer which is planned for a release of Christmas 2001. More info can be found at Hitachi's site here(1) and here(2).""
Step 2, obviously post some anti-MS rhetoric. Slashdot readers love that:
"These will come with Windows CE officially, but unofficially, how long could it take to make them run other OSes as well?"
Step 3, post some mildly amusing but ultimately annoying "dept." comment:
""from the stop-wincing-in-disbelief dept.""
Wrap it up with another anti-Microsoft spiel if you can. We post at least one Microsoft article daily, and a majority of our readers use IE, so it'd be best to piss them off. Don't worry about the sub-100,000 userID's: those guys will defend us. They never leave.
I actually work with the Wearable Computing Group at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Most of our research right now is done on wearables from Xybernaut, the company that Hitachi is partnering with as mentioned in the press release. The Xybernaut systems we have now are regular p200s (192MB RAM, 4GB disk, serial/PS2/USB ports, pretty much all the stuff you'd find on a laptop) running Red Hat 6.2. When we got them, they cost about $4000.
The biggest gripe most people have about them (aside from their general bulk) is the awful Head Mounted Display (HMD) they use. It works by using a small 640x480 LCD display pointing away from you with uses a concave mirror to reflect the image back into your eye. There are a lot of problems with them - it's very hard to get the entire screen in focus and visible, you have this big arm holding the display in front of your face, and it's almost useless in sunlight. There's also the privacy issue of the fact that anyone can just look at the display itself (which, like I said, points away from you) and see a horizontally flipped image of whatever you're currently viewing.
A useful wearable device, almost more than anything, has to have a display that is easy to wear, small, and unobtrusive. I'm curious as whether this Hitachi device will achive that to a better extent than the current Xybernaut HMD.
You could wear running socks running SOCKS
Uhh or if your 18 then you could invest it now and that same 2000$ could help you retire 5 years earlier. As a donation to a worthy cause 2000$ could help build homes in areas of the world hit by natural disasters (where they are often cheaper to build) and pay for medicine where needed ... You could also buy a lot of beer, or chocolate pudding and take at least 20 trips to *really good* restaurants.
Or of course you could also spend the money on a ***toy computer to wear*** ...
I guess it really just depends on your priorities.
"we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!" --Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy