Source: Hacker News
Article note: I love the idea of the "pocket workstation," and I've never been as happy with a mobile device as I was with my n810 which was sort of the missing link between the UMPC and Smartphone (ran Linux with some mobile affordances, slider keyboard that was comfortable for thumb typing), and I want to have that again... but every time I look I don't think these mini laptops quite make it in to the niche.
I have my little 12" carryin' around laptop that has a decent keyboard for touch-typing and an OS that does what I ask of it, but I need to have a bag to carry and a surface or seat to use, and my smartphone that fits in a pocket and I can use on the go, but whose human I/O and coercive environment make me rage most of the time I try to do anything nontrivial on it. These mini-laptops are a little to big to pocket comfortably, and a little too small to operate comfortably.
... The Gibsonian cyberdeck of the Sprawl books had HMDs and gloves or straight up neural interfaces because it was obvious by the mid 90s that the problem was the human interface.
I want to see some innovation on that front. HMDs that are comfortable for text. Software that works with e-ink displays (even just wide-spread support for pgup/pgdn events to paginate and scroll without a bunch of unnecessary refreshes, lookin' at you Android). Key-gloves or Chorders you can use clipped to a pants pocket or wrapped around the back/edges of a handheld device. These aren't new ideas, just once that need to be refined into something serviceable.
Get away from the fondleslab appliance that uses half of its expensive, power-hungry touchscreen to present an awkward gimped keyboard that only works as well as its prediction estimates and re-flows your content as it pops in and out paradigm.
Comments 