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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?
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...
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.
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"
Is that an African or a European orange?
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
If it's going to be a pocket computer, why can't they shape it like a bratwurst?
What?