Do we really need a Webbook?
Does anyone know about the litl? It´s a so called »Webbook«, a tiny computer without anything, just made for browsing the web and reading RSS-Feeds. This gadget that looks deceptively like a laptop but works nothing like any computer you’ve ever used. The hardware to the user interface to the activities it supports, the new machine created by this Boston-based startup, rejects three decades of convention. But what can you do with it? Just browsing the internet seems to be nice, but the developers should asked theirselfs: What is this stuff for? What value does it add to our lives? (John Thackara)
If you want to buy a litl, you a get a small computer which is radically downsized for about 700 bucks (!!!). It has a 12″ display, an Atom Processor with 1,6 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 2 GB Flash Memory, 1x USB and a 802.11g Wifi chip, that´s it. It even hasn´t enough space for a operating system so they offer you »litl OS« which has two modes. A simple grid view and a 3D view based on the z-axis which reminds me of Apple Time Machine.
In my opinion these product has three main failures. First of all it´s a tool which can only do one thing, browsing the internet and receiving atom feeds. This is a nice idea, but chumby is already doing stuff like that. You can get this small device which is able to play wifi radio, play games and use one of 1500 additional applications for about 100 dollar. And chumby offers you a touch sensitive display,…
which brings me to the next failure. It is the way the user is interacting with the product. You can chosse between a reduced QWERTY keyboard, a touch pad and a remote… Why? What´s about touch? What´s about motion tracking? A radical product like these is screeming for new ways of interaction. The litl offers you a very light weight computer with a small display. A touch interface would be a more direct way of navigating and browsing the content especially in 3D mode. Last but not least…
This post was written by Thomas
on December 8th, 2009
Microsoft coming up with a new tablet concept
There have been a lots of rumours the last weeks about a new Apple MacBook Touch Tablet Computer heated up by Gizmodo and their 100% source. After all here comes Microsoft with its own concept for a tablet called »Courier« (using a font without counters… little punks).
The interactions are really inspired by the iPhone. It´s all about the smooth sliding-wiping-dragging-dropping-zooming way of controlling this device.
They idea of combining a touchscreen with a second tool (pen) is not new, but I like it. The pie menu looks a little bit old-fashioned, but I think this will be redesigned for a possible series product.
After product innovations like the Apple AirBook the product design of the CourierTablet looks really heavy. This should be redesigned as well. After that prototpye it´s 1:0 for Microsoft within the race for a mobile tablet computer. We will see how the answer of Apple will look like… I hope that the insider informations are wrong and the body should not just look like a bigger iPhone. Urgh…
via Gizmodo
This post was written by Thomas
on September 23rd, 2009
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