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OQO Price And Release Date Set
captainJam writes "After more than 2 years of development, the OQO is finally set to be released in October for a price tag of $1899. Initially the unit will only be sold through OQO's website. Those grumbling about the price should take into consideration that the OQO is by far the smallest and lightest XP capable handtop with a touchscreen, slide-out keyboard and Transflective display."
can it run linux?
So soon?
Too bad it runs XP.
"Hey y'all, check out the 1900 bucks of spyware I gots!"
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
People who use this will have it bought for them by their companies, anyway.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I, for one, welcome our smallest and lightest overlords yet.
[Sarcasm]Gee whiz for only 1899USD you get a unreadable screen, with an underpowered CPU, too small harddisk, and battery life that does not exceed many lightweight notebooks![/Sarcasm]
On a serious note, what I do not understand about these companies, like the Tablet PC companies is that these devices are ideal complementary devices. Price the device at less than 1K and people will buy these devices. Price them near 2K and they will be niche devices that people will look at, comment as interesting, and move on.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Hardware: Tiny delight.
Operating System: Utter shite.
For that price, I can get like 20 junk computers and build a Beowulf cluster. I don't see the point in this.
The OGO, the OJO, the OKO and the OQO ...
OhGOd !
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
Answering my own question, I found a working link. But the screen resolution is 800x480, when my copy of XP tells me that it needs at a minimum 800x600. Something sure as hell stinks! Is this little outfit getting a special build of XP (seems unlikely)? Why does the retail, full price version of XP insist on a minimum 800x600 display if XP can really run on less (obviously it can, there is no reason an OS needs a larger display, but it really stinks if MS put a limitation in the retail version that obsoleetes your hardware that they will wave for certain OEMs.)
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I can buy a mighty fine Tablet PC for less than that. Sure it will be a bit larger, but it has a _tablet_ behind the screen. I can actually write on the damn thing and it recognizes my chicken-scratch.
From http://www.oqo.com/hardware/specs/:
Some intitial thoughts:
1. 256mb isn't terribly good. 512mb would be better. That said, it's _probably_ acceptable for the kind of usage they're talking about.
2. Who are they aiming this at? Photos seem to indicate business execs, which seems reasonable - they're the sort that actually use PDAs, and probably don't require huge amounts of multimedia power.
3. Docking _cable_? For nineteen hundred bucks, I expect to see an integrated docking bay, one with a slot that I can slide the OQO into. Specs mention some kind of desktop stand, but that sounds kinda cheesy, to be honest.
4. They need to make it a little more obvious that you're supposed to being using a Bluetooth cell phone with this thing for Internet access on the go.
5. Battery life seems like it's on the low side - 3 hours just isn't all that long anymore.
6. Security? If the corporate executive is using this thing, chances are he has some confidential info on it. An OQO seems easy to steal - is there any built-in encryption support?
So, cool idea, but a little too expensive. I could see this becoming something of a status symbol in the corporate world, though. "Think that's a PDA? Well, take a look at THIS!" Surprisingly, I think they've addressed their target market pretty well - replaces the Blackberry, PDA, and laptop.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
The Wikipedia article needs some serious work. Calling all knowledgeable nerds.
Kills two vaporwares with one product release!
I played with an OQO at Foo camp. It is the real deal.
The display is impressively clear in both low light and direct sunlight. As a whole, the produce is very well engineered and the UI felt relatively snappy.
It does run Linux and uses the same hard drive internally as an iPod. Battery life is fairly decent, given computing power, and the battery is designed such that you can upgrade to a higher capacity battery that is simply thicker than the original (making the entire unit thicker).
The screen is also touch sensitive and there is a stylus slot in the top of the unit. As such, one could definitely read email, browse the web, navigate meetings/schedules/calendars, and read documents without having to pop it open to use the keyboard.
The keyboard certainly does not have the feel of a full sized board, but is surprisingly usable for the size.
One of the neatest features is the "docking cable". Basically, OQO will provide a cable that has all of the various different ports -- usb, firewire, video, etc... -- hanging off of it.
The unit has a cradle that you can leave on your desk. It has VGA out. So, in combination with a bluetooth keyboard/mouse and an external monitor, you can drop the OQO into the cradle and it "just works".
Certainly not a primary machine for gamers or developers, but a damned nice little device for folks that want a portable computing device that offers a more real computing experience than a palm device, blackberry, or the like.
Of course the price is high, this is the first one. The first device of its kind, in its size, with its robust feature set. It's new, it's revolutionary and nobody has one. Some people will buy that kind of thing regardless of price -- developers will buy it to design software for it, rich technophiles will buy it just to have one and people who have been waiting for JUST such a device, saving their pennies, are waiting in the wings to buy one. I won't doubt if they're sold out for a year, even if the thing doesn't work! The first SLR digital cameras were like that -- they cost THOUSANDS of dollars and people would snatch them up left and right. Because a few thousand dollars was PEANUTS compared to the time saved by these things.
However, if the thing is even moderately popular, expect to see scads of poorly made clones some time next year, followed by the introduction of a new "entry level" model.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Hello All. Here is a nice web site that discusses the new class of portable computers ultra pcs : http://ultraportables.net/ or http://u-pcs.com/
Well, looking at the word "transflective" I can only guess that it's a mixture of "reflective" and "transmissive", meaning that it relfects some light in order to illuminate the display, but has a backlight to boost the output.
As far as I understand, all transflective screens have backlights.
How else would you see them in the dark?
The difference is that when used outside a transflective screen doesn't compete with the sun and uses natural light to illuminate the display. So the backlight isn't needed in bright light, but is in low light.