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OQO Examined
D4C5CE writes "The vapor solidifies... After years of waiting and an appearance at CES early this year, some people have finally had the opportunity to try an OQO 'Model 01 ultra personal computer (uPC)' at CeBIT America, and published this report. The device is available to a few lucky pilot customers, but for the rest of us they still won't be shipping before this fall, and they have yet to beat the Zaurus line (hopefully also with wireless connectivity in its clamshell versions soon - Are you listening, Sharp?) to justify a $1500+ price tag."
Would make an awesone handheld gaming system if it were priced about $1000 lower ... for $1500 I might as well go buy a 12" Powerbook ...
That's a lot of money for what is essentially a miniature laptop. Is it really worth it, when you can buy a 2ghz laptop with 256+ MB of ram for less than $1000?
Unfortunately for then I think this is a "Mac" type product. No offense to OQO, but I think Apple would be able to pull off something like this.
Does anyone have an idea how well the screen would hold up to scratches and all, being exposed the way it is?
Peace
They already did. Like 10 years ago. They called it the Newton.
Ah! That saved me smashing this device down right on. ;-)
Hmmm...I think I will smash it down anyway. And pretend I did not know it was not for Slashdot users ;-)
I don't own a PDA, but if I'd do, than it would be the SHARP Zaurus SL-5500G.
The device in question here has best of both worlds of portable computing (PDA and Laptop) but exactly this I find makes it a bad choice. It's small enough to fit into a pocket (PDA) but too big to wake the desire to carry it around all times (or often) (Laptop).
To be honest, I do not see why it could replace a laptop. It has no optical drive and thus is limited. I see no real offer in the mobile market, that, personally, I find satisfying. Even the Zaurus is not perfect.
Hello?? Fred?! Is this you?
In fact, the only fault with the U series is Sony's determination not to useful-sized hard drives in them. I kinda get tired of my need to purchase Sony stuff because it's all marketing and no customer support, but it certainly looks right when it's sitting on the store shelf.
The OQO is a perpetually delayed unknown, and if their business model includes limiting supply to keep people hankering after it, then I think they're getting it wrong.
Yes, that's exactly what Sharp will do: wait until a competitor assesses that their product should be pulled from a marketplace and *then* bring out a more competative product. /sarcasm
Now wash your hands.
Wherza guy meet dat chickadee in the picture? She's gorgeous!
Windows XP SP2 told me to install third-party software that prevents viruses and protects stability... I chose Ubuntu
Is it running Palm OS 5, or 4.1? If 4.1, it's running a DragonBall (read: embedded 68000), and not an ARM. Also, the ARM in the Sharp is a LOT more powerful than most ARMs in Palms.
Removal of competition, BTW, makes companies MORE lazy, not less.
> Voice recognition keeps being touted as the holy grail and end of all these problems but where is it? I remember VR demos from the 486 days, you can't tell me a 200-400mhz PDA can't manage that much horsepower.
Having worked on such systems, a few reasons (not to say it isn't coming someday...):
1. Audio systems on most PCs, especially portables, have historically been of poor quality so accuracy suffers.
2. You have to wear a properly configured and positioned microfphone, or accuracy again suffers.
3. Accuracy of 99% (unrealistic) still means correcting one word in 100 -- and corrections may take a lot of time and interrupt a flow of thought. And, since corrections are usually real words and not typos, they may be hard to spot.
4. Algorithm work on the PC moved towards floating point; many portable processors lack floating point.
5. Speech is very useful in interactive conversation between two people -- transcribing dictation when you don't know the problem domain and can't ask questions is a hard problem even for human transcriptionists.
6. Speech gives up some privacy (although cell phones do too).
7. The killer in portability -- SR takes a lot of CPU, which translates into a lot of battery power, which means short lived handhelds.
Personally, I would like to see the older discrete (pause between words) stuff used because it can be quite good when trained -- but the market seems to want continuous. Also, people are trying things like using wireless phones to offload speech processing to network servers (but wireless uses battery power too!)
Also, having said all that, I think conversational interfaces will be more and more important as time goes on in a variety of situations (although they will work alongside other modalities).
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.