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Japanese Pocket-Size PC Cube Demonstrated
rocketjam writes "The Japanese company, Personal Media Corporation, has demonstrated a prototype of a cube-shaped pocket-sized computer called the T-Cube (tentative name). The T-Cube runs the T-Engine OS, an operating system apparently being developed by a consortium of Asian companies for embedded devices and networked computers. The machine is about the size of an orange, uses a CPU made by NEC and sports a desktop written for the Chinese Market supporting Multi- and Super-Chinese Character sets. It is scheduled to ship in Q1 of 2004."
Get it here. ;-)
Looks quite nice to me. Even an integrated ethernet port, audio... - nice, where can I get it?
they must be beta testing them as webservers today...
$cat
The machine is about the size of an orange...
That's some pocket computer. Excuse me, but is that a PMC T-Cube in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
... to make full use of it (and perhaps learn chinese ).
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
End up going home in a pocket.
While it might be the size of a small orange it isn't exactly flat and I don't consider it to be conducive to fitting in my pocket. The other PDA to the left of the screen shot, while being quite a bit taller, is far thinner and would probably fit into a pocket easier than this.
;)
So the OS is some non-standard thing w/probably little or no support, the shape is not really good for "pocket PCs", there is no screen, and everything is in yen and Japanese
No thanks. I'll stick to my rarely stable PocketPC for now.
Honestly, I don't think that the size of a (not-very-powerful) computer matters beyond thresholds. Ie:
Can it easily slip into my pocket?
Yes: iPod, etc
No: cube the size of an orange
Can I carry it around easily?
Yes: cube, laptop
No: server
Does it need reinforced flooring?
Yes: mainframe
No: server
So, basically, I'm not seeing much of a reason to go minimalistic on computers. If portability is a concern, that's already solved with modern laptops - which this isn't meaningfully smaller than (I mean, can't be treated much differently than). If it isn't a concern, then you don't need the extreme small size. And if density is a concern, you're better off with more powerful systems (per cubic whatever) than smaller ones.
Just MHO, of course.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Don't you think they could have designed a less-pointy form factor for a pocket computer? Sheesh.
We've had PDAs for years, since the days of the Apple Newtons and early US Robotics Palms. We've had handhelds like the Casio handheld computer with the 200MHz MediaGX processor from Cyrix in it. We've had HP and Compaq handhelds that are powerful enough to play mp3s for about three years.
Another small computer is cool, but is it really especially newsworthy?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
At the TRON 2004 Show Japanese Personal Media Company shows off the T-Cube a pocket-size PC running T-Engine.
T-Engine is somekind of OS standardization project for networked computers in Japan that started in 2002. Seems they want to build something that does not require to license Windows. Don't know why they not just adopt Linux.
The T-Cube runs the current T-Engine OS and uses a CPU from NEC VR5701. The desktop is written for the chinese Market supporting Multi- and Super-Chinese Character sets.
The T-Cube (tentative name) is supposed to ship in Q1 2004. Press-Release (Raw Translation)
See also the Java Wrist Watches that were presented at the TRON 2004 show in Tokyo.
I know that it's a pain for the Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, et cetera speaking people in the world to use systems mainly built by and for people who speak English, French, and German.
It's a little scary, though, that the east Asian countries are developing their own track of OSes with which we in the west may have to learn to deal. It's also a scary thought that having a group of OSes for one set of people and another set of OSes for another set of people may slow or even reverse the growing commonality of international communication.
Of course, this is coming from an American spoiled by the fact that most of the world is willing to learn my native language. I know enough of two other languages to make do, and enough of a fourth to find a taxi, hospital, restaurant, toilet, and hotel -- enough to travel in a pinch I guess. So I'm not the average Anglophonic snob. But still, it's a bit scary.
Hopefully all the multi-byte character support and such built into the systems such as this can improve the same on other OSes. It' be a shame if we were to be separated by both language and platform from a substantial part of the world.
Right now I'd rather have an orange.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Alternatively, you could get a cerfcube,
e /
which *does* run linux, and is smaller.
see:
http://www.intrinsyc.com/products/cerfcub
tcube site is slashdotted, but I suspect
that the cerfcube consumes less power as
well.
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
They're almost there.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Now if the Japanese could only make cube-shaped watermelons...
oh wait.
Its gotta be the same pockets that we used to carry around 5.25" floppies in before they introduced the 3.5".
No wonder fashion was so atrocious back then. 5.25" pockets...Helicopter collars...Platform shoes...ick.
--Storm
Is that an African or a European orange?
Wouldn't you just love to build a super computer out of these tiny cubes ? Get a dozen, pop them in an old gutted VCR case and you just built a clustered TiVo.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
if this is meant to be a pocket PC, then I don't know where into my pocket I would fit this big LCD display (shown on the photo)...
/. so I'll ask here:) does this thing come equipped with some small erm... pocket display?
(all the sites are
btw: IMHO the thing of this size and proportions does not fit good into trousers pocket.
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
USB and CRT ports
pictures of ports
inside board stack (looks like it's 3 boards total)
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I would imagine that a beowulf cluster of these things could look like a rubik's cube.
it comes in many colors!
I want 2D games back.
They're portable: but so are PDAs. And unlike the tcube, PDAs come with an integrated screen and some means for inputting data. These don't, so they're of limited use on the road. Even for telecommuters, you might as well stick with your laptop.
I suppose if you wanted to transport an entire data center to the other side of the floor, or even across town, these could be carried in a crate rather tna shipped on a truck. But, honestly, how often is this a consideration when choosing hardware?
I suppose they could come in handy for a home network or informal hosting operation out of your basement. But unless they're cheap, I doubt people would choose them over the eight too-obolete-for-gaming-but-perfectly-good-for-any- other-purpose desktops they already have in their basements.
What is the target market for these? People who like cute little multicolored boxes?
The "motherboard" on this must be super tiny. I'm guessing that it uses very little electricity, too.
I'd love to see it in a clamshell handheld configuration - 800x480, wide format screen, perhaps 7" diagonal, minimal psion like keyboard, and a big old battery, something off the shelf, perhaps a pair of cell phone batteries. Trackpad eraser would be nice, too.
Offer it with no memory (but with a SO-DIMM slot), cf slot (two better), ethernet, serial.
Hardware only warranty, and let the user or vars populate the memory, storage device (flash or CF hard drive), memory. That way, it could be offered as cheaply as possible. Use a standard boot method, too.
Then let the community decide on what OS to port to it - NetBSD, Linux, whatever. You'd end up with one device that spans from a very stripped PDA like config (minimal flash, memory), to something that could be a mini-notebook (lots of memory and up to 4 gigs of rotating storage), and everything in between.
It could be a portable serial terminal for sysadmins, a mobile web/internet platform, a portable media player, or a total notebook replacement. Whatever you want it to be.
I'd love one, and would pay near-notebook prices to get one. At under $600, it'd be a killer. Anyone else?
Jonathan
Just to bring this to reality for you geeks out there, Some info on the embedded OS word.
;)
See? It all comes back to Linux!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
What is the world's most widely used operating system? It's not Windows , Unix or Linux, but ITRON, a Japanese real-time kernel for small-scale embedded systems. ITRON runs on mobile phones , digital cameras, CD players and countless other electronic devices.
ITRON emerged as an ambitious Japanese initiative known as The Real-time Operating system Nucleus (TRON). Launched in 1984, TRON was designed to replace disparate computer systems with a unified, open architecture for a "total computer environment."
[...]
The ITRON specification is a standard real-time OS kernel that can be tailored to any embedded system. ITRON already has been ported to a wide range of microprocessor architectures and has quickly become Japan's de facto standard for embedded systems. Today, the specification is used in an estimated 3 billion microprocessors.
http://www.linuxinsider.com/perl/story/31855.html
that said, neato. looks way too much like a gamecube.
When combined, these cubes can form various deadly weapons!!
Be afraid!
A cube the size of an orange, Would that be the average of Riemann sums of the cube inside the orange versus the cube that contains the orange?
There is a pretty big difference in size between a cube that would fit inside an orange, versus a cube that an orange would just barely fit inside.
Isn't there some cubic object that would have made a better analogy? The only thing I see on my desk is the rubik's cube. I'm sure I could do better but I'm in a hurry.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
You know, with computers that small, they might as well come up with interesting cases for them. Who wouldn't want a functional pocket-size computer in the shape of a miniature Cray X-MP? Or inside an empty 12 oz. can of Jolt Cola?
Think of the applications for toy lines, particularly action and fashion figures!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
The T-Cube's dimensions are 52x52x45mm. That's pretty damn small!
For those outside Asia, comparing the T-Cube's size to an orange may be a little misleading, although it's apparent from the photo that the oranges are smaller than navel oranges. To further clarify the point of reference, djqed is right in that the oranges in the photos are mikan. 'Mikan' is the Japanese word for mandarin oranges, of which tangerines are one type (but the oranges in the photos aren't tangerines).
Can I use my digital camera as a screen for one of these? Heh, nothing like having a few GB of hard drive for storing pictures.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
If it's going to be a pocket computer, why can't they shape it like a bratwurst?
What?
Actually, it's not sitting next to oranges. They're mikans, sort of like tangerines. These things are somewhere between the size of a golf ball and a tennis ball. Very tasty too.
And that price tag is not really abnormal in Japan. When I was there, 10,000 yen was about $40. They were selling cantaloupes for that price. They would cut the vine nicely and gift wrap them in little window boxes. Now, that's about $100. Oddly enough, honeydew melons were only about 500 yen at the time, maybe $2.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
When you put them in your shirt pockets you look like you have breast implants.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
No you just peel the labels off and put them in the right place!
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
I've thought for a while (ever since the G4 Cube) that cubes make for a more effiecient use of space. Unfortunately, 'efficient' here means more internal volume for less surface area. That tends to lead to heat problems, but that shouldn't be a problem here.
What I'd really like to see is a 'cluster' appliance that looks something like this, but can 'stacked' via some kind of edge connector on the sides.
Lego computing!
You are attempting to read sigs. Cancel or Allow?
The pictures show tangerines, not oranges. Tangerines are smaller, flattened at the poles, fatter at the equator, and darker orange.
My comments here are my own; I do not speak for my employer.
Just working with something that is raw calculations, I wouldn't doubt that Linux can squeeze out a percent or two more than WinCE. What does this matter when the applications and libraries written on top of this perform poorly? No, the blame can't go to Linux, but as far as the majority of folks are concerned, it's irrelevant.
But when it comes down to actually using the thing, the whole WinCE package *feels* a ton faster (even using MFC, provided it's a newer machine) than using Linux/Qtopia or Linux/X11. Linux/PicoGUI is another story, though not far enough along.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
"There's an obvious alternative: embed the processor into the KVM kiosk, and into every other general-use device. All you carry around is your data, because that's the only component that is useful to personalize."
This was done back in the day. It was called the floppy disk. Of course these days we laugh at the capacity of floppies, but there was a time when the only storage computers had was the floppy disk you put in! It's sort of sad that we've moved away from this concept, but nobody can agree on a friggin standard. You might claim that CD-RWs are it, but most machines don't have the capability to write to them and even those that do can't do it nearly fast enough.
This is really a technical problem (don't expect to see a successor to the floppy disk, since if you don't make the heads part of the disk it can't be competetive in performance but if you do it will make the media cost too damn much). Maybe some sort of flash technology will do it someday, but right now flash is just too expensive and too small.
"There's a second alternative, too. You don't carry around anything, except maybe a general-purpose access device for reaching your home computer. Every device you use in public or carry around is just a gateway to your home server. It doesn't get much more elegant than that."
This can sort of be done today. I leave my computer running all day, ssh into it from the lab and even run X applications on it (and everyone bitches about the networking stuff in X...do you people have any idea how useful it is?), but I can't do the same thing anywhere because most places don't have the right software installed and don't have the bandwidth (I am lucky enough to have my computer at home hooked into the same campus-wide network as the machine in the lab). I don't see either of those problems going away anytime soon.
Processors are cheap (well, cheap processors are cheap...that doesn't mean that the latest Pentiums and Athlons are, but most people don't need that). If you can improve compatability and utility by putting the processor in there then I say go for it.
Physics is good