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Braille PDA/Phone
awtbfb writes "ALVA B.V. has released details on their Mobile Phone Organizer 5500. This combination tri-band GSM phone and Windows CE.net PDA does not yet include GPRS, but it is supposedly in the works. Release dates are this summer. It's only been a year since this was requested in askslashdot."
Yet another cellphone to add to the collection of geek gifts...It looks good to me.
- nick
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Now all we need are mobile PDA/phones for the deaf... oh, wait.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Finally a solution to keep people from yelling into their phones,
and you have to learn braille to use it?
oh wait, I see....
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
People taking there hands off the steering wheel to talk on one of these things...
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
Almost forgot, just for a second, that Microsoft is a marketing behemoth first and a software developer second.
Feel Me Now?
Five years ago, I had to learn Graffiti to be cool. Now I need to learn Braille so that I can keep up with the latest gadget. What will they come up with next -- Morse Code?
Between the M505 and the old Game Boy Advance flubs, they should know how important it is to have a back-lit screen.
I invented a brail phone long ago and demand this company cease their blatant misuse of my patent. Granted, our phones may be a bit different, but that makes no difference in the end. My model was slightly different: instead of a combination phone/pda, though I went for something functional yet simple.
I took a sturdy brick and welded an old brail-teletype on it. With an embedded 8086 executing off of manufacturer-refuse rom chips, it worked great. Sure, implementing the crude Turing algorithms was a bit painful, but we just claimed a "93.2% accuracy" for the devices. The blind people simply skipped over the mistakes and made assumptions as to what was being said.
I'll never forget the fond memories of those days. Watching the faces of the blind light up as they carried out their (unknown to them) imaginary conversations. Believe you me, that time I heard little Billy exclaim: "Mommy I love you too!"; I almost cried. Or that time Jimmy used his first call to order himself a pizza. Every time a car drove by he'd ask: "guys, is that the pizza man?". We never had the heart to tell him the truth. What was even more enjoyable was when he called back to register his complaint! A blind man arguing with a turing algorithm is not a pretty sight. Precious memories.
Great. It's bad enough when the sighted try to drive and talk on their cellphone/PDA combos at the same time. I can only imagine what's going to happen to our nation's roadways once the blind drivers start doing the same...
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)