Nokia Set-top Boxes to Ship with AmigaDE

AtlasT writes: "Amiga Inc. announced today that Nokia will be shipping their Linux-powered "Mediaterminal" STBs with AmigaDE pre-installed. These news along with the previously announced cooperation with Sharp for their Zaurus PDA make the future of Amiga Inc. look a bit brighter indeed. What we who use computers more often than PDAs and STBs wonder is when we'll see the release of AmigaOS 4 and new machines. If you'd like to have a pre-view of AmigaDE and some applications you can buy the AmigaDE Player for Linux or Windows. I wouldn't mind running games like Payback, a GTA2 clone, on a PDA!" The Nokia Media Terminal was supposed to be launched in the second quarter of 2001, then by the end of 2001, now... who knows. Update: 02/23 21:24 GMT by M : It seems the Mediaterminal is already available but expensive.

Comments

Too expensive

[Sircus]

With a 566MHz Celeron and that amount of RAM (64Mb), they won't reach the price point which would lead to mass-market uptake. There's also way too many connectors, etc., etc.

Having worked on a set-top box project, the prime goal seems to be cost-reduction on a per-unit basis. Various developments are in the pipeline which will enable PVR/MPEG/DVD/DVB boxes to be made at a cost point where cable and sat providers can afford to subsidise them to a zero cost. This is where the market lies for these things, and the first company to succesfully bring such a box to market will be the one who wins the big share of that market.

We've been hearing about STBs for a long time. Projects like these, with or without Amiga software, are the reason we hear a lot and see nothing.

Amiga have been claiming to have deals with STB manufacturers for a long time now. Aside from press releases and cryptic mails from Fleecy Moss, I've never seen anything solid come from any of these.

Do you believe?

[mbrubeck]

I believe in the second coming of Amiga! Death to the nonbelievers!

Re:A bunch of really dumb questions

[ColdGrits]

No.

It is related in name only. the current owners bought the name from Gateway 2 or 3 years ago, promised the Earth to existing Amiga users, and then proceeded to do stuff all except rebadge and try to resell TAO's software.

Oh, and put out lots of announcements of annoncements.

Oh, and tell us how wonderful it is working with Corel (nothing happened), how the Sharp Zaurus (sp?) was shipping with AmigaDE (it doesn't), and how AmigaInc was helping Matroxto design the new Matrox gfx chips (they aren't).

Despite their best efforts to kill off AmigaOS, though, third parties are stilldeveloping it thankfully. However, AmigaInc has nothing to do with thateffort (other than getting huge royalties on the name when AmigaOS4 finally gets released, if ever).

This isn't bad at all.

[tcc]

Of course a lot of you will say "where does it fit, why would I want this" well the fact is it's not a majority of people that owns a PVR or a media station box (new buzzword?) should ring a bell.

I wanted one of these since I saw the replay/tivo hardware, but 2 things stopped me, first generation so probably there would be firmware issues, better revisions not too far ahead, etc.. and the other was the price for the non-upgradability (well without hacking it :) ) that it offered (and we can also add the price/meg of the HDDs that are getting very interresting the more the time go), and HDTV support, I could go on for days. OF COURSE the positive aspect of being an early adopter is that you already have the technology and can actually do something while the others wish.. but if I would have bought it right off I wouldn't have wanted to spend again on another box. The dream machine of course is some kind of tivo, with ethernet access, dual IDE brackets, divx codec in firmware, transcoder from grabbed->divx realtime, DVD+RW, and for most of you "not running windows" :).

This machine is a step in the right direction, and yes I am an avid amiga fan, if you think all the amiga people are lame zealots, you probably never owned or programmed or enjoyed that piece of advanced technology way ahead of it's time. That being said, I don't beleive it would do a comeback on the desktop unless it doesn't repeat all of linux's errors or arguable moves, even then, there would be a great need of marketting power and it doesn't mean it would still take off...(just look at where BE is today...) Nevertheless, amiga was famous for video, for one thing, whether it was for video processing, all it's gazillion video output possibilities, colors or advanced features, when you heard amiga you were thinking "multimedia" before that term became a buzzword on a 486PC that had a cdrom.

I think it's very nice to see amiga striking tangible deals like this and finally see a product, it's not what everybody wanted (i.e. a computer that rights off the bat kills windows mac and linux and is so revolutionnary that it will be the second video toaster), this will probably never happen because of the current infrastructure in companies, and besides, a lot of projects have tried before, and there are already 1000s of people paid just to think of the future and desings, and they aren't all FOC people. The time when one person could really change things in the computer realm is probably over (of course there's always exeptions so I keep an open mind) what you need to target now is "what is going to be the next electronic revolution and how can I bypass all my competitors" Cellular technology is gaining a lot since a few years, so is HDTV or any new video technology... I just hope they do the right moves and not to many errors, I wish them the best.

The MediaTerminal is cool...

[CondeZer0]

Hi

michael: FYI the media terminal *was launched by the end of 2001*, I live in Sweden, and they
have been selling for quite a while now.

We also had a demo of the new version, that will be launched in 2 weeks or so, in the FOSDEM, at
the Mozilla developers room, it was really great, it runs Linux(2.4.10+ I think), uses an embedded
version of mozilla as browser(0.9.5+, and will be upgraded automatically to 1.0 when it's released),
have 2 USB, 2 FireWire, 1 PCMCIA, Ethernet, and I don't remember what else, but it was really cool...
(full specs here: http://www.nokia.com/multimedia/tech_specs.html)

I don't have a TV, so I doubt I'll buy one, but you can be sure that it will take very short
time to be hacked, also almost all(if not all) the software it runs it's opensource, and you
can find it at: https://www.ostdev.net/(I think they are
going to release even more software there in the very near future)

A really cool project, that uses opensource software... <rant>ah, sorry, I forgot that this
days slashdot is full of M$ zealots that run WinXP/IE and think that in linux you have to do
"./configure; make; make install" to install anything(have you heard of RedCarpet? that makes
me think.... RedCarpet/Ximian desktop for the MediaTerminal? that could be cool...(not for me,
of course ;) )</rant>

[End rambling, back on topic ]

I think it's great that somebody is doing something like this, have in mind that this
will compete directly with the next version of the X-Box(HomeStation or whatever it's
going to be called), and I really prefer to see people using a product based on opensource
(so I can hack it if I want) than having to run windows on their TV(<troll>anyone wants to get
a BSOD in the middle of his favorite movie ;) </troll>, ah, and one last thing, the person
from nokia(hi Magnus!) that made the presentation, said that they are going to release xDSL modems
for it, that means that this modems will have drivers for Linux, something that in the past was a really
big problem... in resume(I have to go back to work!) this is a "Very good thing(tm)" and
anybody that cares about open source should be happy that it exists..(even if like me, many
of us aren't probably going to ever use it, after all, we don't have a life, right? ;)


\\Uriel


P.S.: I use FreeBSD with Ion instead of any desktop, but it's really funny
to see people complaining that linux is hard to use when even a 3 years
old could install RedHat(in my experience much easier than installing any
WinXX)

P.P.S.: Hmmm. I think in the end it could be useful for me: a Plan9 CPU or file server...
and I could mount the TV screen(if I had one) from my Plan9 termianl ;)