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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.
This think looks cool, but it doesn't hold a candle to the palm pilot built by jesus.
tcd004
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
Just think of how much faster you would type if you didn't insert unnecessary apostrophes into words!
The tiny keys issue really gets at the problem I have with PDAs in general. Interfaces at that size are a real bother. My handwriting is far too bad to use the handwriting recognition, and any other input method is just painful. I can get a fold-out keyboard attachment, but at that point the device becomes sufficiently big that I can't carry it around in the pocket of anything short of my trenchcoat.
PDAs are a wonderful idea, and once someone solves the interfacing problem I'm sure they'll be as common as full-size or notebook computers. But in their current form, I just can't use them, and I doubt that I'm the only one with this problem.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
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.
The Lifebook series by Fujitsu, and much better specs. http://webshop.fujitsupc.com/fpc/Ecommerce/buildse riesbean.do?series=P1
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
I mean, if it's a complete pain in the ass to type on the teeny tiny keyboard on either model, what's the point of a 20 gig HD?
Plus, the Vulcan is fugly.
hang brain.
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.
Could it be any lighter on details?
Great job with the photos. Dide we really need FIVE photos showing the size comparison to a mobile phone? Or THREE showing how a ThinkPad dwarfs it? Would it have killled them to show the back of this thing, so I could see the ports and answer this question: Are the actual ports built into the device, or does it have some stupid, proprietary mega-port and a funky, easily-losable-and-expensive-to-replace port replicator cable that breaks the mega-port out into FireWire, USB, etc?
Or does connecting anything to it in the field require lugging around some docking station that negates the whole point of having a dinky computer in the first place?
~Philly
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 $.02 Scott
Just to balance out the mostly negative posts so far... I think that there is real value in having a full desktop OS in my pocket (WinXP or Linux) for 1) maximizing downtime and 2) permitting me to leave my apartment when I'm on call.
I tried Palm OS - great PIM, great battery life, small form factor, large software library... But extremely limited in processing power and networking options.
Pocket PC - Poor battery life, poor software library, but excellent wifi and cellular data connectivity options.
Linux on iPaq (Familiar, Opie, GPE) - Cool to have a shell prompt, but EXTREMELY limited in storage space. Otherwise, Opie and GPE are maturing nicely, and I can get a good deal of work done when I have the right programs installed
Unfortunately, the best solution I've found so far is an iPaq running Pocket PC with wifi connectivity, running JSLandscape at 640 x 480, running terminal services to my WinXP desktop. Yeah it's slow and sucks battery life like a pig, but at least I can run real applications...
This Vulcan Handheld PC would let me run my VPN and full mail program (Lotus Notes - sux but that's what my company uses) along with the entire library of X86 windows/linux software.
If Happy Fun Ball begins to smoke, get away immediately. Seek shelter and cover head.
A beowulf cluster of these beasties, kitted out with 802.11g wireless networking and mounted on RC model vehicles, roaming around autonimously, trying to find unsecured wifi hotspots so you can use their bandwidth for p2p!
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Bow down to your one and true Master, fellow nerds :/
The PC110 was, and until this M$ thingee comes out, is the smallest laptop ever made.
Now, they go for insane amounts of money on ebay. As a 486, she goes for more cash than the pentium Librettos do
I'm a huge palmtop fan (HPLX/Amity/Libretto/etc), and if this new thing is priced right, I'd be interested... but it'll probably suck
Yet more proof that anything anyone has ever done, IBM did first
--- Do you believe in the day?
I can state for a fact it is possible to learn to touch-type on these little keyboards, but this is greatly affected by keyboard travel and the keyshapes giving good positioning feedback.
On a regular keyboard I can break 80 words per minute pretty easily (up until about 2 a.m.), and on the Psion I was able to average about 25 w.p.m. with some considerable practice. The Psion however was designed with good keytravel, and the chopped pyramid keystyle gave comfortable tactile feedback as to how my hands were positioned.
The essential ingredient to getting the speed up was increase one's (right to left) hand tilt to about 45 degrees and learn to stike the keys a little more with the outside edges of your fingers. The extra tilt works like the arms of an old manual typwriter letting typing elements that are normally to fat for the space they have to share swing into each other's flight paths to share (in the typewriter case a single spot) a smaller space.
I would strongly caution anyone who needs typing speed against purchasing this online. Go to whatever computer store might stock such a thing and make sure that the tactile and positioning feedbacks are going to be sufficient for your needs. This will probably be at least a $1000 toy, so no-one is going to begrudge you a few 30 minute sessions standing in their store playing with it.
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.
the ibm pc110 started it all back in the mid-90's. i have one actually. it's tiny, a pain in the ass to type on until you're used to it and terribly underpowered. i can imagine one of these things being more powerful, but even smaller? speaking from esperience, it'd make it useless to most every user (though i do admit, the server room maintenance idea was good). that's why i've been keeping my eye on similarly powerful machines of a usable size.
the sony vaio u-101 is the brand new update to the vaio u series. most notably to the speed and memory enhancements it adds a lay-flat design and a display that rotated to landscape with the push of a button which is nice for reading e-books or any long document.
and my favorite the jvc interlink mp-xp7230. also the latest in it's series. it's much larger than the vulcan and u-101 placing it at the smallest end of the sub-notebook category rather than a real mini-pc. i've used one of these and typing isn't even an issue. the pointing decive is a tried and true, blue, rubber nipple in the center of the keyboard with laptop-style mouse buttons along with a touch pad below the keyboard. no proprietary mega ports here. everything is seperate so there's no need for an expensive port replicator or converter dongle which we will all eventually loose.
both of these devices have been mentioned before and linux runs perfectly on both aside from some yet to be reproduced proprietary features you'll never miss anyway. and for those of you worried about jvc's first forray into this area, i can tell you it ran rock solid both on and off ac power for three months wile the friend i borrowed it from was away at basic training.
if the ink weren't still wet on my mortgage papers, i'd sure as hell have a jvc interlink mp-xp7230, fully expanded with an external cd-rw/dvd-rom.
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.
- Decent price. It's not a full laptop, it's basically a mobility tool. Don't expect consumers to pay laptop prices.
- Battery Life. Many similar devices are handicapped by their short power duration. Especially for a mobile/wireless device, the ability to run for a reasonable amount of time is key.
- Broad WiFi access. This is outside of their control, but from the design, it appears they are counting on it. If WiFi rolls out as broadly as many think it will, this type of device will do a lot of business.
Sure it looks neat -- like a mini laptop with teeny tiny keys. It's so cute! But even ignoring the tiny keys for a moment, just how do you use this thing? Do you balance it in one hand while typing with the other? I don't think so! That's about as awkward an arrangement as I can imagine. But what's the point of having one if you have to set it on a desk to use it? And when you're typing, your hands will be right it front of the screen, blocking it from view. This isn't radical, it isn't innovative, and I submit that it's not even useful.
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
If they include any half way decent 3D chipset this thing could be a really cool $1200+ handheld game.
If they include any halfway decent 3D chipset, you could probably fry eggs on the thing.
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