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FlipStart to Replace Your Laptop?
WED Fan writes "Paul Allen has a new hardware venture, smaller than a laptop, larger than a blackberry. According to the Seattle P-I, the vision is to replace the laptop for most everyday use, such as office applications, email, and web surfing. 'Really, FlipStart gives you everything that your laptop does [...] We're not promoting the idea that you would do CAD design on it, but for Office applications and most of what people do with their laptops, it's great.' But at a $2000 price tag, this could be a little bit out of the range of many users. The product will launch on FlipStart.com in the not to distant future."
And not only that, the $2000 device can't even do what the $1000 laptop could.... I just don't see this going very far. Maybe if it cost $600-800.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Literally almost everyone who's going to be in this market already has a DS, and it's about the right size... a small cartridge loaded with a PDA-style application or three could clean up nicely. It's not going to be a laptop, but it's a nice cheap in-between that with a few key features could clean up big time.
I have a nokia n800 and love it. It can easily fit in a jacket pocket or a bag without having to think about it. Its big screen, wifi, and bluetooth, make surfing the web a breeze. I use it a lot to read news and documentation in coffee shops or on trains. With a folding bluetooth keyboard, or the on screen one, I can easily write quick notes or docs. And its linux and comes with a full featured terminal I can use to SSH into work and get some things done. Plus its only $400
The genius of the n800 I think is that it is not a laptop and not a pda. It is its own class of device, with a UI designed specificly for its small high resolution screen, touch screen, and set of buttons.
I am still waiting for a computer that looks like a small book, but where the screen itself folds in half, to become a tablet with a reasonable screen size. Apple dreamed of such a device called the Knowledge Navigator years ago in the following video, and I hope display and voice recognition technology will make this something real within the next 5 years.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=3WdS4TscWH8
Ok, this thing will replace my Blackberry and my Palm and maybe my phone, and it weighs ONE AND A HALF POUNDS?
I have a feeling the iPhone will be able to do all this gizmo does, at a fraction of the weight and cost, a bit slower perhaps, but at 10x the [babe version of yor choice]-magnet factor.
I'm not trying to plug iPhones, but what kind of cool stuff has Vulcan lately, versus Apple? (Besides spiffing up downtown Seattle.)
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Yeah this thing looks like it does less than the last Fujitsu P1000 which is just slightly wider (barely larger footprint than a paperback book), and has a touch screen which is an anchient 800mhz Transmeta system. This isn't even replacing a $1000 item with a $2000 item. This is at most a $400 item these days. For $2000 I could get a highly pimped out Fujitsu Lifebook P7230 (I dig Fujitsu's sub-notebooks, rugged lil bastards) that does everything that does, has a whole fucking lot more, and the only drawback would be a slightly larger system (would be even smaller if they dropped the optical drive).
I've heard good things about the OQO's features, but not about its build quality.. has the 02 improved in that respect?
It was, and its category of computers still is, very successful in Japan. Over here, size does matter. Very much so.