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OQO Ultra-Portable Impresses At CES
carpoolio writes "One of the most-talked about gadgets at CES last week was the OQO ultra personal computer (uPC). TechTV gave it a Best Mobile Device award, and deservedly so. It's a fully functional PC that fits in your pocket. Running on a 1 GHz Transmeta Crusoe processor, the uPC packs a 20 GB hard drive, 256 MB of RAM, and has a color screen that slides up to reveal the keyboard. The price? Sub-$2,000. Photos available on OQO's Web site. Similar devices have come and gone in recent years, but this one really looks nice." OQO seems to be slowly migrating from vaporware to a release date - a CNET News article notes that "OQO said Thursday that it will begin selling the device in the second half of 2004."
Here is another site which shows the uPC -- with pics.
:)
Soon to be Slashdotted too, I'm sure.
Right is wrong when left is right.
It's vaporware. Oqo has announced previous versions of this product several times, none have ever made it to market. I'd love to have one of them, and many people have been waiting for it, but at this point I'm not holding my breath. I'll believe it when I see it.
/. in 2002 for best vaporware:/ 12/22/022821 7&mode=thread&tid=126
It made
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02
Slashdot should not be promoting hype from any vendor that has a history like OQO until it's actually released.
You can still get pictures of it from google image search.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is.
No it's not an RS232 port. It's a propritary port. The unit comes with a cable that's about 3 feet long that breaks it out into other ports such as Ethernet, USB, VGA (and some others, I don't remember the details)
This thing is AWSOME! I saw it at CES and I'm seriously thinking of getting one when they come out. It is truely amazing. The only thing I'm not sure of is the screen seemed prone to getting damaged. They also claimed they had it running off the same battery at CES all day and it was still running (so several hour battery life)
Not sure if the pictures on this site show it (it's slashdotted) as none of the other pictures I've seen show this, but the screen slides up about 1/2 way to reveal a little QWERTY keyboard.
Second of all, it runs linux just fine. The designers have tested it with Red Hat 9 with no problems. They haven't tested BSD, but don't see any reason why that wouldn't work as well; there's some discussion of testing Darwin on it.
Third, I just asked one of the designers about ports. The reponse:
"We've got USB, FW (4 pin), Audio (stereo with "extra" feature lines), 2 docking ports, external 802.11 antenna port and Power. USB is 1.1, FW is 400Mb. On the docking connector, we've got: VGA, LVDS (for digital interface to LCD), Serial PCI (for external PCI chassis/devices), same FW, 2 USB lines, Audio, Power. On the docking cable, we've got a USB -> Ethernet converter with RJ-45 plug, male and female VGA connectors (for flexibility of plugging into devices without additional cables), and so on." There is no serial port on the device.
Fourth, the theory behind the device is to have a box that will convert from a PDA to a desktop machine and back again. You use it in the office, undock it, use it on the train, and redock it to use it again once you get home. No syncing required. It's not really meant just be a turbo-charged PDA.