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HagakiPC - "Postcard" PC
captainJam writes "The HagakiPC, Hagaki meaning postcard in Japanese, is a tiny PC with dimensions of 135 x 109 x 18mm and weighing in at 340g making it by far the lightest and 2nd slimmest handtop. Only 128MB RAM and a 640x480 VGA screen, plus there's no hard drive -- it's meant to run OS's from CF cards (great for D.S.L. and the like). Still only a prototype, so not much info is available, but what we do know (and a few photos) are here." Update: 09/01 12:14 GMT by T : Link to D.S.L. upgraded to a form that doesn't make some browsers choke.
One of the greatest hurdles in getting these very small and very powerful computers to be very useful is how to handle input - its hard to build in a fully-sized or totally usable keyboard into something like this. I'm not finding any straightforward explanation of how you get input into this computer on the website at first glance; I also don't see a stylus in any of the pictures, which makes me think touch screen (which can be implemented well... just not ideal).
Yet slashdot will continue to up the stock prices. It may be have already been said here but this is becoming an advertising showcase site instead of a news site.
Stay tuned for new sig...
I know some people are going to claim I'm wrong, but I think a 266MHz processor and 128MB of RAM are pushing it a bit to run modern applications (and more likely, operating systems!), especially compared to the competition (such as the OQO at 1GHz)
I mean, where is this product's niche? It's not really powerful enough to run XP (or KDE), but then again the battery life isn't good enough to compare it to something like a Toshiba E800 PDA, which can be excused for not running XP or Linux because it's not designed for that kind of use.
Will people end up running something like Qtopia on it instead? How does the 266MHz compare in terms of raw power with the new XScales, which run at up to 624MHz?
I guess this is another wannabe portable device to find market niche, the only advantage it has over a PDA is its 640x480 screen, otherwise all specs are actually worse than a PDA. PDAs are cheap now, and will this "new" gadget be cheaper?
I still strong suggest the use of Virtual Keyboard, as input method seems to be a hurdle for small/light portable devices at the moment.
Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
This seems to be just another blurring of the lines between PDAs and tablets and PCs and MP3 players and cell phones and...
I mean, yeah. It's gee-whiz nifty technology and gadget lovers (self included!) will go for it. But does it do something a PDA won't? Or one of these new "Portable Media Centers?" Or is it just supposed to be a really tiny laptop, sans hard drive? The whole tech industry seems to be blindly cranking out portable technology with various levels of integration and capacity in hopes of hitting on the right combination of size, power, and capability.
Which is cool for gadget-lovers, but seems like a real poor (and real expensive) substitute for market research.
No hoax. Free computers.
Last year, someone brought a prototype into the office where I work. It was postcard sized, but the screen covered the entire face. The screen also hinged out to reveal a keyboard.
It had a hard disk and a Transmeta processor (about 1GHz, I think). It was fast enough to run WinXP.
The whole device was a prototype, but it seems to me that it blew away the PC described in the article. They were taking it to a show (Comdex?).
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I'll give you that it can run damn small linux, but damn small windows? Most people are not going to want to run a win-ce system on something that claims to be a pc... in this case it's just an oddly shaped, poorly designed, less powerful Pocket PC with a lot of RAM.
Hey look no pointless curley braces or semicolons... just like Python
Although I'm not current on the topic so perhaps this is just wishful thinking, but has anyone ever gotten anywhere with brainwave transmission/reception used for a control application. And please, I don't mean the whole space alien thing, there has been some credible research in this area. I suppose, if we can't even get speaker-independent voice recognition to work reliably, I don't imagine we'd get much further along with brainwaves; and of course, this would leave out that whole female population of users.
There's also the whole eye-movement scanning (IR bounce-back) that's done for weapons systems and to assist the handicapped.
Can't they take the display technology from the Palm's (even Palm V), add just enough CPU and memory to make a decent performing Xterm, add Wifi and that's it. Backlight optional as long as the reflectivity is very high (like Palm V).
Perhaps pouring methanol into it would help it last 10 hours or more (but the Palm V already lasts 30 hours).
Then you could just connect up to the near compute server, with specs of your choice and just surf, read, hack, whatever, from the comfort of your sofa, your lounge chair outside, etc. Most current laptops are just too unwieldy to replace a magazine.
I love it, except the macrovision copy protection. Who would want to copy a DVD using something with a 266mhz cpu? even if they get some USB DVD drive, where would it get copied? Some 512 meg flash card?
I think this would be a fine replacement for a laptop for those who want to check email or surf the web where there is a wireless service. I would also think at 640*480, it would make for a so-so word processor, not bad for taking to the library. And the fact that its less than one pound would be a huge selling point for me.
Come to think of it, how is this different than a PDA?
Right now, I use a 22 year old Tandy M100 laptop for taking all manner of notes in school, as well as for programmable math. I haven't really considered a modern laptop because they're too large (M100 is same size as a sheet of paper) if you don't pay an indecent sum for a mini-mini, and because it's not ridiculously expensive to get batteries for (4 X AA == 20 hours operation).
Now, I would like to take the low power consumption of the M100 (1 watt in it's case) and it's full-size, GOOD keyboard and combine it with a more modern but still reflective LCD display. Rather than have a keyboard with 3-5 inches of space on top and bottom of it, build the laptop into the area covered by the KBD (12 by 5 inches or so). Now use a pair or 4- or 5- inch LCDs side-by-side as a display. Install a CF drive for mass storage and BAM, you got a winner.
On the software side, do something new with an operating system. Create a multi-tasking Kernel like that found in Contiki (GUI os for Commodore 64), along with a very basic windowing system. Keep 1) A word processor, 2) A simple spreadsheet, 3) A calendar, 4) A high-precision calculator, and 5) basic web browser/e-mail client in ROM on the system. Also, something that's good for "quick'n'dirty" programming, like the BASIC of the M100, and also similarly user-friendly.
Yes, quite a wishlist... probably never gonna happen. But I can dream, right?