This can only be a good thing. Apple is going to want to report to its investors just how overwhelmingly positive their existing customer base has responded to the switch, and they'll be itching to post strong numbers on overall Intel chip sales.
Bush did a good job of avoiding this in an interview in the September 6 edition of Time Magazine (http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987, 1101040906-689397,00.html - sorry, you need to pay to read the article). He was asked directly what his biggest mistake was, and unabashedly avoided the question.
I'd love to see it answered, but given this precedent it may be better to pose a less general question for which it will be more challenging to avoid.
I remember doing some testing on a mail server in '94 - after years of using foo@bar.com as an address I knew would reliably bounce - when "The Fooster" actually replied asking why I was sending test messages to his account.
Damn Internet boom...
O'Connor, Mike (BAR71-DOM)
The O'Connor Company of St Paul
2168 W. Hoyt Ave.
St. Paul, MN 55108
US
Domain Name: BAR.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
O'Connor, Mike (MDUYICQXAI) mike@HAVEN.COM
The O'Connor Company of St Paul
2168 W. Hoyt Ave.
St. Paul, MN 55108
US
651-647-6109 fax: 123 123 1234
Record expires on 23-Apr-2006.
Record created on 22-Apr-1994.
Database last updated on 11-Jul-2004 11:47:34 EDT.
You're likely going to see many opinions in this thread, but here are - from my perspective - the most salient points from my experience.
The first is the ongoing cost of maintenance. With any projection device, you'll need to occasionally replace the bulb - in many cases, this works out to a new bulb every 500-1000 hours. For my InFocus LP330, new bulbs cost me $150-200 each.
The second point is daytime viewing. Light output of projectors is measured in lumens, with the higher the number representing higher light output. For daytime viewing, anything under 1000 lumens is essentially useless in all but the darkest of rooms. A good, reflective screen will help a bit, but if you're planning to put the projector in a room that gets a lot of sunlight, you'll want to either invest in a brighter projector or some black-out drapes for the room. The latter option may be less expensive.
Have a look @ TI's WANDA platform for a cool reference design similar to this. I played with the platform at the CTIA show last month, and the company that put it together for TI, Accellent, had working prototypes in cases ready to go.
The best part about WANDA: it's $130 for the integrated board. Add a battery, display and a few controls, and you could have whatever kind of PDA you wanted.
Additionally, Metrowerks has been working to get their OpenPDA Linux distribution (formerly Lineo's) working on WANDA.
Symbol has a less than stellar track record of opening up their devices to alternative technologies, and their licensing relationship with Microsoft all but guarantees that you'll never see them shipping a Linux or Symbian device from them.
I bought one of these off of eBay a couple of months ago, and sold it shortly after I bought it despite having invested in a 128MB MMC card. A few key comments:
1. While I thought the keypad would be interesting and innovative, it's actually a disaster in consumer product design. The standard 3x4 keypad design is so commonly employed that people now input numbers/PINs/etc. as much for the pattern of the digits as the number the combined digits form. I found while using the device that even numbers I have known and dialed for years did not easily come to memory as the phone lacks the visual queues the familiar layout provides.
2. The device supports a limited set of Bluetooth profiles, so that Jabra headset you bought or the first few generations of SonyEricsson headsets (through the HBH-30) won't work with it.
3. IMAP over SSL/TLS? Forget it. Doesn't work.
4. The user interface feels childish and inelegant. This is just my opinion, but when you compare it to either UIQ on the SonyEricsson P800 or PocketPC 2002 it appears more to be the product of an early-stage, open source project than commercial UI design.
5. The video camera only captures ~12 seconds of video. This is NOT a storage limitation, as this restriction exists no matter how much storage you have available.
6. Also personal opinion, the construction of the device feels cheap and "plasticy".
Still, the device category has come a hell of a long way since the IBM/BellSouth Simon...
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This can only be a good thing. Apple is going to want to report to its investors just how overwhelmingly positive their existing customer base has responded to the switch, and they'll be itching to post strong numbers on overall Intel chip sales.
That's a 20x price difference.
Bush did a good job of avoiding this in an interview in the September 6 edition of Time Magazine (http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987, 1101040906-689397,00.html - sorry, you need to pay to read the article). He was asked directly what his biggest mistake was, and unabashedly avoided the question.
I'd love to see it answered, but given this precedent it may be better to pose a less general question for which it will be more challenging to avoid.
I remember doing some testing on a mail server in '94 - after years of using foo@bar.com as an address I knew would reliably bounce - when "The Fooster" actually replied asking why I was sending test messages to his account.
Damn Internet boom...
O'Connor, Mike (BAR71-DOM)
The O'Connor Company of St Paul
2168 W. Hoyt Ave.
St. Paul, MN 55108
US
Domain Name: BAR.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
O'Connor, Mike (MDUYICQXAI) mike@HAVEN.COM
The O'Connor Company of St Paul
2168 W. Hoyt Ave.
St. Paul, MN 55108
US
651-647-6109 fax: 123 123 1234
Record expires on 23-Apr-2006.
Record created on 22-Apr-1994.
Database last updated on 11-Jul-2004 11:47:34 EDT.
You're likely going to see many opinions in this thread, but here are - from my perspective - the most salient points from my experience.
The first is the ongoing cost of maintenance. With any projection device, you'll need to occasionally replace the bulb - in many cases, this works out to a new bulb every 500-1000 hours. For my InFocus LP330, new bulbs cost me $150-200 each.
The second point is daytime viewing. Light output of projectors is measured in lumens, with the higher the number representing higher light output. For daytime viewing, anything under 1000 lumens is essentially useless in all but the darkest of rooms. A good, reflective screen will help a bit, but if you're planning to put the projector in a room that gets a lot of sunlight, you'll want to either invest in a brighter projector or some black-out drapes for the room. The latter option may be less expensive.
It's analogous the plural used by the hacker community for DEC's Vax computers: Vaxen.
Have a look @ TI's WANDA platform for a cool reference design similar to this. I played with the platform at the CTIA show last month, and the company that put it together for TI, Accellent, had working prototypes in cases ready to go.
The best part about WANDA: it's $130 for the integrated board. Add a battery, display and a few controls, and you could have whatever kind of PDA you wanted.
Additionally, Metrowerks has been working to get their OpenPDA Linux distribution (formerly Lineo's) working on WANDA.
Symbol has a less than stellar track record of opening up their devices to alternative technologies, and their licensing relationship with Microsoft all but guarantees that you'll never see them shipping a Linux or Symbian device from them.
I bought one of these off of eBay a couple of months ago, and sold it shortly after I bought it despite having invested in a 128MB MMC card. A few key comments:
1. While I thought the keypad would be interesting and innovative, it's actually a disaster in consumer product design. The standard 3x4 keypad design is so commonly employed that people now input numbers/PINs/etc. as much for the pattern of the digits as the number the combined digits form. I found while using the device that even numbers I have known and dialed for years did not easily come to memory as the phone lacks the visual queues the familiar layout provides.
2. The device supports a limited set of Bluetooth profiles, so that Jabra headset you bought or the first few generations of SonyEricsson headsets (through the HBH-30) won't work with it.
3. IMAP over SSL/TLS? Forget it. Doesn't work.
4. The user interface feels childish and inelegant. This is just my opinion, but when you compare it to either UIQ on the SonyEricsson P800 or PocketPC 2002 it appears more to be the product of an early-stage, open source project than commercial UI design.
5. The video camera only captures ~12 seconds of video. This is NOT a storage limitation, as this restriction exists no matter how much storage you have available.
6. Also personal opinion, the construction of the device feels cheap and "plasticy".
Still, the device category has come a hell of a long way since the IBM/BellSouth Simon...