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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
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.
Full article available here.
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.