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Fully-functional Miniature Notebook Planned
florin writes "Check out this upcoming extremely cool micro-sized notebook from Microsoft-cofounder Paul Allen's company Vulcan (who were previously mentioned on Slashdot some time ago). Despite being small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, this is a fully blown x86-compatible computer capable of running Windows XP - or, presumably, a Unix of one's choice. Featuring an 800x480 pixel display, 256 MB of memory, sound, USB2, WLAN and optional Bluetooth, GPRS/CDMA or Firewire, this is far more than just another PDA, yet still small enough to carry with you at all times." Looks really cool, but I wouldn't plan on using full typing speed on it's tiny keys.
To type fast, use hall-effect touchpads on either side of the computer, and simply redesign the keyboard for one of three modes: one-pad (left-or-right), stylus, or two-pad.
People who want to learn to type on it quickly will find it takes less than a month to be proficient. And if the human-factors engineering is good, then they may find that they can type faster on it than with a normal keyboard.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
The small keyboard shouldn't be a problem:
Just stick on a USB twiddler. Chording keyboards can be much faster than full keyboards. And perhaps someday you'll never need to use a normal keyboard again - just use your personally-customized portable keyboard and point at the computer you want to type to.
My hands are too big to operate one of those.
The perfect size for laptops is something like the Dell x200. Very lightweight, but with a keyboard where you actually can hit individual keys.
I think the smaller is better craze is only good to a certain point, this is in my opinion, beyond.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Looks good... which distro installs on it? I mean with something that cool you wouldn't want to run "your Mother's OS" (tm) on it would you? It's too bad they aren't selling these *WITHOUT* a display, You could actually bring your own personal BEOWOLF cluster of these on trips etc.
Just a thought...
Cheers,
_GP_
One of my CS instructers came back from Japan last semester with something similar to this, (scroll down to the bottom, yes it's an old picture, only thing I could find that looked similar), but smaller and faster and without the camera. (It was a Sony though.) It also had a keyboard that you could actually type on, at least a little better than the Vulcan one. Of course, the battery was the same size and weighed more than the rest of the computer.
"I think that when you become a Republican, you don't get to score any more." -- Butt-head
From the page: "The Mini-PC is a concept from MicroSoft co-founder Paul Allen's Vulcan, Inc...."
No, it isn't. IBM and other manufacturers have had palmtop computers for a long time.
I have used PC laptops, Powerbooks, Newtons, and Palms over the years. I have switched from Newton to Palm and back to Newton again. Yeah, it's big, but it does lots more for me from a practical end. Easy email, notes, books, scheduling, and MP3's on my Newt! Also easy connectivity via an older 3Com Ethernet PCMCIA card. Sure, it weighs a pound and is not pocketable...That's the sucky side. I use an older Toshiba laptop for SuSE, and Win98 to keep up with the "rest of the world" and my iBook for everyday work. I have to agree with the above posters. A keyboard, whether chorded or not, has to have something that approaches full sized keys. I have an external KB for my Newton and it is as small as it can be and still be comfortable. Before getting my iBook I regularly used a 2400c and that was a small KB as well. Heck, lots of times when I see a 2400c on the swap lists, or auction block or whatever, one of the chief complaints for selling is that the KB is too little for folks with big mitts. Its all about size versus useability versus the right tool for the right job. My Newt is all big and clunky, but for me it blows a Palm away. Others might be different. Just my $.02 Scott
As an Operations guy, man, I have wanted something like this for years. Full featured enough to handle remotely connecting in for sudden downtime events, yet not nearly as large as a laptop. With 1xRTT, it means you can take it into a restaurant and, if you pager goes off, be able to check system status without having to clear off the entire top of the table.
:)
Not to mention that it makes checking Moviefone.com a lot slicker than the current PDA browsers are.
It's not going to be for everyone, but for those who need it, doggone, it's the cat's meow!
And it'll impress the babes
Stev
Just to balance out the mostly negative posts so far... I think that there is real value in having a full desktop OS in my pocket (WinXP or Linux) for 1) maximizing downtime and 2) permitting me to leave my apartment when I'm on call.
I tried Palm OS - great PIM, great battery life, small form factor, large software library... But extremely limited in processing power and networking options.
Pocket PC - Poor battery life, poor software library, but excellent wifi and cellular data connectivity options.
Linux on iPaq (Familiar, Opie, GPE) - Cool to have a shell prompt, but EXTREMELY limited in storage space. Otherwise, Opie and GPE are maturing nicely, and I can get a good deal of work done when I have the right programs installed
Unfortunately, the best solution I've found so far is an iPaq running Pocket PC with wifi connectivity, running JSLandscape at 640 x 480, running terminal services to my WinXP desktop. Yeah it's slow and sucks battery life like a pig, but at least I can run real applications...
This Vulcan Handheld PC would let me run my VPN and full mail program (Lotus Notes - sux but that's what my company uses) along with the entire library of X86 windows/linux software.
If Happy Fun Ball begins to smoke, get away immediately. Seek shelter and cover head.
How fast an x86 processor will this take? There seemed to be no mention of processor beyond soimply "x86 compatible".
My subtext is just a figment of your imagination.
I am so jealous of you. I am still working on a PCG-C1VN, which is somewhat bigger. I can still type on it fine.
One thing that struck me was how ugly the Vulcan minipc is. Compared with Sony's U1, U3, the upcoming U10, or Samsung's Nexio or Sharp's keyboard Zaurus, the minipc just screams "I got this with my HotWheels!"
I wouldn't want to be seen with that cheap-looking thing.
My Zaurus 5500 does all these things, with the exeption of WinXP, although it DOES run bochs.. For $178 + $16 for screen protectors + $51 for a 10/100 card, and flashing with OpenZaurus 3.2, I get:
206 MHz CPU, 64MB of RAM, 16 MB flash
(you can even create swap to increase RAM)
Linux
320x240 full color GUI
SSH client and server
VNC client and server
SMB client and server
Apache
MySQL
Perl
serial terminal
Word/Excel compatibility
Full functionality web browser
IMAP/SSL email
wireless, bluetooth or ethernet
up to 1+ GB of directly accessible storage
keyboard
handwriting recognition
Oggs/MP3s/_MPEGS_
and it's about 1.5x the size (mostly increased length) of a Palm.
Why do I need WinXP, or x86 compatibility? Am I going to develop for Win32 on this thing?
It's all about what you need, and what tool will get you there.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The issue of size seems to be a difficult one, especially with any device requiring visual I/O. How about voice? A cell-phone size would do. Speech recognition and synthesis are coming along and there's a lot you can do with your voice. Dictate something, have it read back, edit it, send it. Look for info using standardized commands. Play audio games... ;-)
Alexandre http://enkerli.wordpress.com/
You *can* touch-type on a keyboard this small. Up until just recently, I was using a Jornada 720 for a lot of things, and it is about the size of this MiniPC. I could touch-type quite easily- and after a couple hours of getting used to it, was typing about as fast as I do on my iBook or on a desktop. I could type fast enough to use it as a definate iBook replacement- I used it for writing papers in LaTeX, coded, web browsing, SSH/telnet, email, even running apps remotely with XFree86. (And yes, all under WinCE)
However, I do notice one huge difference between this miniPC and the Jornada720 (or a Psion)- the keyboard of the latter was meant for touch typing, while the miniPC's keyboard doesn't look like it was. Look at a photo of it, and it looks to have little rubber chicklet keys rather than a regular low-travel spring keyboard mechanism. A keyboard built like a real one, just 25% smaller than full size, is why people can type so fast on a Psion or a Jornada 720.
The only reason I don't use it still is the screen isn't reflective like you find on most color PDAs now, making it useless during the summer, when I do these computing tasks outside on the porch or in the woods up against a tree.
Why can't one company make a device that does what so many of these different new small computers are aiming for? All of them seem to have some imperfection-
1. The Sharp Zaurus C700: The keyboard mechanism and size is way too small for doing any real typing on. It is a thumboard, although one slightly bigger than on the SL-5500. I guess a PXA255 XScale CPU instead of the PXA250 would be nice too.
2. The OQO may never come out, but would be damn close to the perfect thing if a good, yet small (75% of 'full size', size of most Psion and Jornada 720 keyboard) attachable keyboard is available.
3. This miniPC has the bad kind of keyboard and cannot be configured into a tablet mode like the C700. There doesn't appear to be a touch screen, so it does seem that the Vulcan folks really weren't thinking, and didn't consider a tablet mode. Any computer aiming to take the place of both a notebook and a PDA really should accomodate the wide variety of situations that are hindered by a keyboard that isn't needed hanging around by allowing the user to hide it and operate the computer with a touchscreen.
4. Almost all TabletPCs are too damn big.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad