Here come the OQO/770 Killers

[Mike Cane]

Yeah, right.

http://www.my-esm.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=51200892

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000653072882/

[Jerome]

1500$, vaporware.

[Hedgecore]

$1500 is a little steep for a rendered phone. Unless it comes with the copy of 3dStudio they created it with :P

[RogerS]

"A little steep"? You are too kind. $1100 more than a 770 for a phone and Windows seems to have passed "a little steep" and gone into you've-got-to-be-nuts-to-pay-this territory.

IMO.

[Remote User]

Have no fear of the Windows devices. Microsoft has just admitted it is out of gas. Check this (http://www.techworld.com/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=5002) out. This is a unambiguous admission that they are going to have to stop doing graphics they way they've been doing graphics from day one in Redmond and to start doing graphics the way that the designers of X laid the groundwork for over 20 years ago. Microsoft and the companies that are depending on Microsoft can not only not play in the same league as 770-class devices, they can't even show up for the game. Not everybody knows it yet but the people watching this know that it's game over, man.

[Mike Cane]

Roger: Get to the Wired Store. Fondle the OQO... heh-heh.

[RogerS]

Yes, well, I will accept an OQO if I go to a party and they give me one free as a party favor. :)

I don't have anything against it except for the price.

[Jerome]

Yes. One of the big pluses of the 770 is that the price is right.

And that it is available now, of course.

[cis4life]

No Competition, It will be hard enough breaking this device into the market without the hefty pricetag this one has. 770 is still ok.

[Mike Cane]

More info about it!

http://jkontherun.blogs.com/jkontherun/2005/12/jkontherun_excl.html

[waddell]

The OQO and 770 are not competitors. The OQO is a desktop replacement - the 770 is an inexpensive device optimized mostly for browsing. The same comparison can be made with this new franken-xp-phone. Aside from form-factor and a few similar use paterns, they aren't all that similar.

The only thing I really don't like about the OQO is that it was outdated before it was released because of slips and delays. [which were much, much worse than those for the 770 release.] I can't take the OQO seriously as a desktop replacement given it's lack of usb 2.0 and inability to drive an external display at 1600x1200 at 16bpp or better. If I'm going to pay for a desktop replacement, I expect to get one. Also, the OQO touch screen is supposed to be pretty awful wrt precision - at least that's what I've read. There's a who bunch of info about handtop pcs at handtops.com (http://handtops.com) if anyone is interested.

[Mike Cane]

You're behind the curve -- USB 2.0 is in the new OQO 01+.

[James Kendrick]

The reality is that handhelds that are full WinXP devices are devices that are in the laptop category in terms of pricing. They cannot be compared to specialized (and limited use) devices like PDAs and the 770. The prices will never be comparable. I will say that 2006 will be the year of the full function handheld at more reasonable prices.

[Jerome]

The reality is that not only they are in the same category in terms of pricing, they are also in the same category in the terms of battery life, etc...

If you put WinXP (or OSX, or even full-fledged Linux) on a machine, you get the same constraints as to computing power, disk size and interface than on a desktop. No surprise.

The idea behind a handheld is to redesign the system so that you DO the same things using less power, footprint and money. What do I do: I type text, do spreadsheets, run a calendar... all things which were done on a PC-XT running at 8 MHz. I also need network connectivity, web, mp3, maybe the odd animation. Why wouldn't that work on a palmtop?

Unless your web connectivity implies 3-D games and bloated web pages, it should work. What do you use your WinXP machine for?

[James Kendrick]

But, that can't be done cheaper than a laptop. Miniaturization is by nature expensive. The two goals are mutually exclusive, unfortunately.

[Remote User]

The reality is that handhelds that are full WinXP devices are devices that are in the laptop category in terms of pricing. They cannot be compared to specialized (and limited use) devices like PDAs and the 770.Anyone who understands that the 770 is a handheld remote X terminal and who understands the power of the 'X Server - X Client Application' paradigm is never going to agree that the 770 is a limited use device. On the contrary, it's the first mobile device ever manufactured for the mass market that was NOT a limited use device. The magic of the 770 is that when used as an X terminal it is thinner than a thin client and its GUI can empower the user simultaneously to multiple remote apps and services running on remote computers and remote supercomputing clusters. A 770 user using X has access to far more CPU power and storage than does a user of any XP machine of any size.
Miniaturization is by nature expensive. The two goals are mutually exclusive, unfortunately.Reality is far too complex for this to be true. The 770 itself is evidence of that. When miniaturization involves integration of multiple discrete hardware components the price of the integrated component typically is less than the price of the formerly discrete components. When current is reduced, the need for (and cost of) heat dissipation components is reduced, or eliminated. When BlueTooth or Wireless USB are added, the need for cables is eliminated. When the touchscreen firmware is moved into the CPU the need for a discrete controller is eliminated. When miniaturization makes a product more in demand the cost of manufacturing each unit decreases.

There are many problems with building small XP machines that work well, any many of these are the same problems that are encountered with building big XP machines that work well.

[James Kendrick]

Thin clients can never replace devices that must be fully functional when a network is unavailable, on a flight for instance. While WiFi is more readily available now than in the past there are still many places and times when it is not. It requires a full computer to provide the connectivity options many mobile users need to get connected.

Small devices are expensive to design, engineer, and manufacture than larger ones such as laptops. This is why we haven't seen such handhelds for less than around $2,000. As processes become more prevalent we will see them come down like everything else. I believe this will happen in 2006.

[Remote User]

Thin clients can never replace devices that must be fully functional when a network is unavailable, on a flight for instance.The 770 isn't a thin client. It's an X terminal. You have never seen a wireless touchscreen X terminal in mass production before, have you? If you aren't sure what an X terminal is nobody here is going to ridicule you if you say so. Many Linux people don't actually know, either.
It requires a full computer to provide the connectivity options many mobile users need to get connected.What do you mean? All these 770 users are getting connected easily to the Internet without 'a full computer'.
Small devices are expensive to design, engineer, and manufacture than larger ones such as laptops. This is why we haven't seen such handhelds for less than around $2,000.The selling price of the 770 is $350. What are you talking about, exactly?

[Mythic]

The 770 isn't a thin client. It's an X terminal.
I would say that people use 770 in different manners, for some it MIGHT be a thin client. (It sure is for me, most apps I use on big computer would not fit small screen anyway) So you should not try to persuade them about your subjective truth.

[christianhauck]

Remote User, I hear you preaching. And there is one thing that resonates with me: Stuff for the expert market can be prohibitively expensive. As soon as mass market jumps in and prices drop, new worlds of opportunities open up. Examples taken from my "former life": 20 years ago: graphic caards for scientific visualizations (cheap due to gamers). AD-converters (cheap now due to music lovers). Mechanical devices: ultra-high-precision spray devices (hairspray).

Long story short: now the cheap X-terminal is here. "We" did not expect it like that, and if I interpret you correctly, even those that have a 770 don't see what it is (by the way, off-topic again: that's what Alchemists say about the philosophers' stone, too).
For us, uninitiated, little crowd: where is the (free, easily accessible) X-server to play around and tinker, even if only to say or listen to "hello world"? Where is the beef?

[Remote User]

The 770 isn't a thin client. It's an X terminal.
I would say that people use 770 in different manners, for some it MIGHT be a thin client. (It sure is for me, most apps I use on big computer would not fit small screen anyway) So you should not try to persuade them about your subjective truth.It's apparently lost on you that your reply ironically demonstrates the correctness of my statement and undermines your own. As you note, 'Thin Client' is not a precise term at all. On the other hand, X terminal is an absolutely precise term. Nothing about my description of the 770 as an X terminal is 'subjective'. It's a very precise term. 'Subjective' is, however, a pretty good word to apply to what a thin client is, as you yourself posit, viz. "for some it MIGHT be a thin client".

Your experience with 'apps on big computer(s) (which) would not fit small screen anyway' implies that your experience with 'thin clients' has left you feeling unfulfilled because the GUIs on those apps don't scale and the apps themselves aren't designed for remote collaborative groups. Your situation is like someone with a TV who doesn't have any way to get any broadcast programming connection.

My experience, for over a decade, contrasts with yours. The GUIs I deal with daily are remotely served from many locations to my display. They're always properly scaled and always place me in the appropriate collaborative workgroup context. It isn't the application that does this, though, it's X. The remote apps are graphic, but they're very compact. Executable code is only about 3 Mb. Graphical X apps can be very small, of course, because they can be rendered and don't require bitmaps.

I use touchscreen displays and touch-driven apps all over the country every day but there is no touchscreen code in any of the apps I'm getting displays from. How can that be? The answer is 'X'. All X apps are touchscreen apps if my remote user X configuration defines a touchscreen. Extrapolate the significance of that example of the advantage of that specific feature of X architecture if you will.

The 770 is an X terminal because it's built to be one. Nobody has to add any code at all to operate it as an X terminal. That's not a subjective judgement that I or anyone else makes. It's a fact of the 770's design. I think you should argue with Nokia, perhaps, and tell them that the 770's ability to serve up remote displays to X client applications all across the internet is just an opinion that they have about what the 770 can do. Certainly, anyone can choose to not use the 770 as an X terminal, but that doesn't change anything. If I have car and I don't drive it, well, it's still a car, you see, and that's not a subjective judgement, is it?

[Remote User]

The X Server is the software component that resides on the 770 and 'serves up' a display from a client application running somewhere else. The howto for this here at ITT was written by RealNitro. If the info in the ITT howto is in need of any refinement then any of us can do that.

There are not many X apps that have been written for remote computing because back in the days when you could actually buy an X terminal it was an expensive, proprietary device. Then, in the '96-'97 timeframe X was viewed as a 'dead' technology and the companies that had been making X terminals stopped making them. They started making Windows Terminals, instead.

Largely because of the value of X in building the KDE & Gnome desktops, and because of the vibrant cottage industry of desktop themes, people began to take an interest in X again, not as a remote display protocol, but as a theme engine. What I was doing at the time was building an application-specific GUI out of X primitives for the point of sale vertical market, ignoring the desktop and focusing on remote X solutions. I still could not buy X terminals, so I had to use PC's as X terminals. Giant overkill - heavily overbuilt hardware, but unavoidable.

All an X terminal is, really, is a display that uses the X protocol to connect to the network and request a display from a client application on the LAN or WAN. Anything else (Flash Memory, extra RAM, Citrix/Microsoft display/connectivity software) turns it into a fatter device, a 'thin client' that hacks a remote user experience on the Windows platform. Nobody who ever manufactured a thin client (something born about 13-14 years after X was born in 84) put the X protocol on a thin client, too. I suspect that this exclusion was a Microsoft requirement for issueing a license to a 'thin client' manufacturer to put the Microsoft/Citrix display/connectivity protocols on a thin client. At any rate, it never happened, and if you bought a thin client it wouldn't do X.

X was becoming free software about this time and X development was coming back to life. The intensity of X development these days is at a level much higher than at any point since it was first introduced in 84. Many of the people who first brought X into the world are involved in this rebirth. X has always been monolithic and is about 75 Mb today. The release of X 7.0, a modular version, is imminent - RC3 was on December 5. Still, though, you can't buy an X terminal, and there's really no point in anyone building one any more. There is a need for including the X protocol on handheld devices, however. That's why a lot of important X developers have been busy at handhelds.org trying to hack X on to all the handhelds that are manufactured but which don't have X.

The Nokia 770 changes all this because of the simple fact that it has X on it. It doesn't really need to have ALL of X on it, though. It only needs to have the X Server component, the part of X that empowers it to open up a remote display to X client apps. The new bottom line question, then, as you note, is "where are the apps?".

Well, any app can be opened by a user in a remote window on the 770, as RealNitro has shown, but because of the way that the keyboard input is implemented on the 770 (for now, at least) the app can't be used except with the touchscreen as an input device. Fortunately there doesn't have to be any touchscreen code in the app because the touchscreen input of X is taking place at a lower level than the app. Unfortunately the GUIs that apps are built with are generally not designed with any appreciation for touchscreen input, but for mouse and keyboard input, so the touch zones are tiny, little things.

If you've clicked on my personal info you've seen that I have mature vertical market software and a versatile X GUI development framework that is designed for X and X terminals, but I'm not willing to launch into the market with the 770 until it's widely available. I don't really need any help from Nokia other than that. How many companies other than mine have X apps that are designed for this opportunity, the one that the 770 offers? I'm not sure that there are any. At the point when the 770 and/or its followup is available for immediate shipping then I'll move on this, but until then I just won't. If the Windows world likes Citrix, (essentially an effort to do X on Windows, but not free and not universal like X) and it does, then the Linux world will like X as a network transparent remote display protocol. It's free, it costs nothing (Citrix costs real money) and it's universal. When you have a 770 in your hand X makes sure that the remote operating system and the remote hardware are non-issues. I hope this explanation of the strange absence of apps designed for remote users has been helpful. I'm doing my best to help people see the future I see. CEO's almost never do what I'm doing, explaining all this stuff to everyone who will listen. I guess I just enjoy most of all the idea that we all are just a heartbeat away from showing how people can use software and work/play collaboratively across the world without actually having to own and manage a personal computer. That's what this is all about, actually - removing the PC from the list of required equipment for a rich, Internet-based software experience.

[Hedgecore]

IT savvy CEOs are impressive on their own, Remote. I've been thinking a lot since your earlier posts on this topic, moreso once I finally got my 770 last Saturday. (10 hours round-trip, well worth it). I haven't experimented with the 770 in this capacity yet, but I plan to. (My FedoraCore box was sacrificed for a short lived Intel OSX experiment so I'm sans-Linux at the moment). I think Nokia has found a fine balance though; even in a city as big as Toronto, open hotspots can be difficult to find sometime. (This morning I was able to use gMail standing at the streetcar stop across from my apartment building; I was connected to my own access point about 600 feet away though). Until wireless saturation is high in most areas, I'm still going to be thankful for the extra horsepower/software under the hood of the 770.

[Remote User]

IT savvy CEOs are impressive on their own...
even in a city as big as TorontoI was trying to say that CEO's don't usually (as in never even) yak about things all over the net like I do.

Toronto is a hotbed of activity for my company. There's a company (http://www.teriyakiexperience.com/) located there that operates about 100 restaurants across Canada and is our customer. They've fully deployed my X software and their IT department is just a single individual (not your average fellow, certainly). You don't have time for the stories I can tell you. If I gave you the correct IP address and you were authorized you would be able to walk near one of these restaurants anywhere in Canada and see their menu on your 770, then use it to order lunch or dinner (and much more) without installing any software at all on your 770. HQ would have the order securely archived in their central storage facility almost immediately because of rsync and openVPN. People have no idea what is possible.

[Mike Cane]

I know just about nothing about X Terminal and this revolution you are talking about. Please give some examples of your use in this area so I can understand what's the big deal for you. Thanks.

[Lord Bodak]

Toronto is a hotbed of activity for my company. There's a company (http://www.teriyakiexperience.com/) located there that operates about 100 restaurants across Canada and is our customer. They've fully deployed my X software and their IT department is just a single individual (not your average fellow, certainly). You don't have time for the stories I can tell you. If I gave you the correct IP address and you were authorized you would be able to walk near one of these restaurants anywhere in Canada and see their menu on your 770, then use it to order lunch or dinner (and much more) without installing any software at all on your 770. HQ would have the order securely archived in their central storage facility almost immediately because of rsync and openVPN. People have no idea what is possible.

You're doing some pretty cool things. Ever since I started running Linux I've wondered why more people don't appreciate the opportunities X provides.

[Remote User]

Ever since I started running Linux I've wondered why more people don't appreciate the opportunities X provides.Part of the reason is that there are a whole bunch of people who understand X well but who have a near-total disdain of using it to write end user and vertical market apps. Another part of the reason is that a whole bunch of people who understand Linux well have the same perspective. It's taken 30 years to uninvent the cash register. It may take another 30 years to uninvent the PC - i.e., remove it as a requirement of the experience of interacting with the software and user interfaces that we need and want.

The huge new Plasma, LCD (and soon, SED) TV's that the world is buying like crazy are just very, very dumb terminals, but they work so well because they don't try to be anything more than what they need to be in a very complex scheme. It's the same with a remote X display, except that it's interactive and it delivers GUIs that provide access to software. It works well because it doesn't try to be anything more than what it needs to be in a scheme, a scheme where users don't need PCs. It works because all it needs to be is a touchscreen GUI to the power of the WEB, and beyond that, to the entire Internet itself. Voice command, recognition and synthesis have to enter the GUI picture very soon, too, but the processing of all this will be remote and centralized, not in the device itself, so the question of how much processing power it will take is irrelevant and will not (should not) delay the arrival of this.

Don't listen just to all the X and Linux gurus who know so much about and so totally involved with the lower layers, with the technology for its own sake but who don't have any interest in apps and GUIs. Listen to the people who need apps that are useful and intuitive. If you have, on the one hand, a group of sharpshooters who don't have any interest in understanding where the valuable targets are, and on the other hand, a group of beginning marksmen who know exactly where the valuable targets are, tell me, which group is going to do a better job of scoring a bullseye? I pick door number two.

There are sharks, everywhere, I'd like to remind you. The tech biz is filled with people for whom tech is just a way to make money. These people have no use for it except for its ability to make money and to build their power. They're watching and learning about how to do that even better in the future than they're using tech now. Look what they did with touchscreen voting, for instance. They used the tech to commit what many of us feel are crimes and yet the touchscreen technology itself ended up being painted as the 'villain'. How sick is that?

Tech means different things to different people. There are companies that have acquired patents and 'ownership' of seeds that grow grains, of intuitive hand gestures that make things work, of ideas that explain how things work, of music that we like to make and hear, to profit from the fact that we still want to and have to do the things that people have been doing since before the dawn of time. Now these companies expect that they should be paid money even for how we live our lives. Don't ever forget that, like it or not, tech is in many ways just another warzone. But I digress...

[Remote User]

I know just about nothing about X Terminal and this revolution you are talking about. Please give some examples of your use in this area so I can understand what's the big deal for you. Thanks.Mike;
You're TV is a terminal. So is your telephone. All you need to understand is that when you're using the X protocol your touchscreen display and a network connection (aka your 770) suffice for you to be able to interact with X software. A PC is not required for software any more than the PC is required to watch HD TV or to use a phone, VOIP or POTS (plain old telephone service). Unfortunately, when nobody creates GUIs or applications that make use of this, then it's no surprise that nobody understands this aspect of what X is about. The component called the X Server is actually the equivalent of the TV tuner, the part that makes your TV smart enough to receive and display the programs coming over the network to it. The component called the Client Application is the equivalent of the DVD or the satellite/cable program you're enjoying.

X is multiheaded. The TV equivalent of this is a split screen or a picture-in-picture, except that with X there's no limit to how many apps on how many remote computers can be invoked by the icons on the GUI at one time. The network GUI is a much different animal than the desktop GUI. AGUI built out of network transparent GUI thingys is much different than a desktop GUI built out of GUI thingys that can only monitor or control the one PC on the other end of your display's VGA or DVI cable.

I have 3 teenagers who will keep me busy over the next few days. Stay patient just a little longer, even as I'm waiting for my own 770 to arrive, and soon you'll see some remote apps on your 770.

[Mike Cane]

Well this all seems to be the Web 2.0 model, but not using the Web 2.0 model (ie, AJAX).