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AlphaSmart Shows Palm-Based Laptop
krswan writes: "AlphaSmart, which has built proprietary 'mini-laptops' for education in the past, has released a Palm Compatible device with a full keyboard, built in rechargeable batteries, 2 USB ports, and two Secure Digital and Multimedia Card compatible slots - all for $399. It is only about 2 lbs and the screen resolution is 560X160. As a teacher, I would love 30 or so for my classroom. More details at the Dana website." It's basically still more a glorified keyboard (like the older AlphaSmart products) than a laptop, but that's not a bad thing.
I would think a bunch of thin-clients would make more sense than these suckers -- the spec pages seem to show that they are more geared toward PDA-similar stuff -- store appointments and the like
would be nice to have somebody remind me when that next physics test would be, though
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Something like this has been needed for over a decade. A diskless mini-laptop with a useable keyboard and very long battery life, good for basic text typing and email checking, without battery-hungry color displays or Quake 3-capable processors. My only obvious complaint is it would be good if it had a little more screen resolution, to hold a 25x80 telnet/ssh window. But I already want one. Wow!
H/PC Pro device manufacturers didn't stay onboard with these WinCE-based machines. They offered too little functionality for too much cost.
Now AlphaSmart is offering less power for only slightly less cost? I've seen the picture of the device, I don't think they are in this for the long haul.
I have been pwned because my
Just add wireless and IM software and it could easily replace my toilet computer/laptop.
Advanced LCD with backlight. 3.5 times wider than the typical handheld.
A laptop without color?
PalmOS Software v4.1
Flash, or burnt?
8MB of memory
It doesn't scale up with the size it seems.
Looks like a case mod of a normal Palm to me...
it could easily replace my toilet computer/laptop
If you're spending enough time on the toilet to need a computer there, may I suggest more fiber in your diet? Wow.
I've got one of their original models (very limited memory, no spellcheck / IR / curvy blue plastic) that's still going strong. In almost 10 years of owning it, I think I've changed the batteries 3 times, once when I left it on for a week. I've replaced the keyboard (it just got too gummy and dusty for my taste) and the power switch (they sent me a replacement for free and I soldered it in) but it's been tossed, dropped, scratched, and neglected for 10 years and other than that switch has only cosmetic damage to show for it.
It's ugly as sin and fairly limited, but it does what it does with nothing to crash, with nonvolatile memory, and with nary a complaint. An upgraded product is definately appreciated, but somehow I don't see this new model providing the same trouble-free experience as the old standby.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
***yawn*** offline data input with verification before transfer to the mainframe just got smaller.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
release what I wanted :) The Treo 270 (or something similar) embedded into
Portable keyboard. The setup should be such that the screen is inside the portable keyboard, when folded together and this all should be in one package. When folded, it would only work as a phone, kind of similar principles as in the Nokia 9210 Communicator - when opened you would have a natural size keyboard and all.
really a recycled Tandy 100 ...
...several people who've worked there, in fact.
The original alphasmart is really a nifty product - it's a low cost keyboard with basic word processing capabilities and easy downloading to a PC. What's interesting is that I hear their biggest market has been k-12 schools. They're used for teaching typing skills and basic computer concepts (save, print, etc.).
This palmOS version looks great - certainly more capable than just a keyboard w/memory.
With the massive number of applications available for Palm OS plus a large number of good thirdparty RAD tools. This could be great for schools. PalmOS/PalmOS based devices are great for the vertical market. Long barttery life, Simple interface, Simple API's.
/b
[Please type your sig here.]
To be a worthy successor, a "smart keyboard" should
- Cost under $500, so the Omnibook 300 is out.
- Have a full sized keyboard--Poqet, WinCE pocket PC's etc. are out.
- Turn on instantly (no boot delay) and not make noise (i.e. no hard disk). Subnotebooks are out.
- Run for 10+ hours on a battery charge. Subnotebooks are out again. Preferably it should run on standard AA cells and not depend on a charger; this Dana thing fails on that count, but it's not fatal.
- Weigh under 2 pounds--the TRS 100 could get away with 4 pounds because there were no alternatives til the 3-pound TRS 102--but these days subnotes are too heavy.
- Run a reasonably standard OS with free development tools--PalmOS is sort of ok, WinCE loses. Linux would be better but you can't have everything.
I don't think anything has been made since the TRS 102 days (well maybe the Sinclair Z88) which meets all these criteria, even though it could have been done easily.I don't understand the allure of the Palm Pilot. I've never seen a pen-based PDA remotely as useable as the HP 100lx, which is still my favorite.
But why not get the real thing instead, with a 32-bit preemptive multitasking OS?.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
Apple tried this same thing with the eMate running the NewtonOS.....the device looked *very* cool, but it just didn't catch on. I suspect the same will happen to this device too.
my 2 cents
The hypothetical backpacker's laptop is a tool
to facilitate email communications when all your
posessions must fit into a backpack and all
Internet access takes place in Internet cafes.
The requirements are:
1) cheap (in case it gets lost/stolen)
2) light
3) durable (whether on airplanes or chicken
trucks, luggage tends to get kicked around)
4) Has a keyboard and reasonable size screen.
5) Has a floppy drive.
The last one may not be obvious to those who haven't traveled in this manner. The only way
you can reliably move data between a laptop and
the PC at an Internet cafe is with a floppy. For
everything else, the machines will either be too
primitive or policies too restrictive.
A side note: Has anyone managed to get a USB
equiped PDA to talk directly to a USB floppy?
My favourite device for younger children would have to be the tablet. These little devices are all fine and good, but a tablet can use either an attached keyboard or pen with a monitor size considerably larger than these tiny screens.
:)
And they're pretty cheap for what you get
Sincerely,
-Matt
---
Got web Hosting? RackNine Inc.
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I think I've seen this somewhere before :-) That's a link to the Amstrad NC- series of computers which had Z80 processors and a clone of BBC BASIC, including an assembler! Great little machines, shame I lost mine in a burglary a few years back.
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
This thing is certainly more advanced than the TRS-80's and Apple II's I used in school. Hell, most palm pilots have more computing power than my first Mac SE.
It's not the size of the memory or the speed of the processor that counts, it's the skill of the programmer.
evanchik.net
I've been waiting for a Palm-based sub-laptop form typing device for a long time. But this thing is kind of a kludge. For one thing, it's expensive. For another, it's kind of ugly.
Since the screen is touch sensitive (I'm assuming, since it is a Palm device), that means some sort of resistive touchscreen (again, I'm assuming.) This means glass, which means increased weight, and if there isn't a cover for it, it means a broken screen if I try tossing it in my backpack like you can do with the other Alphasmarts.
My main complaint is the cost. I'd wish someone would hack a LCD screen driver for a cheap, low-power monochrome screen, so I could recycle my old Pilot into a portable writing slate. As it is, I think the best portable writing slate on the market is a QuickPad Pro. It's cheap, has CF support (I have a spare 16MB CF card that I have lying around since I got a 160MB card for my camera), has a serial port, runs off of AA batts, and uses a stripped-down version of DOS for an OS, which they hint can allow you to write code to run on it.
Of course, the Dana has the Palm codebase to work off of (and a couple of nifty apps - a MS word compatible word processor and a widescreen book reader), so maybe my first impressions are a bit harsh. But $399 for a damn keyboard, no serial port, and no CF support... I am NOT buying a new computer (to get a USB port) just to use a writing slate!
I could see myself buying a Dana. I can see Danas selling here and there. But I don't expect the Dana to be a monster hit.
You can take a Palm PDA and plug it into a keyboard. I have a Visor Deluxe and a GoType, and I do this. But when you do this, you only have a 160x160 display, and you have to be a bit careful with it because it's easy to knock the PDA free from the keyboard.
The Dana gives you a wider screen, good for looking at lots of text or perhaps column data such as a spreadsheet. It's all one unit, and it looks tough. That means you can grab it with one hand and walk around with it casually, or fling it into a backpack to take it to the library. (I hope the keys don't clack too loudly!)
Take a look at the USB ports. Looks like one is an A connector and one is a B! You can hang USB devices off this, such as a printer, and use them. Or you can plug this into a USB port, probably to hotsync your data with your desktop computer. Oh yes.
Now all it needs is a good way to hook it up to a phone line or a cell phone. You ought to be able to get a USB external modem working with this, and you might be able to get a cable that will let a Startac work with it for data. With 560x160 resolution, you can have an 80 column display, although 24 lines would be pretty cramped, but anyway you should be able to use this thing as a remote terminal.
I remember that Apple used to sell a small gadget something like this; they called it an eMate. Schools used to buy eMates. Any school that would buy an eMate would buy one of these; it can do more, it should be equally tough or tougher, and it is half the price the eMate used to be.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Palm PDAs have always been intended to have a symbiotic relationship with your desktop computer. You run Palm Desktop on your desktop computer, and you can pull up all your data, edit your data using the full-size keyboard on your desktop, and hotsync. If you have an accident with the batteries on your Palm, your data is safely backed up in Palm Desktop.
Can you use the USB port on the Dana to hook up a Palm PDA such as a Treo 90, and then do a hotsync? If so, you could use both the Dana and your PDA to work with your data, and reconcile it with hotsync automatically. I'm not sure how useful that might be, but I'm wondering if it would work.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
QuickPad Pro runs MS-DOS (and use CF) and hence has a lot of software available for it, all of it keyboard- and large-screen aware. CalcuScribe is another device aimed at the educational market.
What a great idea! Take the worst part of the Palm handheld (severely limited OS), and give it the worst features of the notebook (compared to the handheld-Bulk which prevents it from being pocket-able).
So, it's too big to fit in your pocket, and the software sucks... Thanks, but no thnks, I'll stick with my Psion 5MX, which has a keyboard, the best handheld OS & the best productivity apps of any handheld. The 5MX has 16MB of memory, runs for a month on 2AAs, has a half-VGA display (640x240), cost approximately the same, and has the most USEFUL & PRODUCTIVE apps out there, most free. Those apps include SSH, PGP, Telnet, vt100 term., irChat, Fibre optic loss calc., Bash-Like command-line, Full-featured RPN Calc. etc.
I still don't understand why Psion/Symbian devices haven't caught on. They beat the hell out of Palm & WinCE in every single aspect... And that is a totally objective point of view.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
How about a solar or wind-up version for use in places that many miles away from the nearest electric socket or battery shop?
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Actually, the eMate was a huge hit with the people (mostly in the education market) who actually got to use one. Not only did students and teachers like them, but journalists went nuts for them - just the thing for traveling and writing. The big downside was that the eMate wasn't nearly as quick or powerful as the Newton 2000/2100.
There was rampant speculation for a while that Apple was going to put the more-powerful (167Mhz ARM) Newton 2000/2100 guts into an eMate case and retarget it towards business users: a "bMate".
The AlphaSmart Dana reminds me a lot of the "bMate" concept. I bet it quickly develops a cult following, especially if the Internet functionality (wireless, e-mail, Web, and blogging, anyone?) is up to speed.
-Mark
This has the potential to be a real win for journalists, students, bloggers, e-mail jockeys, and anyone else who's make use of computer is to read, enter, and edit text.
The big problem that I see is that it needs a hard lid that closes over the keyboard and screen to protect them so you can just toss this into your backpack without filling the keyboard with Doritos crumbs.
The eMate design handled this nicely, but any hard lid would be great.
-Mark
Because I can only think of one reason to have a laptop in the bathroom, and having it in black and white would be like going back to 320x200-style like you'd get off of BBS's fifteen years ago.
When I called it a Visor Deluxe with a Targus removable keyboard.
Visor Deluxe (refurb) = $100 @ Fry's or online.
Targus Keyboard = $100
Foam Keyboard Pad, as the Targus is EVIL to carpal tunnels = $4
Total difference: $195.
Seems a lot for a slightly widened (and still monochrome) screen.
Nice try, though.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
She has found that when her kids were given these, the kids who had done NO work all year, were suddenly writeing papers, doing homework, and makeing B's (which for those kids is somthing)...
Its amazeing how much they get done when properly motivated. and its incrediable how the alpha smart motivates them.
The Code Ninja is swift with his tool, precise in his delivery, and deadly accurate in his execution.
Well at 399 you can buy almost a Pocket PC which makes it more attractive since I would need the xtra memory. Then if I want a laptop replacement I will get a Fujitsu tablet Pc or something like that. And even in designtechnica.com have some review on a laptop replacent that at least run WindowsXP for less than 1000, not to mention that you can get a IBM Thinkpad for $600 at http://app.infopia.com
The JZA
... get a regular Palm and buy Fitaly Stamp
But don't say that around here! You'll get called an "Amiga-loving faggot," [sic] or worse. :)
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
A lot of people here are way too quick to dismiss the incredible usefulness of a device like this. Those of us that have owned and used the Tandy Model 100, 102, or the later, sleeker (but buggier) WP-2 know better. So do those millions of us for whom our Palm device is *by far* the most indispensible computer we own. (You can have my PC and 17" LCD monitor long before I turn loose of my Kyocera Smartphone or some other Palm device.)
While clearly not capable of doing everything a real laptop does, these things are in a usefulness class that's *far* beyond any laptop (and I think I speak with some authority, as a former program manager with responsibility for both Latitude and Inspiron at Dell.) Windows CE/PocketPC/HPC has tried to play here, but still doesn't "get it" - there's tremendous value in instant-on, simple applications that just allow the work to get done - fancy GUIs are actually a detriment in such form factors. Battery life measured in weeks or months of ordinary use is incredibly liberating. My dream is to one day own a computer with real desktop capabilities, that can operate through an entire day of hard use (conferences or client meetings), and that does not require luggage for all its life support equipment (rechargers, floppy & CD drives, etc.) Although some have come close (Some ThinkPads, and the new iBook), I've never seen such a thing actually make it to market. (Keep in mind that one of the largest target market for portable devices is the healthcare field, but they can really only consider devices that can make it through an entire shift without recharging - that pretty much eliminates all laptops, leaving you back with a Palm or CE choice. Sadly, too many are being decived by color screens and a "familiar" (not really) Windows interface.
This is a very interesting and useful gadget, but lacks one crucial capability to be a real, viable replacement for a laptop on a business trip: a graphical web browser. Sadly, the last time I checked, there were no native graphical web browsers for Palm devices (WAP is useless, text-based browsers are nearly so, and the TopGun derivatives require impractical transcoding proxies.)
Even so, this is a great tool for those that write a lot, either for deliverables, or simply notes to document the work they do. I can see lots of these in use by consultants, lawyers, and businessmen of all kinds. The main strategic error I see is one of physical form factor - my slim WP-2 is far easier to throw into my breifcase "just in case" than the Dana, with that wierd curved design that doubles its thickness. The second biggest erro is the lack of a real network connection (wired or unwired), but that's a Palm problem and not properly something that's the Dana's fault. (It is inexcusable that Palm hasn't fixed this in the years they've had to do so. It is the single biggest reason the CE devices are starting to kick their butt in vertical applications, but they seem oblivious, as usual.)
This sort of thing could be really interesting with the next-gen BeOS-derived environment. I can't wait. Buying one of these would be easier (and about the same cost) as hacking my WP-2 to run a uSimm/uCLinux card internally, although that would have the advantage of a real Ethernet interface...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
The form factor's perfect for its purpose. It's a regular keyboard, with a small display appended. These are all over the elementary schools. (The old ones, not Dana.) Kids can handle them the way kids do, not the way we gingerly treat laptops or PDAs.
AlphaSmart is how kids learn to type these days. It's also important for kids who have trouble doing handwriting -- it's a great empowerment tool.
BTW, the main competition is probably Calcuscribe, which is like an AlphaSmart with some math abilities. But I think Dana will top it (albeit at a higher price, which will make it more of an adult than K-12 product).
If you give folding Palm keyboards to grade school kids, they will destroy them.
If you give them regular Palms, they will break them or lose them.
These things are supposed to be tough and last a long time on the battery pack. For their intended purpose, they will rock.
I wonder if you could run one off of solar cells?
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
It uses a rechargeable battery pack that can be replaced by 3 AAs.
Check the product sheet.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
I would suggest wiring the braces on their teeth up to the Dana and feeding them lemons, which apparently will generate enough power to run a calculator, but that would be wrong. :)
Also, braces are plastic nowadays instead of metal.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
This unit was manufacture by the HandEra corporation for AlphaSmart...
http://www.handera.com/
Polymorphism -- It's what you make of it.