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Transmeta Powered High-End Portable?
NETHED writes: "CNet is running a
story on the oQo (Very flash heavy) ultra portable computer. 'Along with Windows XP, it will come with a 5800 Crusoe processor from Transmeta, a 10GB hard drive, 256MB of memory, connection ports for FireWire and USB (universal serial bus), and wireless networking connections through either WiFi or Bluetooth.' Sounds like a winner, considering they want it to cost LESS than 1000USD. Now, only if this didn't sound like vaporware."
Hey, comon now, i was just quoting C-Net! :)
--sig fault--
isn't indicative of the speed of their computers.
doh! can you feel the slashdotting...?
This device sounds pretty cool. However, I think Transmeta is going to have a hard time penetrating the corporate market which seems to be where the profits are. Big corporations are so pro-Intel, it makes it tough for the AMDs and Transmetas of the world.
OK, so it doesn't really *need* it, but why not?
Is the storage solid state? (I can't get the article right now). If not, it seems like they could double the storage without impacting the price. Maybe these are "old" specs?
This could have a very interesting effect on MMORPG players. Why ever disconnect (unless your internet access fees are exorbitant)? Just pull it from your station at home, play on the bus/carpool to work, and then stash it in your drawer, checking frequently that your macros are still working properly.
I know I'd find it incredibly usefuly in WW2Online, for those moments I notice a weakness in the front, and just five minutes of game time could make a difference!
What the heck is transmeta? Liquid? Gas? Have fun with your gadget, but I'll stick with my *electricity* powered portable thank you. And don't complain to me if you can't buy a transmeta refill canister at CompUSA. I never saw any.
Sounds to me like the second is just a battery and DVD drive - I assume it also has a regular keyboard, and a larger screen, and therefore won't be so "empty" as implied.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Start-up shrinks PC to palm size
By Michael Kanellos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
April 16, 2002, 9:45 AM PT
First there was the pocket calculator. Then there was the pocket organizer. And if start-up OQO gets its way, the next big thing will be the pocket PC.
The Seattle-based company is showing off a full-fledged "ultra personal" computer this week at Microsoft's WinHEC 2002 conference. The computer is slightly thicker but roughly the same size as handhelds currently coming out from Palm or Hewlett-Packard.
The major difference is that the OQO device, which will come out in the second half of the year for around $1,000, is a complete Windows XP computer. Along with Windows, it will come with a 5800 Crusoe processor from Transmeta, a 10GB hard drive, 256MB of memory, connection ports for FireWire and USB (universal serial bus), and wireless networking connections through either WiFi or Bluetooth.
The screen measures just four inches in diameter, roughly the same size as those on a Palm, but the company will also sell docking stations so that it can be used like a normal desktop or laptop. The device measures 3 inches by 5 inches, is 0.9-inches thick and weighs about half a pound.
"We see this as 'This is your only computer,'" said Colin Hunter, executive vice president of OQO. "It isn't a PDA (personal digital assistant). With this device you can dock it in and it is your PC."
The hardware market is notoriously harsh on start-ups. Other companies, including a Taiwanese manufacturer called Saint Song, have also tried to promote miniature PCs before. OQO executives and partners, however, say that current market circumstances have opened opportunities for super-small devices.
The technological foundation to make robust, miniature computers finally exists, for example. The OQO uses the same tiny hard drive from Toshiba that Apple Computer incorporates into the latest iPod. The company also worked with Micron to ensure that memory could be packed into the device as densely as possible.
A lot of the design work at OQO, which was founded by engineers who worked on Apple's Titanium PowerBook went toward reducing the size of the power supply and the overall integration of the components, Hunter said.
Another factor at play supporting handhelds is that consumers and corporate America have become acclimated to portability. The explosive growth, until recently, of handheld devices and cell phones established the market for portable devices.
Once the infrastructure for wireless networking is established, ultra-portable PCs will become more popular than PDAs because they can do more, said Dave Ditzel, chief technology officer of Transmeta. Plus, it also gets rid of the data synchronization problem because everything moves to one device.
"You can do full Web browsing with Internet Explorer. You can't do that on a PDA," he said. The Crusoe processor inside the OQO, he noted, runs at 800MHz and contains 512KB of cache, a data reservoir for quick data access. Current handheld processors max out at 206MHz and have much smaller caches.
The OQO is actually the first of a wave of computers with nontraditional designs. The device weighs 250 grams, about half a pound, but there are other computers coming out that will weigh 800 grams. PC manufacturers will also begin to show off tablets that can convert into notebooks, Ditzel said.
"This is a smaller form factor than Microsoft envisioned," he said. "There is a trend toward everything getting smaller."
Despite the faster chip, the batteries on the OQO run about 9.5 hours, Ditzel and Hunter said. Although the Crusoe processor runs on fairly low amounts of energy, the small screen size helps enormously.
Two different docking stations will also be released with the device. One will allow the PC to be used like a desktop. A second will look like a notebook with a 14-inch screen. However, except for an extra battery and a CD or DVD drive, it will be empty. The OQO will slide into a slot.
The first version of the OQO measures 0.9-inches thick, but thinner versions will follow, Hunter added.
That is pure and simple FUD and you know it. I am running a 650mHz PIII with 256 Megs and 11 Gig and I have more than enought room for everything plus. XP runs just as stable and fast as any Linux box with KDE or Gnome running. (for those of us who like a GUI)
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
leaving just barely enough for mozilla
"The screen measures just four inches in diameter"
Um, so is oQo introducing the hot new 1940s-style-television round-screen craze to the market, too?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
http://www.fujitsupc.com/www/products_notebooks.sh tml?products/notebooks/p2000
With less hard disk and no CDRW/DVD
This looks kewl and all, but why are ppl trying to get PC functionality from a Handheld device...Handhelds are good at things like keeping appointments, names, reading short E-Mails, Reading E-Books, Math, and generally doing simple tasks...
And why XP? There are no real handheld apps built for it.
Some ppl in the handheld industry are trying too much...
Granted, Bluetooth will be a nice feature once it becomes standard...but that's not what they've done here...
Lets see...I can buy a decent Palm for Real Notebook for less than $1000 total. Now, you might argue that the notebook is cumbersome...this might be so, but then you get a 13 inch screen as opposed to a 4 inch screen...
Handhelds are a tool, they are not a replacement for a Notebook/Desktop...those solutions work very nicely for their intended purpose.
Hopefully we'll be able to counter the effect soon. The tech is there, it just needs to happen
I see from the article that it's an 800mhz processor, but does anyone know how it compares in performance to other 800mhz processors? Yes, I did the requisite Google search but didn't come up with any hard data.
It sounds like a great litte box at a great price, but if it sucks to write/compile code on, it's little more than a shiny toy.
it's not going to stop until you wise up, no it's not going to stop. so just give up.
(BTW, "definition")
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Well, I'm sure they wanted to put a larger hard drive in the unit but since they are using the small hard drive from Toshiba (the one that comes in the iPod) I don't think they had much of a choice what with only 5 and 10 gig versions.
Regardless, this thing seems pretty well connected. With that connectivity, why not store your mp3's on an external drive/system? Then you can just stream your music via samba or http or something to the device? You could probably have a small (1 gig or so) "cache" of your favorite songs at the time. I'd love to have an mp3 player with a built in 802.11[a|b] card. My home and my workplace have wireless internet access so I'd just need an hour or so of music for the commute and such.
Looks like a pretty cool device but I'd want to see if the small screen is crisp enough to read and browse the web with.
Geoffeg
To alleviate DoS effect:
e ss / qo_16apr02.html
http://www.transmeta.com/about/press/special_pr
"Seattle, Washington - April 16, 2002 - OQO (pronounced "oh-q-oh"), today at Microsoft's WinHEC Conference, announced the world's first ultra-personal computer, representing a new PC category that could transform personal computing the same way the cell phone has revolutionized telecommunications.
OQO's first product is a highly functional and versatile handheld wireless computer that easily becomes a notebook or desktop PC. Measuring just 4.9 x 2.9 x 0.9 [inches] and weighing less than nine ounces, OQO's PC is a full-function computer running Microsoft Windows XP Professional and incorporating up to a 1GHz Crusoe TM5800 processor from Transmeta Corporation (NASDAQ:TMTA); four inch, super bright VGA color LCD; Synaptics touchscreen; 256MB onboard RAM; 10GB+ hard drive; 1394 FireWire, USB, audio, OQO-link connectors; and 802.11b and Bluetooth wireless networking.
"We're impressed with the direction that OQO is showing in developing its ultra-mobile, ultra-connected Windows XP-based PC," said Jim Allchin, group vice president of the Platforms Group at Microsoft Corp." These types of small-form-factor PCs, with their ability to deliver the power and richness of Windows any time and anywhere, will enable exciting new user experiences and opportunities."
"The OQO device represents an exciting new mobile computing platform that delivers full desktop applications in a handheld form factor," said Tim Bajarin, computer industry analyst and president, Creative Strategies, Inc. "It clearly breaks new ground and opens the door to a new category in mobile personal computing."
As a standalone device, OQO's ultra-personal computer slips easily into a shirt pocket. When inserted into an OQO-designed enclosure, it becomes a notebook PC. When placed in a cradle with a standard screen and keyboard, it becomes a desktop PC. This modular design allows for ease of use and convenience when traveling, whether to and from the office, across the country, or around the world.
"Modular computers have been identified as one of the most desirable form factors by Giga's IT audience every time we have surveyed for it," said Rob Enderle, research fellow for Giga Information Group. "This is one concept that actually could transform the technology industry and ensure a more steady revenue stream preceded by unprecedented--and potentially incredible--growth."
"After years of designing Apple and IBM laptops, the OQO team felt the time had come for the next step--but a revolutionary one--of the full-featured, wireless PC." said Jory Bell, president and CEO, OQO. "We wanted an ultra-personal computer that you always carry, but that was still powerful enough to be your only PC. We sought a device that incorporates wireless access as a central idea to the whole mobile experience. Moreover, we tried to instantiate something that would make people optimistic about the future."
"Crusoe is a catalyst for innovative, small, cool and quiet computing for emerging wireless platforms," said David Ditzel, vice-chairman and chief technology officer, Transmeta Corporation. "Until Crusoe, no one imagined that you could run Windows XP on a computer weighing less than nine ounces."
The first OQO PCs are expected to be commercially available from leading consumer electronics manufacturers in the second half of 2002.
OQO was founded in 1999 and is based San Francisco. The company includes executives, engineers and designers with exceptional credentials, including key positions at Apple Computer (Powerbook Design), Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory, IBM Almaden Research, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Oracle Corporation and Transmeta Corporation."
I went to the city because I wished to live without deliberation.
A friend of mine had a site that was slashdotted. His bandwidth got saturated, which limited the number of incoming requests, and the cpu hit (although he was on business-class cable, so he didn't have the bandwidth racksace might have).
His real problem was that his apache logs ballooned and the system became unresponsive (from the excessive IO transfer and possibly a kernel panic). After rebooting, his web server disk was so full of errors, he had to go to backup.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It's not vaporware -- you just won't see it until about 6 months after it is no longer relevant.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
BTW, I noticed your plan:
Not to belabor the obvious, but have you looked at k5? Scoop might be a good basis for you.
"Totalitarian control of the media", though? Maybe you need to get out more. AOL/Time-Warner/God Inc. might have some "totalitarian control", but the people who read Slashdot are just a bunch of riff-raff goofing around to impress ourselves. It's like a cable-access channel, without the production values -- Wayne and Garth on a budget.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
The real bottleneck to shrinking computers are no longer really the actual chips and disks. These are getting smaller and lighter and more energy efficient (well, at least the first two anyway).
What has not been effectively shrunk yet is the areas of human interface. The input (mouse and keyboard) and output (computer screen)
On the input size, cameras and microphones are shrinking, so these may be useful. On the output side, I know there are small screens out there, but to get real work done, you often need a big screen area.
evanchik.net
"Despite the faster chip, the batteries on the OQO run about 9.5 hours, Ditzel and Hunter said. Although the Crusoe processor runs on fairly low amounts of energy, the small screen size helps enormously."
Power consumption of a 4" LCD CCFL is around 1W, which is the same for any 4" - 15" single lamp LCD panel. The small screen size does not help any with the reduction of power consumtion. Power consumtion for this device will about the same as any Crusoe powered laptop since memory and the hard drive will still draw the same amount of power. This unit will only see a 9.5 hour battery life if the CCFL is off and the hardrive is powered down with the processor running at under 20% with not many accesses to memory.
Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
Make it the size of Mobilepro 7xx family and now we have something to talk about as far as a "desktop replacement."
Better yet. Make a lower-end one that has less ram, flash storage instead of a HD and configure processor to emulate a StrongArm. (IIRC, one of the strengths of the Crusoe is that it can emulate other architectures, although I may be wrong.)
Give the user the option of either PalmOS 5.0 or PPC 3.0. Drop the price a bit so that it is competitive with HP Jornada 720. Give the slightly larger form factor of the Mobilepro size (keyboard / screen), it then becomes a viable alternative for a lot of people to a full-blown laptop.
Advantages compared to Palm-sized PDAs:
better keyboard / screen usability
Advantages compared to laptop:
instant on
longer battery life
smaller overall size / less weight
lower cost
Sure you wouldn't be able to carry it in your shirt / pants pocket, but so what? Like I'm going to carry anything that cost me over a couple hundred dollars in my shirt pocket. Put it in your briefcase, shoulder bag, whatever.
I'd buy one.
I think 10" would be the absolute minimum in pure ergonimcal terms.
:-). The big advantage of this little machine over a desktop replacement notebook is that it's quite reasonable to have it with you *all* the time.
I've been using a Toshiba Libretto 70 with a 6.5" screen for about 4 years, and it's just usable. You don't really want to have more than one window on screen at once, you can't write code where you need to see more than about 20 lines at a time (but that's a good thing
I wish somebody was making a machine like the Libretto these days. My 70 only takes 32 Meg of RAM, and that's just not enough any more. The closest I've seen with a usable screen and keyboard are the new Fujitsu P Series machines, but they are noticeably bigger than the Libretto (and way bigger than the oQo).
- ibm research
/. article
Strikingly similar in concept.This includes the Libretto L3, a 10" LCD, 600mhz-Crusue version of your own notebook. It's slightly bigger, but I think there are some other subnotes on this site that approach the size of the original Toshibas.
I wasn't really questioning the "totalitarian" part -- Rob & Co. don't really pretend otherwise (it's their world, we just live in it). It's more the "media", unless you meant "medium", so "this site" rather than "all channels of communication" (You know, like "The gray aliens, working with the Knights Templar, control the media".)
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Didn't really mean to be a dick, just thought you were being a little harsh. Hell, maybe he wrote "diagonally" and his editor swapped in "diameter". There is a picture, or at least there was when I looked at the story (yup, still there, almost literally big as life), and the screen is clearly rectangular. I probably would have written "four-inch screen" and left it at that, since diagonal measurements are pretty standard, and for a device described as being 3" x 5", that would be about right (looks like maybe a 1/4" border on the long sides and a 1/2" on the short, so maybe 2-1/2" x 4", so 2.5^2 + 16, take the square root, mumble, mumble, well, I get 4.7 inches -- close enough for jazz), and nobody's going to buy the damned thing based just on this description anyway. (In fact, odds are nobody's going to buy the damned thing period, or even have the chance to. He's probably going to review 6 more products we'll never see before the week is out.)
Actually, what he probably should have said was "itty-bitty screen, roughly the same size as those on a Palm".
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Still, it looks an awful lot like the next generation of the Newton to me.
fencepost
just a little off
- Windows XP
- 5800 Crusoe processor
- 10GB hard drive
- 256MB of memory
- connection ports for FireWire and USB
Which of those make this a "high end" portable? Hell, you can get iBooks with better specs than that. It must be the price that makes it 'high-end'.Being an investor I'm guessing you know the product pretty well. Here are my concerns:
:)
* Screen size: It looks like the built in screen only does 640x480, a resolution at which I cringe when thinking about browsing most of the popular websites. 1024x768 seems to be the minimum resolution I'm confortable at these days and with such a small screen, that would be pretty horrid.
* No built in PCMCIA slot. Most people don't see how important this can be to a portable device. What will I have to do when another wireless network standard comes out (and I'm pretty sure they will come out)? I could get a USB or firewire version of the device but that makes the machine bigger and more clunky.
* Replacable battery. I can't seem to find any information on this. Is the battery in the unit easily changed with another one? The pages say that the unit will get 9.5 hours on a charge, which is very likely the maximum theoretical limit. I'm guessing the unit gets more like 6 hours on a chage, 4 if you are doing really have usage.
* Sound. The page doesn't say if there is a built in speaker although I'm guessing it has built in audio.
* And most importantly, does it run linux?
I'm not sure you are allowed to divulge any information on the product. Regardless, these are some of the things I'd question before being interested in the product beyond cool geek value.
Geoffeg