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.

Comments

IBM prototype

[Lumpish Scholar]

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.

Porting is straightforward.

[Christopher Thomas]

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).

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 ... to develop" a device like this. They look serious about it, but for now, it's still vapour.

Balmer tested one and had to piss, see the video

[VampireByte]

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.