What’s wrong with PDA’s?
They’re too small. They’re too business-oriented. The good, light, powerful ones are too expensive. The cheap ones don’t have WiFi or good speakers. They don’t use a desktop OS.
We e-book readers need a computer we can use standing up. There’s just too much wrong with PDA’s.
Too small. A PDA screen is too small to display the full width of a web-page, too small to enjoy video, too small to show enough words on a page. The Nokia 770 has a screen width of 800 pixels, compared to 320 for a Palm. It has 384,000 pixels, the Palm a mere 153,600. We just need more screen real estate than a PDA has.
Sure a PDA is small enough to fit in a shirt pocket. Honestly, I’ve never seen a single person carry their PDA there. And my paperbacks are too big to fit in a shirt pocket too, but that’s never seemed a handicap before.
Too business-oriented. People want good speakers to listen to music, internet radio. For those videos, too. They want drawing and image-editing applications. Programming languages (python on the 770). Games. Addresses and phone numbers? Got ’em on my phone, dude. Connection to Outlook? Hey, it’s gmail I need.
This isn’t just my viewpoint. Newsweek points out 1.2 million paying subscribers to MLB.com to download video snippets of baseball games, 100,000 movie downloads from a single site monthly, 5 million viewers who watched the Live 8 concert on AOL instead of MTV. Gotta have WiFi for that. Who wants to watch/listen/play from your desk?
Too expensive. I can get a Sony PlayStation Portable for $227. A full-size computer with LCD goes for as low as $299. A PalmOne LifeDrive is $499.
OK, there’s some exaggeration here.
But the point is there’s a market for a device that falls between the PDA and the TabletPC, a touchscreen handheld with a desktop OS. Of course, I want it for reading e-books. We’ve seen specialized e-book readers, and they don’t cut it because, let’s face it, we all really want to do something more with our e-book reader than just read an e-book. Even my radio is more than a radio — it’s a clock, it’s a CD player. I want portability, sure, but I want more.
A full OS. Bill Gates, at WinHEC in April, spoke about portability from a different perspective. He sees the need to be able to just get a read on what’s going on now, while you’re not at your desk. He says you don’t want a notebook, but some sort of auxiliary device. “When somebody is in an elevator, you sometimes see them opening up their laptop, trying to boot it up to see what the meeting room is they were supposed to go to, that’s kind of a painful thing,” Gates said.
He went on: “Almost nobody would have that [ultra mobile] as their only PC, but have it be complementary to their PC, and then have all their states, the same applications, be able to carry that around, we think that’s very attractive.” He added that, in that “whole spectrum of devices …. we think the hottest will be that ultra mobile PC.”
A carry-around computer running a full OS, with regular apps, isn’t a PDA. And there’s a need for it — a computer you can use standing up, like the Japan-only Sony U101 shown here. We’ve seen WebPads, we’ve seen the OQO and other $2000 miniature computers. They’re still missing the niche — “as close to one pound” and “hopefully in the $800 range,” Gates said. Actually we want in the under-$400 range, like the 770.
And you know that when we have that, the computer we can carry around, not a PDA, and use standing up, we’ll have our e-book reader too.
>>>Sure a PDA is small enough to fit in a shirt pocket. Honestly, I’ve never seen a single person carry their PDA there.
Hello, sailor! I do, and always have. The 770 will most likely wind up there too, even if I have to sew on custom-sized ones!
I guess I’ve spent too long in a cold climate, where people wear jackets so much of the time. Coat pocket is where the PDA goes, or on the belt. Shirt pocket would be like wearing a pocket protecter here in New York, too nerdy to imagine among all the black-clothed fashion masses.
Anyway, there’s a picture at the Maemo wiki which shows a 770 next to a Nokia phone, which may give you an idea how large to make that pocket: http://www.marceloeduardo.com/blog/up/maemosweeper_startup.jpg
Devices like the PSP *are* full blown computers in everything but OS. Give the hackers enough time and they’ll be running Linux there.
Share the big stuff over WIFI from your desktop machine, and put essential stuff on memory cards if you need to take it away with you, and you don’t need a hard drive.
My not-so-secret, lustful desire is a Sony U101-like machine (the U101 is discontinued already?) with a built-in Cingular Data Connect card and Windows XP OS for an always-connected mobile PC. Everything I can do on my laptop or desktop — including reading e-books, listening to MP3s, web access, all at the same time, etc. — I could do with this thing and take it with me wherever I go.
The sooner the better, too.
John
The Sony U101, which like you I have secretly desired at a distance for a long time, does appear to be available still, through the usual buy-Japan-only-products (Japan-Direct, Dynamism, etc.) channels; but I too have seen that it’s been discontinued. Still, it’s going on two years now in age, right? If there is a direct descendent, I don’t know what it is. It looks like the keyboardless U71 (a U.S. model) is the current generation tablet relative.
Wow now I want the Sony U101. You people should stop showing me cool devices.
I went to an interview once and saw a guy with an old PalmIII in his pocket. I usually keep my Zodiac in my backpack at college or in my old laptop case when at work. I might put it in my cargo pocket once and a while.
Just get me ereader for the 770 and I will be happy. It looks like the 770 might hit the niche between a pda and laptop. Jkontherun.com has a lot of experience with the Sony U70 and he says its too small and its bigger than the 770.
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