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Review of the Cybiko Xtreme
Levendis23 writes: "We've just posted our latest review: the Cybiko Xtreme. Pretty slick little gadget, with RF networking and ability to set up bluetooth-like clouds so that other units can talk to each other, play games, or swap files. You can can even use another unit at as a repeater to bounce your message to another unit out of your range."
Just a couple days ago my father related to me how he was telling his students about Fidonet - sending a message across country by having it hop modem'd servers in the good ol' days - and the kids saying "Why not just use the internet?"
So having these little babies spread across a country could easily lead to a "Cybiko across America", eh? An alternative to the U.S. gov't filtering all our packets? Hmmm...
I had one of the original "classic" cybiko's. Why did I have it? Because they gave them away by the boatload in a contest on their website where everyone who signed up won one pretty much. A lot of people who got them took them right back to Best Buy/CompUSA/Staples/Toys R US etc. and got themself a $100 return credit. I wonder how many of these give-aways they're including in the "half a million" they claim they sold.
.com/tech company down the tubes. Their new one seems pretty nice though, the size was one of the kickers with the original, maybe they'll make it this time.
That aside, it was really a pretty neat toy for any one in school still. It was no PDA, but it wasn't meant to be one either. They eliminated features that you can live without in a device targeted towards school kids (touch screen, high res screen, size, etc.) and they added some really nice features (wireless networking which could chat, play games, check email, etc). It would supposedly automatically network with nearby Cybiko's so you could chat, and play games with them, and if one of them was plugged into a computer, you could use that one to access the internet to check email and stuff, though I dunno how well these things actually worked as I never met anyone with one besides me.
I was a little surprised these things didn't catch on more. I'm guessing that's why they gave so many away, because this seems like the sorta thing with a critical mass. On its own, it sucks (not much fun to chat with yourself), but the more people who have it, the better it becomes. Add in the school mentality of the more people who have it, the cooler it becomes as well, and I thought this thing had a lot of potential if they could have gotten the spark started.
But in their giveaway they screwed up big time by not including an age limit at that time, so the wrong people ended up with these things, and those people took them back to the stores, thus taking away even more sales for them! I'm surprised to see that these guys are still around, I was sure at the time after that mistake, and giving away 1000's of these things that surely they would be just another
Though this also seems like exactly the sort of thing where just as it starts to get popular, school administrators will start banning it, so I don't think they're out of the woods yet......
Don't forget, AOL is directing the development of the Cybiko. The Cybiko will be AOL's Palm Pilot.
Look away from the light.
Software Wars
A quick perusal of their website doesn't reveal any thing that would allow someone do their own coding. Toys like this are only worth having if they are hackable :). Anyone know of any projects to hack them or provide dev. tools.
You can get the development tools and documentation from the Cybiko web site. They've been available for free right from the start.
I used to be active in the cybiko community. Here are some links:
www.cybla.com
www.cybimunk.com
www.devcybiko.com
Hope you find these useful