User Review of Transmeta-Based Aquapad

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Remember when dot.com's were profitable and webpads were these cool little toys that were going to explode? Well that never happened but it seems like at least one company has actually come out with a Midori Linux webpad...called the Aquapad - looks kind of cool but only uses flash memory, so no storage :( I don't know if it would really be worth getting, but it looks like fun."

Comments

Pricing? Midori Linux vs. WinCE?

[GregGardner]

I find it interesting that if you follow the link in the review to a place where you can preorder one of these devices: www.aquapad.org, the pricing is $700 for both the Midori Linux version and the WinCE version. Doesn't it cost money for the WinCE license? And does it not cost money for the Midori Linux license (GPL)?

I guess this is just one reseller's version of the pricing. Maybe they are just taking a bigger margin on the Linux version. Too bad they don't pass the savings onto the consumer.

What's the use?

[boopus]

I had to admit I didn't make it all the way through the review of this particular model, but... The question that always comes to mind is what people are actualy going to use these for. UPS uses a "web pad" of sorts, and it seems to work very well for them, but that's a single use machine. The only real use I can see for these is when they are going to be deployed to do one thing, and have custom applications designed to do their one thing well.

Why? Because there isn't any decent way to get text into them. You can tap out characters on a screen, but that isn't the same as typing, and gets frusterating quickly.

Would it be cool to grab your web pad out of it's charging cradle and relax on the couch? Yes. Untill you decide you want to respond to the guy badmouthing the whole webpad concept on slashdot and try to type a response.

That being said, the lack of storage seems like a good thing, as there really aren't any uses for these that don't involve a network, that's why they're called a webpad.

In the end the geek in me will win, and I'll probably own one... But not untill they're on tigerdirect/ebay for $150.

Re:What's the use?

[aussersterne]

...there isn't any decent way to get text into the them. You can tap out characters on a screen, but that isn't the same as typing, and gets frustrating quickly.

There are very nice handwriting recognition systems for other operating systems, just not for Linux. I used Calligrapher for Windows CE (now bought by Microsoft and renamed to Transcriber) and used it to take notes all through college. I was able to scribble fast enough to keep up with professors and accuracy was better than 90-95%, more than enough to make readable notes. When I got my BA, I had >300 printed pages of notes which had been written by hand and recognized in real-time into Pocket Word documents.

My current PDA is a Newton 2100, which I would say gets about 99.5% accuracy for me (it actually "learns" your handwriting as you use it, getting better over time) and I e-mail and post to Usenet with it all the time. I don't even think about it; I never have to bring up the tap-tap keyboard, even for punctuation or unusual symbols like umlauts in German.

For Linux, unfortunately, there isn't anything comparable to either of these handwriting recognizers. I owned a Fujitsu Stylistic and installed Linux+KDE on it on a 12GB drive for a brief moment. I thought I was going to use it as my main computer, only plugging a keyboard into the PS/2 port when I needed to to extensive data entry. Unfortunately, I gave up and sold it because the only Linux-based pen input I could find at all was xscribble, a horrible implementation of Palm's Graffiti, and much less helpful for serious use than Calligrapher/Transcriber under CE or Rosetta/Paragraph under Newton, meaning that with the Stylistic+Linux, I had to have the keyboard plugged in all the time to be useful.

Natural handwriting recognition exists, and it works, quickly and accurately. Just because Palm users or Linux users have never seen it doesn't mean it's not there.

I don't understand the point...

[FastT]

I don't understand why manufacturers spend so much time and effort making bad design choices with pad-type mobile computers. Why not just take a standard high-end laptop, put a touch screen where the keyboard is, and bundle a top-flight handwriting recognition package with it? Why is it any more complicated than this? I see great opportunities for people who are in the laptop market to buy such a variant--it makes much more sense if the machine will be used in social situations, or in vertical markets.