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A slight failure of technolust
Jul. 13th, 2010 02:03 amAKA Good tech, bad tech, how to win big
I spent some time a few days ago playing with an iPad an an iPhone 4, courtesy of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jamesb and Mrs B. They really are lovely devices, a gorgeous combination of great industrial design and some truly excellent software and HCI work. Very impressive indeed. The iPad will be even more impressive and versatile when it gets "iOS 4", as Cisco is nobly allowing Apple to call it.
But I still don't want to own either of them. The phone is a bit too closed and I don't want to have to void my warranty and jailbreak and unlock either device just to run whatever I want on them. I also do rather want at least the option of Flash, Java and so on. Most of the applets on my Communicator are Java MIDlets.
For a while, I've been thinking that I would like an iPad clone, but running Android, with a couple of USB ports for slave devices and a host port for connecting to a PC, and perhaps a multiformat card reader or two built in, both for sucking pics off a digital camera and for adding additional storage, or for standalone backups. Oh, and replaceable batteries. Maybe even two of them, so you could hot-swap them when it was running, or run with just one for minimal weight.
Same sort of formfactor, same sort of functions and UI, but a bit more open. Not some little 5" or 7" thing but a full 10" or so, maybe even a bit more in a widescreen format.
But then I realised something.
One of the main uses for such a device is reading eBooks and so on, and one of the places I'd most like to use it, especially in summer, would be sitting in the park or in a beer garden or the like, places I wouldn't carry a laptop just to read or surf.
And in bright sunlight, TFT screens are useless. They wash out into invisibility.
Which made me think of the ideal combination: an Android (or WebOS) tablet with an ARM chip - perhaps an nVidia Tegra - and a Pixel Qi screen.
Pixel Qi is the standalone screen company selling the technology used for the OLPC project's XO-1 laptop - the famed $100 laptop. Its unique thing is that with a backlight, it's a normal colour LCD screen, but in bright external light, you can turn the backlight off and use it in reflective mode - like the ancient mono LCDs of the 1980s. Most of the colours wash out, but the resolution is very high, for crisp text, and with no backlight, your battery life goes up several times over.
It's the ideal combination. Thin light ARM-powered device - I could not be less interested in an Atom-powered slate with Windows 7, I want the thing to be thin, light and last all day on a charge and I don't want or need x86 and a desktop OS - but a screen that works outdoors and gives even longer battery life.
Now that, I might buy.
P. S. Aficionadi of this market might point at Notion Ink's Adam at this point, as demonstrated late last year, but nine months later it's still not on the market, so it hardly counts.
I spent some time a few days ago playing with an iPad an an iPhone 4, courtesy of
jamesb and Mrs B. They really are lovely devices, a gorgeous combination of great industrial design and some truly excellent software and HCI work. Very impressive indeed. The iPad will be even more impressive and versatile when it gets "iOS 4", as Cisco is nobly allowing Apple to call it. But I still don't want to own either of them. The phone is a bit too closed and I don't want to have to void my warranty and jailbreak and unlock either device just to run whatever I want on them. I also do rather want at least the option of Flash, Java and so on. Most of the applets on my Communicator are Java MIDlets.
For a while, I've been thinking that I would like an iPad clone, but running Android, with a couple of USB ports for slave devices and a host port for connecting to a PC, and perhaps a multiformat card reader or two built in, both for sucking pics off a digital camera and for adding additional storage, or for standalone backups. Oh, and replaceable batteries. Maybe even two of them, so you could hot-swap them when it was running, or run with just one for minimal weight.
Same sort of formfactor, same sort of functions and UI, but a bit more open. Not some little 5" or 7" thing but a full 10" or so, maybe even a bit more in a widescreen format.
But then I realised something.
One of the main uses for such a device is reading eBooks and so on, and one of the places I'd most like to use it, especially in summer, would be sitting in the park or in a beer garden or the like, places I wouldn't carry a laptop just to read or surf.
And in bright sunlight, TFT screens are useless. They wash out into invisibility.
Which made me think of the ideal combination: an Android (or WebOS) tablet with an ARM chip - perhaps an nVidia Tegra - and a Pixel Qi screen.
Pixel Qi is the standalone screen company selling the technology used for the OLPC project's XO-1 laptop - the famed $100 laptop. Its unique thing is that with a backlight, it's a normal colour LCD screen, but in bright external light, you can turn the backlight off and use it in reflective mode - like the ancient mono LCDs of the 1980s. Most of the colours wash out, but the resolution is very high, for crisp text, and with no backlight, your battery life goes up several times over.
It's the ideal combination. Thin light ARM-powered device - I could not be less interested in an Atom-powered slate with Windows 7, I want the thing to be thin, light and last all day on a charge and I don't want or need x86 and a desktop OS - but a screen that works outdoors and gives even longer battery life.
Now that, I might buy.
P. S. Aficionadi of this market might point at Notion Ink's Adam at this point, as demonstrated late last year, but nine months later it's still not on the market, so it hardly counts.
