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Is There Room for an IM only Device ?
tealover writes "MSNBC Has an article about a new device from Motorola that they're marketing that just does IM. It' called IMFree. Kind of a combination of a cordless phone and pager; There is a base station that plugs into a USB port in your computer, so it's only portable in relation to the base station. Sounds and looks like the kids would like this."
I got the Java Midlet based IM (Specilized ones for MSN, Yahoo and AOL ) and a mobile jabber client. Also, with my sprint vision plan I can use the web browser to use the IM ( which I prefer, specially on a well made mobile IM tool like Yahoo's messenger).
But a small dumb terminal, that looks and feels like a pda would be handy, I think the portable phone/usb base station is a pretty good idea, Would a pda that does all of it's processing on your desktop computer be a lot cheaper? I think a cheap zaurus-like pda would be a good trade of for range of use.
Ansi's and stupid tricks!
... is something that provided a very cheap screen/kb/mouse combination which wirelessly connected to a new session on a linux box. That way, I don't need to scatter boxes all over the house and multiple people could use it all at once. Mike
I know that the US is not really into SMS, but in europe, it's HUGE. In belgium alone, a few MILLION smss are sent every day. At 40cents/message, that's big bucks for a service that costs next to nothing.
The situation has gone so far that studies have shown teens to use their thumbs for stuff that the previous generation would have used the index finger for. Like dialing an ordinary phone, or pressing the doorbell.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Motorola is still on that IM kick?
After that crap V101, you think they might just go after quality and customer service instead.
I'll wait 'till Nokia makes one. I need my phones to last longer than a few weeks.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
the form factor, keyboard layout and purpose is so much like a blackberry that surely it won't be long before Research In Motion layers are knocking on moto's door. Remember when RIM sued Handspring... *sigh* imagine if someone had successfully protected a patent on the QWERTY keyboard layout. We'd all have to learn to type all over again every time we bought a keyboard from a different company!
Before adopting WHATWG, read the moonlight.NET EULA [http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx]
wonder how long it will be till someone makes it run on linux .. *ducks*
I'm a little tea pot.
aol/tw ought to offer a rebranded
version of this, integrate it with
their services (emphasis on aim),
and send out these things for free instead
of the damned cdroms (including a
net installer for their pc & game console software
in the im device).
(or someone else should)
This seems pretty silly to me as most teens here (Netherlands) are equipped with a mobile phone. It doesn't seem to have any added value over plain-vanilla SMS messages. Don't the States have a SMS service?
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
Wireless Terminal.
Admin your *nix box from anywhere (Within your home. Who would of thought), Or watch the cpu usage.. This thing has alot more uses, Then one thinks at first look.
But does it have encryption?
I wonder how long it will take linux to make this device appear as a terminal. You could admin your box from anywhere in the house.. Or you could watch your cpu usage from the roof.
I believe Motorola is trying to expand its market after losing ground with apple.
SMS is really like IM'ing. And there are even some telcos that have some kind of SMS<->IM gateway. At least here in my coutry (Philippines), where SMS costs PhP 1.0 (approx. $0.02 US). We have an SMS<->ICQ Gateway which costs around PhP 2.50 per sent message. And I think the only barrier why there isn't any other SMS<->IM gateway is that either the telcos and IM provider (AIM, Yahoo, MSN) doesn't see any market demand for such things... yet.
If you look into AIM usage, there's a lot of teenage girls out there that sit infront of a computer and chat with friends all day. These girls also have siblings, so there's a lot of infighting about who gets to use the computer. These devices are perfect for those families. It gets kids off the computer so the computer can be used for more worthwhile stuff. For $99, it's way cheaper than another computer and everyone can do what they want to.
So you have two teenagers... are you going to buy another computer so they'll stop fighting over who can chat when? -That- seems like having an extraneous hardware device that this product can do for under $100.
my blog
Some years ago, my bro'in law was vp at Vodafon.
He showed me their latest product : MyAirMail.
It was exactly the same thing as mentioned above except that it would send and receive real emails and be 4-times smaller.
So, is there a market for this new im device when there has already been such products in the past ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Have been brainstorming a bit about this subject in the past: why haven't the mobile phone producers and network operators integrated instant messenging ( real-time! ) contact list with the phonebook in our cell phones? Just like with IM programs buddies could than update their own profile and this would show up in everyone's phone. My friends use this to keep track where everybody is and what they are upto all the time! It would require both new functionality of the phones and more significantly, a cheap broadcasting technique similar to SMS. But it would rock, I think!
I'm a perfect example of this.
My senior year of college, I had a desktop and a laptop. The desktop was always kept reasonably up-to-date for my entire college career. (That year it was a 1.1 GHz Athlon with DDR memory, etc etc.)
The laptop was an old cheap beat-up POS. Pentium 200MMX, 128M, 12" screen.
I used the laptop 95% of the time that year, for one reason: Even though the chair at my computer desk was pretty comfortable, the couch in my apartment's living room was ten times more comfortable. I pretty much did all my work that year either on the couch or sitting in a folding chair in the front lawn.
Thank God for 802.11
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Hey, with CSI and CSI: Miami they're on a roll, right?
"IMFree...IMFree...and freedom tastes of reality..."
It's not surprising that this article has attracted a torrent of comments like "I wish it were a dumb terminal" or "Why can't it access Jabber?" As always, these foolish questions can be dismissed by reading the article.
"Motorola is marketing IMfree to young teens, and to young teenage girls in particular, because they found this group was a heavy user of instant messaging services."
Now I know that many of you Junior Slashbots out there are very proud of the fact that you've been using Linux and Jabber since before they were cool. However, the market for AIM is enormous among young teens. In homes with broadband, many AIM users have started leaving themselves signed in 24/7. This leads to some contention, as it's impractical to run more than one instance of AIM on a home PC. In a home with, say, one PC and three kids, mom can type a letter while her kids use the AIM devices wirelessly. Total cost for the kids' hardware: $300.
Now, I'd like to see a $100 handheld terminal device that would sell well among the Slashdot crowd. Remember, it has to include wireless Ethernet, a color screen, Bluetooth, compatibility with all bands of GSM, at least 128 MB of RAM, an MP3 and Ogg Vorbis player, a Gecko-based web browser, a terminal which can run any shell imaginable, Perl, a C compiler, an 80 GB hard drive, a usable keyboard, FireWire, USB 2.0, and Infrared. And it has to run Linux.
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