I read this article last night and thought exactly what probably everyone here thought, "Hey, isn't that the N8x0 he's talking about but with a bigger screen?".
I gotta say that this is a genius marketing move by Arrington.
Making it an open source hardware creates buzz for the product. There will probably be follow up articles, informal polls, etc...basically generating more interesting content for his websites.
If this inexpensive internet tablet that caters to the larger market does succeed, it means more people going online, which circles back to more hits for TechCrunch.
Whether or not the product succeeds does not really matter. Arrington already wins.
It seems to me that building an el cheapo subtablet isn't exactly rocket science (anymore). If the people who are now developing the Pandora had left out the keypad, they'd have made one in basically under two years from idea to realisation, without any big corporation and without containers full of money.
The difference is into getting latest HW (and i'm not talking only about the processor) at lower prices. Including the manufacturing process. Pandora uses the 35xx which has larger footprint. Small differences, but in the end what makes up for few extra millimeters here and there.
The main problem for a tablet, and especially a subtablet, is the user interface first and useful applications second. This is where Nokia's tablets really suck: The user interface was designed without any vision or "grand plan" and the applications are basically retaylored Linux desktop applications. The only people who are content with these tablets are apparently either Linux sysadmins who like to have a portable terminal and people who are only interested in looking at content, not creating it.
I think the 5 steps vision has not been a secret for some time, you are just too impatient :-)
I think we are starting only now -maybe- to have available HW that is somehow close to what 770 would have been if we had had the chance to really implement it according to our wishes.
I think the 5 steps vision has not been a secret for some time, you are just too impatient :-)
I think we are starting only now -maybe- to have available HW that is somehow close to what 770 would have been if we had had the chance to really implement it according to our wishes.
You don't need the latest hardware for good ui and useful applications. In some respects for example the old Apple Newtons are still superior as Sean Luke has argued here and here. I think it would be very interesting if they manage to pull this off without any 5 year plan with 'steps'.
You don't need the latest hardware for good ui and useful applications. In some respects for example the old Apple Newtons are still superior as Sean Luke has argued here and here. I think it would be very interesting if they manage to pull this off without any 5 year plan with 'steps'.
You beat me to it. Which of the five steps is the one called: "Develop temporary crappy UI and do not include useful applications"?
I think we are starting only now -maybe- to have available HW that is somehow close to what 770 would have been if we had had the chance to really implement it according to our wishes.
I really don't have much of a beef with the hardware, even that of the 770. Save the silly LCD throughput feckup, the Itablets have very nice hardware indeed. It's the rest that suxx.
I really don't have much of a beef with the hardware, even that of the 770. Save the silly LCD throughput feckup, the Itablets have very nice hardware indeed. It's the rest that suxx.
Here if I disagree with you is about the HW, it suxx as well, at least from the standpoint of what we would really like to deliver.
You beat me to it. Which of the five steps is the one called: "Develop temporary crappy UI and do not include useful applications"?
The UI is what it is, but you should rather ask the relevant question: which of the steps is "Develop a clean UI which goes beyond the one inherited almost for free from the desktop"?
Not that you are going to get an answer from me to such question, but at least you would have asked the right thing.
About the useful application, it was stated that part of the experiment with making the tablets was also to see how much the community would have been able to provide for itself.
OTOH, I see applications around me that might become killer apps for these subtablets. Take e.g. EverNote, a note-taking, information collecting application that outperforms Microsoft's OneNote in all aspects. A tablet version of such an app could -- nay: Is! -- immensely useful, provided that tablet has an efficient text entry system (and for a tablet that means HWR). It is flexible enough that most people won't even need a dedicated PIM and with the new connected features it has entered the "Cloud Era" as well.
