On Sunday 19. April 2015 21.45.15 Ron K. Jeffries wrote: > > Nanonote was really small and compact, and had a physical keyboard. > Battery life was considered reasonable (do not know how it performed in the > real world) > It did not have capability to be USB host, a severe limitation. > It did not have Wi-Fi or Ethernet so getting on the Internet was Not Easy.
The USB Host aspect was perhaps the most unfortunate: using USB wireless dongles would have been possible with host support, and then there wouldn't have been much room for such complaints. ;-) The revised version of the Ben was going to have host support, but everything got cancelled just after the prototypes were made, apparently. Of course, there is/was that microSD wireless card (still available from Pulster, I think), and I wonder whether it might be possible to get one of those SDIO wireless cards (typically aimed at camera usage but which actually run Linux and serve the storage using some kind of Web server using the shipped, possibly GPL-violating, firmware) and connecting them using an adapter to the microSD port. > It was however a charming device. Thanks to Werner, the single > user-accessible port was used in creative ways. I've had quite a bit of fun with libubb and the 8:10 port. > Ben Nanonote had low-res display. > Ben's keyboard was cramped but the feel was not bad. > > Nanonote did not support touch. > > Yet a few hundred (my estimate fewer than 1500) people bought the Ben > Nanonote. Apparently the number who continue to use Ben Nanonote is really > low. Maybe... N=50, worldwide? I was doing things with mine recently in connection with jz4740 kernel support, partly because I was looking at trying to get recent kernel support for the jz4730 (which I think Bas might have some experience with, because I saw his name on various Mipsbook/Minibook Web pages), and seeing how well the jz4740 stuff worked on the Ben was the first step in that direction. > Is there a market niche for: > > Totally open hardware design > small form factor (think about the size of iPhone 6 or Samsung S6, or a bit > larger, e.g. Note 4, > with a physical keyboard option. It could be attached magnetically, a la > "two in One" laptop/tablet hybrids. > In that configuration the keyboard could have a heft extra battery to > provide mass so device is stable when sitting on a table. > > Anyway, yes, Werner, I am well aware the cost of development would be high. > Well, maybe not quite so high if an off-the shelf dev board could be the > computing guts... > > Look forward to the ideas this group will offer. S I'm following Luke Leighton's EOMA-68 efforts because it rather looks like he'll be initiating the long-awaited crowdfunding effort to produce the PCMCIA-sized computer cards that have previously been produced in limited quantities. One of those cards may well incorporate the jz4775, which will mean that it is almost a successor of the Ben NanoNote, and I think there could be an opportunity to build a device of that kind around such a card. I wrote about EOMA-68 recently: http://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/?p=933 One might say that the EOMA-68 cards are perhaps not optimal for such a tiny device, and there is a proposal for CF-sized cards instead, but I think you have to pick your battles and go with available hardware if you want to have a chance of delivering something like a Ben successor. Certainly, I'd rather see people focus on end-user devices than a zillion more "Raspbuino" [*] single- board computers riding the tinkerer bandwagon. Paul [*] Any similarity to a real product name is purely coincidental. The intention is to communicate how lots of people want to ride the Raspberry Pi and Arduino bandwagons by releasing countless variants of boards with either cheap ARM SoCs or Atmel AVR CPUs, all of which having questionable benefits over the many, many products already in existence using more or less the same components. _______________________________________________ Qi Hardware Discussion List Mail to list (members only): discussion@lists.en.qi-hardware.com Subscribe or Unsubscribe: http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/mailman/listinfo/discussion
