More on the Jackito Tactile PDA

Roland Piquepaille writes "A week ago, I wrote a column about a new Tactile Digital Assistant (TDA), the Jackito. Several Slashdot readers questioned the existence of the product and thought it might be an elaborate scam. I also had serious doubts. But as both the company behind this TDA, Novinit, and myself are French, I decided to investigate and contacted the company. And I spent several hours with the CEO and the CTO. I told them about the mistakes they made in their early announcement and asked what kind of corrective actions they were taking to fix the situation and build trust in their product. I also discussed their vision of this TDA, the history of the project and its possible future. But more importantly, I used an early prototype. I don't know if this TDA will be a success, but one thing is sure: it's real. Read this interview for more details."

Comments

YHBT

[Anonymous Coward]

RR, the submitter is a known troll.

YHBT, YHL, HAND.

Not Really Going Anywhere...

[johnhennessy]

I hate to be the harbinger of bad news, but the PDA market (and Tablet PC market for that matter) isn't really going to take off (in the way it should take off) until we can give people more than the 72/100 dots per inch on the screen.

Its hard to convince people to completly drop paper when any standard laser will spit out printouts at 600dpi (or greater) yet the best displays are still only pitched at 100 dpi.

If you had a choice, which would you pick ?

The same applies to the sensitivity of the touch-screen.

Re:Roland the Plogger, again

[enforcer999]

It's Roland the Plogger again, pumping up his hits so he can sell ads on his blog. But at least he actually went out and did some work. Usually, he just writes clueless re-hashes of published articles. I was wondering why everyone was being so hostile to this article. Thanks for the information.

Any other correlation?

[Anonymous Coward]

The submitter is a long known troll.. I don't trust this for one minute.

I can't believe that Slashdot would run this story without some type of vertification from multiple sources.

When it gets proven that this is a total fraud, don't say I didn't worn you.

Seems really unprofessional

[billstewart]

There are two cases - either they're a scam or they're not. If they're not, then they've got a bunch of problems:

• Asking for a deposit upfront sounds a lot like they don't actually have enough working capital for the orders they're getting, and don't have enough credit line of their own to cover it either. Companies that start off with inadequate amounts of capital are almost always doomed, so even if they don't _intend_ to be a scam that takes your money and runs, they can still take your money and crash.
  
• Not having web-page credit cards support ready when they launched the product means (at best) that they're not willing to delay their web page launch for a day or two while they arrange with one of the hundreds of online credit-card-handling services out there. They seem to have fixed that now, but especially when they're asking for a dubious-looking up-front deposit, it's hard to inspire trust...
  
• "Escrow accounts" can be real, or can be a fake rip-off. Their web page doesn't name any actual escrow service provider, so it sounds like they're just keeping the money themselves.
  

Interesting....

[Spyro VII]

However, even if it's not a sham, it still seems like pretty shady business. Besides, how is it that only this Rolad fellow seems to know anything about it's existence (while of course having no ties to the actual company)?

Saw a braille PDA at the bus station the other day

[Robotech_Master]

Funny thing...not long after reading the original article about this PDA, I was at the city bus transfer station waiting for the bus...and I happened to see a fellow fiddling with something that looked a lot like that Jackito PDA illustration. At least, it had a similar form factor and the braille strip in the same place, even though it wasn't identical. So, I can't speak for the Jackito PDA--heck, I'm not even entirely sure that what the guy was fiddling with was a PDA--but I can say I've seen someone using something that looked a lot like the picture of that thing. Didn't get to ask him about it, because he put it away and went to catch the bus I got off of.