Its hard to believe it will sell for <$200 / without being locked to some sort of contract or homepage with ads etc ... If so - this is truly an amazing achievement, not to mention its amazing that its techcrunch.
It's a technique used by Dell and other PC makers for years. It's a nuisance, but if cost is a factor, it can be worth the 20 minutes it takes to clean the crap off.
Dell are bought by "The general public", who often don't know how to clean the crap off. So some of it sticks, and they make money.
The crunchpad however, is going to be bought by techie geeks. If it comes loaded with adverts, everyone will just remove them, and they won't make any money.
This is a technically amazing achievement, but IMHO the market does not exist. They'll sell a few, but nothing major.
That's a measurable though. If Crunchpad was paid to have something on it, then they measured that no one actually left it on there, they would probably stop paying pretty quickly.
One big bonus for the kindle is the battery life (2 weeks? vs a few hours). Obviously, the crunchpad has lots of other things going for it. I guess my point is that they're really meant for two different purposes.
If the thing is meant to live on your coffee table and couch, then a couple of hours is good enough. Just design an attractive charging station/stand so it can charge while it goes into "picture frame mode."
Another stand so that it can be used as some kind of secondary display would be cool. (Maybe not a real display, but one driven by something like VNC?)
If it runs Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows, just use synergy. It lets you share keyboard and mouse between several systems. It's awesome. The kind of OSS software I'd love to pay for.
OK, valid point. I have a Game Boy and a Nintendo DS for composing chiptunes. I only have to charge the Game Boy batteries every two weeks or so. The DS has to be charged every couple of days. I pretty much only use the Game Boy. And, it has almost nothing else going for it...it's bigger, crappier screen, noisier audio, etc. (The DS is emulating a Game Boy, though, and it has quirks, so that's another negative for the DS.)
Sure. It certainly will not be a quality product at that price point. And if it costs much more, it will not be competitive. I am anticipating a debacle in which they realize that they can't turn a profit by selling the device for any less than $600, making it a flop: Stores don't order products they know they can't move.
I'm not sure where they plan on having it manufactured but if they're first time overseas manufacturing virgins, I'm guessing "quailty fade"[1] will hit them like a freight train. If they do go on sale, buy one from the first run.
[1] Quality fade is the odd phenomenon where your first batch of manufactured goods from the asain factory is fantastic. You pop champagne, sell the first couple thousand at a tidy profit and the world's your oyster. Over the next few successive shipments, the quality of the products deteriorates until they barely remain assembled during shipping. The dirty trick was that the factory took a huge loss making that first run out of quality materials but then slowly substituted inferior parts without informing you until it became profitable for them.
$600 sounds plausible to me -- after all, the $100 laptop cost more like $200 when it was done. If a netbook with aluminium case, VIA Nano processor and 12" touchscreen was profitable to manufacture at $300, one of the Asian companies would already be selling them, I suppose.
It'd be great if it (or v2) has one of those Pixel Qi or OLPC XO screens. Better compromise between E-Ink's (sunlight) readability & low power consumption, and LCDs' refresh rate & color production.
Kindle if you plan on reading a lot. Doing real reading on E-Ink is much, much, much nicer than reading from an LCD.
CrunchPad if you want to browse the internet, and pretty much do anything else (within it's capabilities that is).
Am planning on getting a DX for reading books and research papers, however... the CrunchPad would be a great item for the coffee table, or... bathroom :)
It's not a "nesting limit", it's a cooling-off period before the reply link is shown, which increases with nesting. It's supposed to discourage heated back-and-forth replies, which historically have low value. Replying a level up defeats the purpose.
PG, if you're reading: Instead of delaying the display of the reply link, it might be better to instead display the link, but during the cooling-off period make it go to a page explaining why the user can't post right away. (And maybe also make the link a different color?) Otherwise, it simply looks like a bug or artificial system limit.
What a gorgeous digital photo frame this would make! I look forward to pointing this at a Flickr (or other) slideshow. In fact someone in another corner of the country or the world could keep this pointed at your Flickr photo stream and will be able to see your latest photos without doing a thing. Similar to what Picwing was offering.
Wonder how they will handle storage - suppose I see an image I want to save or stuff I wish to copy/paste and send via gmail. I get that there is no local storage but I hope it will allow inter-process operability.
Maybe it's me, but I don't understand the appeal of this type of computer at all. Granted, I also don't understand the appeal netbooks, so maybe I'm way out in left field.
This thing seems like it's a big iphone. I already have an iphone and it meets most of my general quick-fix internet needs. I have a laptop when the iphone isn't sufficient. I just don't see the need for another device in the mix. Unless the pad is easily converted to a moderately powered computer by adding a quick keyboard and mouse, I wouldn't even entertain the idea of buying one.
It looks pretty good, but I still maintain my position from last summer, which was that this will never cost $200. Of course, that's fine, as I would not expect a device like this to cost that much to begin with. About $400 seems like the 'right' price for something like this.
conceptual designs to first working prototype is often a time fraught with problems. I seriously doubt this will be a few weeks and even more doubt the price. It could sell for much more, so why make it so low?
I'm not sure it could. That is, it would sell some at many ranges because it's unique. But I do think price sensitivity will be huge here. In other words, I am guessing every dollar they knock off the price tag will mean a big difference in the number of sales.
