Normally I would agree with you. I'm all for combining as much as possible into the phone.
But in this case we are talking about something that by necessity is too large for carrying arround every day in your pocket. What makes these things better than a smartphone is the big screen and until someone actually makes the rollable screens we have been tempted with by scifi movies for decades now, the device can't be smaller than the screen.
I look forward to the day when I can combine that feature in the phone too though.
Presumably you will have your cellphone with you anyway and its connection can be used via bluetooth.
Some advantages of not having a HSPDA radio in the tablet: * The cellphone allready have the account for the connection so you will not need another for the tablet. * Battery life of the tablet will not be drained by the connection. * Cost and size can be kept down * The tablet does not need to be as extensively certified as a GSM/HSPDA phone.
The only downside is that Bluetooth currently maxes out at 2.1 Mbps and the HSPDA networks are getting above that. But frankly 2.1 Mbps should be enough for what you will do on these tablets.
Why would you want an integrated phone, it is too big to use as your primary phone so you would need another phone anyway, use that via bluetooth. Problem solved.
The screen is really good so I think most users with normal eysight can use it without problems.
It uses RS-MMC which is like mini-sd but cheaper and (I think) slower.
Ive had my 770 for a week now and so far I'm very happy with it!
I have seen many posts wondering why you'd want one, so here are my reasons.
* I want to have something to browse the web where a laptop is not appropriate, like in the bed or TV couch (I dont want to sit awkwardly leaning down to the coffetable or balancing the thing on my lap)
* I use it as an extra MP3 player in the kitchen, streaming music from my server. When used like this I have external speakers and the power chord plugged in. Since there are lots of wifi MP3 player I can't be alone in having a need for this functionality.
* It can act as a pretty good divx player on the road but I haven't really used it for that yet.
* It's really cool!
This might not be enough for everyone but I have wanted the websurfing part of it since the term webpad was first coined somewhere in the late 1990s. And this is the first one that really delivers on the promise at a decent price point.
I never wanted the tablet pc's becuse the ones I have seen are all laptops without keyboard which means that they are expensive, heavy and not really designed to surf the web on the go.
The fact that it runs Linux and potentially can do a lot of other things is pure bonus!
Many people have questioned the lack of a phone in the unit, but I can't really see why I would want one. If it had a phone, lets say a 3G one, it would need it's own subscription or a dual subscription if possible, would be heavier and use more battery.
I honestly think that it is much better to use my allready existing phone and subscription through bluetooth. Right now that is a GPRS phone but may soon be uppgraded to 3G, if it had been built in I would not have had the possibility to uppgrade it either.
I guess I should include a little min review also, so here goes...
The good. * The build quality of the thing is excelent. Since most Nokia phones are plastic little massproduced toys that feels like they will break if you look at them funny I was suprised by this. The 770 feels like it could stop bullets:-)
* The browser, so far it has handled most pages I have thrown at it with ease the pages have been shown in all their glory without having to slim them down to the screen. (Try that on a Palm!)
* The battery life, the stated 3 hours must be while stressing the unit hard, for normal use it lasts a looong time. The powermoding is excelent!
The bad. * The 64Megs of RAM is a bit to little, the browser suck quite a lot of it and becaus of this it has problems with really large web pages.
* Memory handling in general is not the best, it takes a little to long to load programs.
* I expected that it would include a real dockingstation with power but it came a flimsy plastic stand a standard nokia charger.
But you shouldn't have to enter the bluetooth PIN code everytime you connect to it. I have a SonyEricsson K700 and after I have paired the 770 with it once it will connect directly when I tell it to. This is the normal behavior of bluetooth units so you most likely have a phone that does something weird.
You obviously don't pay the TV license since the current price is 1920pr (258$) per year, not ($30-40).
And about the legality, I believe it actually is legal right now since the law that forbids downloading hasn't taken effect yet. Currently only upploading is forbidden, of course if you use any P2P sw to download you are simultaneously uploading...
That said, I actually watch downloaded TV almost exlusively! I'm totally addicted to watching TV whenever I want and without having to wait a year or more for a Swedish channel to pick up a show.
I pay my TV license and if I could I would pay for the downloads also. The price should be whatever the going price for advertising/viewer for the show would be. I doubt proctor and gamble pay that much for forcing me to watch detergent comercials.
After reading this thread I just have to wonder, what kind of boring places do you people work at! Everyone seems to think that everything relating to the computer field is network management or coding alone through the night. Engineering of all kinds are usually very social, it involves working together with diverse, almost allways interantional teams of people and very little of it is actually the alone time on the computer writing code, specifications or blueprints. I work in the automotive field writing software for the embedded systems in the car. On a normal day I discuss design decissions with my work mates, troubleshoot problems with the hardware guys and/or discuss feature request with the customer. I probably write more e-mail than code and I definately spend more times in meetings than coding alone. I would have thought that was the norm rather than the stereotypical jolt drinking hacker, but aparantly I was wrong. I guess my advice to women fearing that the CS fields are too antisocial should make sure they go inte SW engineering.
The hardware spec below was posted in Neonodes forum FAQ section. It has a 1100mAh battery that will get you 10h of MP3 time which sounds great but the talktime is only 4h. My fully charged T68 claims 11h talktime whit it's 700mAh battery so the radio part is probably not the most efficient in the word. A couple of other interesting flaws has come up in the forum. It has no vibrator function and apparently the touch screen is more like a glidepad, it has no per pixel sensitivity so handwriting recognition is probably out of the question.
All in all it looks like an almost perfect phone that will be out in limited release in february (only about 1000 units!). After that the plan is that the phone will be marketed by the service providers since Neonode is a very small company (only 15 people) that don't have the resources themselves.
We probably have not seen the real camera phones from the big manufaturers yet, just communicator models like the Nokia 7650 and SonyEricsson P800. I'm expecting something like the N1 from all of them. They at least has to compete with the Panasonic GD87 and similar.
But I would be extatic if the little guy would suceed, it's allways fun with new competition to shake things up.
GSM features: GSM dual band mode 900/1800 MHz or 900/1900 MHz (US). GPRS Class 10. SIM card can be accessed without removing the battery.
Operating system: Windows CE.NET version 4.1 running our own shell called "neoshell". We do not use Pocket PC or Smartphone 2002. Pocket PC use a minimum 240x320 pixel resolution and Smartphone 2002 requires a numerical keypad.
CPU: 96 MHz ARM 7
Display: 2.2" TFT LCD with 262140 colors (18 bit mode), 65535 colors (16 bit mode), 70 Hz frame rate, 176 (H)x 220 (V) pixels, 96 kb video ram. Touch screen with 4 navigation keys + YES and NO (Power on/off) buttons.
Memory: 16 Mb SDRAM, 73 MHz, 64 MB SD-Card included in price. Avaliable today: 512 MB.
Camera: Built in camera with 640 x 480 pixels and 16M colors. QQVGA(160x120)/QVGA(320x240) and VGA mode(640x480). Continous recording 160x120 pixels at 15 frames per second to SDCard.
Audio: Built in 1W speaker (for ring tones, conference calls etc) and receiver and microphone (for GSM talk). Built in connector for a stereo headset and microphone.
Audio Codec: 48/44/22/11 or 8 Khz, sampling rate, 8 or 16 bit stereo or mono. Mixer for GSM audio(input and output) and internal audio stream(input and output).
Communication:
12 Mbit USB Host function capable of 100mA/5V output to low power devices such as mouses, keyboards, joysticks..
12 Mbit USB Function communicating with PC or other Host simulating a serial port up to 12 MBit/sec (appears as a COM10 on PC). This port can also be used for Microsoft Acivesync 3.6.
115k, 1,1M and 4 Mbit multi mode IRDA port (This port can be used for Microsoft Activesync 3.6)
Remote Control Ir function for 36-44 KHz modulation mode simulating a TV Remote control up to 10 m.
Battery: 1100 mAh, 3.7V. Charge-time 2.5 hrs
Operating parameters: Operating up to 10 hours for games/mp3 (Radio in standby), Talk time 4 hours and standby time up to 250 hours.
Size: 88x52x21 Weight: 93 g
Software: Camera, Mediaplayer, File Manager, Address book, notepad, SMS, MMS, WAP-Browser, E-mail, Internet Explorer
Cringely makes it sound as the big problem with telematics is the need for a harddrive for storing maps. As a software engineer with three years experience in building telematics systems I can tell you that problem was solved years ago by storing the maps on DVDs or CD-ROMs. A DVD can fit the maps for the whole of Europe. And navigation is not the end all be all of telematics either. Usualy what people mean by telematics is some kind of wireless data access to and from the car and it's here the main problem lies. For one thing you need a reliable data link and so far cellular telephone networks aren't there yet, not even with GPRS. They may work but not reliably.
Another more thorny issue is the case for security. If you are going to allow a network link to a car you need to be absolutely sure that that link can't be hacked. Think for instance about what would happen if someone could turn the volume of the stereo up to max just when the driver is trying to overtake another car. And that's only the most mild of possible hacks, for some systems/cars it might be possible for a cracker to lock the brakes or apply max throttle!
Most people seem to assume that the text adventure died with Infocom, makers of such classic games as the "zork" series. But it has lived on and improved in secluded parts of the internet. On the way it changed it's name to Interactive Fiction, and now we have advanced systems such as Inform, TADS and Hugo. Games produced now by amateurs for free and with no compensation other than recognition among their peers (why does this seem familiar;-) ) are now approaching and in some cases even surpassing the old masters. I especially like playing these games on my Palm V. That way I can snuggle up with it in bed, like I would with a good book. Try doing that with Quake 3!
If anyone is interrested in interactive fiction I can recommend the online fanzine xyzzy news http://www.xyzzynews.com/
And to those complaining of the lack of graphics and 3D, I suppose you never read books either! To paraphrase an old quote,"Interactive Fiction has the best graphics in the world, your own imagination."
Well I didn't mean removable discs. I meant the built in hard drive kind of disc. These would take up about as much space as a VCR and if it was attached to a LAN you could stick in a cupboard somewhere.
So these new uses for hd's need lots of space cheep and don't really care for acces times. How about making very large(physically) discs. Since the amount of data on the drive is proportional to the square of the radius a 10" disc could hold more than eight times the amount of a 3.5" one, at the same data density. Correct me if I'm wrong but the mechanics of the drive is the expensive part right? So once new fabrication facilitys have been built, the price for a 10" drive wouldn't be much higher than for a 3.5" but it could hold 8 times more! Quantum used to make a line of 5.25" drives a couple of years ago, when all other hd makers made 3.5" ones. They could hold more data at a comparable price than the 3.5 drives but had slower access times because the heads had to be moved longer. But with these new applications access time isn't that important. So how about it, 60 gig drives for 200$. Such drives could hold about 100 uncompressed CD's or a 1000 hours of mp3! And with gmr heads you could probably start having your entire video collection on hd's.
I see a future where every house or apartment have a central storage box connected to output terminals like TV's, Speakers and computers through a LAN. No more need for CD's, DVD's or video cassets.
It crashed my Palm V to and I don't even have any weird programs on it so:-(. So I went searching the newsgroup about it, and it turned out that the way to solve it was to hold down the page up button for 5 seconds while pressing the reset button. This made it possible to get it so I could delete the applet. For some reason it had installed itself as "This applicat" followed by an unprintable character.
The problem probbably occurs because the program is executed and hangs in the boot sequence. At least that was the idea I got from the newsgroups. Anyone have a more enlightened answer?
I think that one roadblock to a truly easy install is that you typically need TWO partitions. One for swap and one for files. This makes it impossible to just install to the active paartition like Windows does. You need to make some assumptions on how to set up the paratitions. Is it possible to use a swap file on the ext2 partition? If so, then an install as easy as Win 95 should be possible.
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Normally I would agree with you.
I'm all for combining as much as possible into the phone.
But in this case we are talking about something that by necessity is too large for carrying arround every day in your pocket. What makes these things better than a smartphone is the big screen and until someone actually makes the rollable screens we have been tempted with by scifi movies for decades now, the device can't be smaller than the screen.
I look forward to the day when I can combine that feature in the phone too though.
Why would you want built in GSM/HSPDA?
Presumably you will have your cellphone with you anyway and its connection can be used via bluetooth.
Some advantages of not having a HSPDA radio in the tablet:
* The cellphone allready have the account for the connection so you will not need another for the tablet.
* Battery life of the tablet will not be drained by the connection.
* Cost and size can be kept down
* The tablet does not need to be as extensively certified as a GSM/HSPDA phone.
The only downside is that Bluetooth currently maxes out at 2.1 Mbps and the HSPDA networks are getting above that. But frankly 2.1 Mbps should be enough for what you will do on these tablets.
Why would you want an integrated phone, it is too big to use as your primary phone so you would need another phone anyway, use that via bluetooth. Problem solved.
The screen is really good so I think most users with normal eysight can use it without problems.
It uses RS-MMC which is like mini-sd but cheaper and (I think) slower.
It uses RS-MMC, 1Gig costs about 60... Is that enough?
Ive had my 770 for a week now and so far I'm very happy with it!
:-)
I have seen many posts wondering why you'd want one, so here are my reasons.
* I want to have something to browse the web where a laptop is not appropriate, like in the bed or TV couch (I dont want to sit awkwardly leaning down to the coffetable or balancing the thing on my lap)
* I use it as an extra MP3 player in the kitchen, streaming music from my server. When used like this I have external speakers and the power chord plugged in. Since there are lots of wifi MP3 player I can't be alone in having a need for this functionality.
* It can act as a pretty good divx player on the road but I haven't really used it for that yet.
* It's really cool!
This might not be enough for everyone but I have wanted the websurfing part of it since the term webpad was first coined somewhere in the late 1990s. And this is the first one that really delivers on the promise at a decent price point.
I never wanted the tablet pc's becuse the ones I have seen are all laptops without keyboard which means that they are expensive, heavy and not really designed to surf the web on the go.
The fact that it runs Linux and potentially can do a lot of other things is pure bonus!
Many people have questioned the lack of a phone in the unit, but I can't really see why I would want one.
If it had a phone, lets say a 3G one, it would need it's own subscription or a dual subscription if possible, would be heavier and use more battery.
I honestly think that it is much better to use my allready existing phone and subscription through bluetooth. Right now that is a GPRS phone but may soon be uppgraded to 3G, if it had been built in I would not have had the possibility to uppgrade it either.
I guess I should include a little min review also, so here goes...
The good.
* The build quality of the thing is excelent. Since most Nokia phones are plastic little massproduced toys that feels like they will break if you look at them funny I was suprised by this. The 770 feels like it could stop bullets
* The browser, so far it has handled most pages I have thrown at it with ease the pages have been shown in all their glory without having to slim them down to the screen. (Try that on a Palm!)
* The battery life, the stated 3 hours must be while stressing the unit hard, for normal use it lasts a looong time. The powermoding is excelent!
The bad.
* The 64Megs of RAM is a bit to little, the browser suck quite a lot of it and becaus of this it has problems with really large web pages.
* Memory handling in general is not the best, it takes a little to long to load programs.
* I expected that it would include a real dockingstation with power but it came a flimsy plastic stand a standard nokia charger.
I also bought a 770 and I'm loving it!
But you shouldn't have to enter the bluetooth PIN code everytime you connect to it.
I have a SonyEricsson K700 and after I have paired the 770 with it once it will connect directly when I tell it to.
This is the normal behavior of bluetooth units so you most likely have a phone that does something weird.
You obviously don't pay the TV license since the current price is 1920pr (258$) per year, not ($30-40).
And about the legality, I believe it actually is legal right now since the law that forbids downloading hasn't taken effect yet. Currently only upploading is forbidden, of course if you use any P2P sw to download you are simultaneously uploading...
That said, I actually watch downloaded TV almost exlusively! I'm totally addicted to watching TV whenever I want and without having to wait a year or more for a Swedish channel to pick up a show.
I pay my TV license and if I could I would pay for the downloads also.
The price should be whatever the going price for advertising/viewer for the show would be. I doubt proctor and gamble pay that much for forcing me to watch detergent comercials.
After reading this thread I just have to wonder, what kind of boring places do you people work at!
Everyone seems to think that everything relating to the computer field is network management or coding alone through the night. Engineering of all kinds are usually very social, it involves working together with diverse, almost allways interantional teams of people and very little of it is actually the alone time on the computer writing code, specifications or blueprints.
I work in the automotive field writing software for the embedded systems in the car. On a normal day I discuss design decissions with my work mates, troubleshoot problems with the hardware guys and/or discuss feature request with the customer. I probably write more e-mail than code and I definately spend more times in meetings than coding alone.
I would have thought that was the norm rather than the stereotypical jolt drinking hacker, but aparantly I was wrong.
I guess my advice to women fearing that the CS fields are too antisocial should make sure they go inte SW engineering.
The hardware spec below was posted in Neonodes forum FAQ section. It has a 1100mAh battery that will get you 10h of MP3 time which sounds great but the talktime is only 4h. My fully charged T68 claims 11h talktime whit it's 700mAh battery so the radio part is probably not the most efficient in the word. A couple of other interesting flaws has come up in the forum. It has no vibrator function and apparently the touch screen is more like a glidepad, it has no per pixel sensitivity so handwriting recognition is probably out of the question.
All in all it looks like an almost perfect phone that will be out in limited release in february (only about 1000 units!). After that the plan is that the phone will be marketed by the service providers since Neonode is a very small company (only 15 people) that don't have the resources themselves.
We probably have not seen the real camera phones from the big manufaturers yet, just communicator models like the Nokia 7650 and SonyEricsson P800. I'm expecting something like the N1 from all of them. They at least has to compete with the Panasonic GD87 and similar.
But I would be extatic if the little guy would suceed, it's allways fun with new competition to shake things up.
GSM features:
GSM dual band mode 900/1800 MHz or 900/1900 MHz (US). GPRS Class 10. SIM card can be accessed without removing the battery.
Operating system:
Windows CE.NET version 4.1 running our own shell called "neoshell". We do not use Pocket PC or Smartphone 2002. Pocket PC use a minimum 240x320 pixel resolution and Smartphone 2002 requires a numerical keypad.
CPU:
96 MHz ARM 7
Display:
2.2" TFT LCD with 262140 colors (18 bit mode), 65535 colors (16 bit mode), 70 Hz frame rate, 176 (H)x 220 (V) pixels, 96 kb video ram. Touch screen with 4 navigation keys + YES and NO (Power on/off) buttons.
Memory:
16 Mb SDRAM, 73 MHz, 64 MB SD-Card included in price. Avaliable today: 512 MB.
Camera:
Built in camera with 640 x 480 pixels and 16M colors. QQVGA(160x120)/QVGA(320x240) and VGA mode(640x480). Continous recording 160x120 pixels at 15 frames per second to SDCard.
Audio:
Built in 1W speaker (for ring tones, conference calls etc) and receiver and microphone (for GSM talk). Built in connector for a stereo headset and microphone.
Audio Codec:
48/44/22/11 or 8 Khz, sampling rate, 8 or 16 bit stereo or mono. Mixer for GSM audio(input and output) and internal audio stream(input and output).
Communication:
12 Mbit USB Host function capable of 100mA/5V output to low power devices such as mouses, keyboards, joysticks..
12 Mbit USB Function communicating with PC or other Host simulating a serial port up to 12 MBit/sec (appears as a COM10 on PC). This port can also be used for Microsoft Acivesync 3.6.
115k, 1,1M and 4 Mbit multi mode IRDA port (This port can be used for Microsoft Activesync 3.6)
Remote Control Ir function for 36-44 KHz modulation mode simulating a TV Remote control up to 10 m.
Battery: 1100 mAh, 3.7V. Charge-time 2.5 hrs
Operating parameters:
Operating up to 10 hours for games/mp3 (Radio in standby), Talk time 4 hours and standby time up to 250 hours.
Size:
88x52x21 Weight: 93 g
Software:
Camera, Mediaplayer, File Manager, Address book, notepad, SMS, MMS, WAP-Browser, E-mail, Internet Explorer
Cringely makes it sound as the big problem with telematics is the need for a harddrive for storing maps.
As a software engineer with three years experience in building telematics systems I can tell you that problem was solved years ago by storing the maps on DVDs or CD-ROMs. A DVD can fit the maps for the whole of Europe. And navigation is not the end all be all of telematics either. Usualy what people mean by telematics is some kind of wireless data access to and from the car and it's here the main problem lies. For one thing you need a reliable data link and so far cellular telephone networks aren't there yet, not even with GPRS. They may work but not reliably.
Another more thorny issue is the case for security. If you are going to allow a network link to a car you need to be absolutely sure that that link can't be hacked. Think for instance about what would happen if someone could turn the volume of the stereo up to max just when the driver is trying to overtake another car. And that's only the most mild of possible hacks, for some systems/cars it might be possible for a cracker to lock the brakes or apply max throttle!
If anyone is interrested in interactive fiction I can recommend the online fanzine xyzzy news http://www.xyzzynews.com/
And to those complaining of the lack of graphics and 3D, I suppose you never read books either! To paraphrase an old quote,"Interactive Fiction has the best graphics in the world, your own imagination."
Well I didn't mean removable discs. I meant the built in hard drive kind of disc. These would take up about as much space as a VCR and if it was attached to a LAN you could stick in a cupboard somewhere.
Torbjörn.
So these new uses for hd's need lots of space cheep and don't really care for acces times. How about making very large(physically) discs. Since the amount of data on the drive is proportional to the square of the radius a 10" disc could hold more than eight times the amount of a 3.5" one, at the same data density. Correct me if I'm wrong but the mechanics of the drive is the expensive part right? So once new fabrication facilitys have been built, the price for a 10" drive wouldn't be much higher than for a 3.5" but it could hold 8 times more!
Quantum used to make a line of 5.25" drives a couple of years ago, when all other hd makers made 3.5" ones. They could hold more data at a comparable price than the 3.5 drives but had slower access times because the heads had to be moved longer. But with these new applications access time isn't that important. So how about it, 60 gig drives for 200$. Such drives could hold about 100 uncompressed CD's or a 1000 hours of mp3! And with gmr heads you could probably start having your entire video collection on hd's.
I see a future where every house or apartment have a central storage box connected to output terminals like TV's, Speakers and computers through a LAN. No more need for CD's, DVD's or video cassets.
Torbjörn
It crashed my Palm V to and I don't even have any weird programs on it so:-(. So I went searching the newsgroup about it, and it turned out that the way to solve it was to hold down the page up button for 5 seconds while pressing the reset button. This made it possible to get it so I could delete the applet. For some reason it had installed itself as "This applicat" followed by an unprintable character.
The problem probbably occurs because the program is executed and hangs in the boot sequence. At least that was the idea I got from the newsgroups. Anyone have a more enlightened answer?
Torbjörn
I think that one roadblock to a truly easy install is that you typically need TWO partitions. One for swap and one for files. This makes it impossible to just install to the active paartition like Windows does. You need to make some assumptions on how to set up the paratitions. Is it possible to use a swap file on the ext2 partition? If so, then an install as easy as Win 95 should be possible.