Any news on future release of OS4 netbook or on Natami?

[Kronos]

Well "NetBooks" and "UltraBooks" will more or less merge with tablet+kbd replacing the lower end.

The reall issue with the LimeBook (aka OS4book) is that it allready was a bottomdweller when it was introduced years ago.

[Darrin]

I had to check wether this was Amiga.org or OldDuffers.org, it's funny how fans of a computer that changed the world 25 years ago now piss and moan about tablets, the most transformative innovation in the computer world in the last two decades.

Wake up and smell the coffee, if there even is a netbook market in 2015 it'll be lumped in the "other" category as statistically irrelevant.

Funny how some people can't understand why people like me have absolutely no need for a tablet.  How many tablet users only have a tablet?  Very few, I bet.

[polyp2000]

Speak for yourself.  I have no interest in an oversized smart phone.  

You know - i was kind of like you for a while before owning a Smartphone i couldnt see the point of a tablet. But having got used  to a smartphone. I recently aquired one of the firesale HP Touchpad's (Mine runs WebOS & Android (cyanogen)). I can safely say it is a handy thing to keep in the living room or to take on holiday. (Great for watching movies on a plane etc). Particularly if you are going on a budget (or so they would have you believe) airline. If you are only taking hand luggage it saves the weight and space of a Laptop. All i am saying is dont dismiss tablets completely they do have benefits over both a laptop and a smartphone.

All that said - i for one would pre-order one of these amiga netbooks provided the price is sane and the specs are good enough. For me this is the most sensible
amiga move i've come across for a while. Im sure its not going to take over the world but cost is the one thing thats keeping next gen amiga's from being in the hands of fans.

I believe that the OS is slowly becoming less relevant with the trend of moving everything into the cloud. A system just needs a good browser with up to date support for all the various standards. I've not used an next gen amiga but i assume the latest browsers on OS4 are on the ball - with the exception of Flash which thankfully is dying. I think this situation was evident to my when using the HP Touchpad's WebOS - while its App store is pretty barren - in WebOS the browser is good enough to run most of the apps in the cloud - so app support for the most part is not a real issue. Its only when it comes to games that you
find the issues. Now an AmigaOS based netbook or even a tablet wont have this problem - it already has a nice back catalogue of games which - lets face it - are the same types of games we are seeing re-hashed on the Smartphones with updated graphics.

N ...

[VingtTrois]

Speak for yourself.  I have no interest in an oversized smart phone.  

+1
I would like a TABLET with AMIGA X1000 technologies inside! Is it possible? :biglaugh:

[Kronos]

@Darrin

I somehow doubt you would be lukier if you only had a 10" (or smaller) netbook ?

Smartbook (like the MacBookAir) on the other side provide just enough power&useabilty to serve as ones only computer.

[Darrin]

@ Polyp2000

I agree they can be useful in certain circumstances (I do a lot of travelling too).  I just can't see myself buying one just for the 2 hours a month when it might be useful.  

I'm happy to unpack my laptop if necessary and it runs for 5-6 hours without charging.  Any minor stuff like reading emails or surfing the web can be done on my cellphone.

I think my main worry about a tablet is breaking it or losing it.  A laptop is too big to lose and a cellphone fits in the pocket.  Tablets come inbetween.

[Forcie]

Natami lives and is being developed. I am one of the system testers. However the homepage and a lot of the promises about the system is the work of Gunnar von Boehn, who left the project several months ago. That is why the public activity on the Natami page and forum is low. Surprisingly few people wants to know actual facts about the system in its current state, they want to hear promises and propaganda. And with the guy willing to make propaganda gone - well, you get it

The Natami is most likely to resurface under another project name, with goals more in line with what the main developer Thomas Hirsch wants to do with the system. We will see if there will be further public updates or not until completion.

[polyp2000]

@ Polyp2000

I agree they can be useful in certain circumstances (I do a lot of travelling too).  I just can't see myself buying one just for the 2 hours a month when it might be useful.  

I'm happy to unpack my laptop if necessary and it runs for 5-6 hours without charging.  Any minor stuff like reading emails or surfing the web can be done on my cellphone.

I think my main worry about a tablet is breaking it or losing it.  A laptop is too big to lose and a cellphone fits in the pocket.  Tablets come inbetween.

@darrin - yup .. thats why i didnt spend the earth on a premium one!

[Hattig]

I've spent £130 on a 64GB Blackberry Playbook. Partially because it's QNX based, mostly because it's a ridiculously cheap price for a well built high quality bit of hardware that sadly didn't do that well. I can stick it in my bag, it's under a pound in weight (netbooks being around 3lb), and it will do most if not all of the portable things I want a device to do.

But, I have my netbook and my main laptop, and my main PC, and my home server, for all the other things.

[commodorejohn]

Both can co-exist in a household.

Strictly speaking this is true; however, neither can exist in the first place if the focus keeps jumping back and forth between one or the other while neither of them have even been made.

A port back then could have led to AmigaOS being a major player in the tablet space by now. Too late now.

Not a chance. The tablet market has been about proprietary, vendor-controlled software for years now, and certainly since the iPad made them trendy and people actually started buying them. A non-proprietary OS, on which people can install any software they like right out of the box, would be anathema.

Minds like you is what ruined commodore, a tablet will be sold in more units than any computer even if it is driven by a exoticOS (= AmigaOS)

Wow, li'l old me, a corporation-slayer? Why, I never knew I had it in me! I was just pointing out that spastically jumping between projects as the trend-winds change is going to result in no units being sold, but if we want to go there: why do you think that an "Amiga" tablet is going to sell more than an "Amiga" computer? Certainly not because the target market for tablets (teenagers and twenty-somethings with too much money, middle-aged people who are scared by real computers) have any idea what the Amiga is or feel any loyalty to it. Not because of technical superiority either, because any desktop OS is going to be ass on a tablet. Or do you think the existing Amiga community is going to run out and buy a hundred thousand tablets each?

I had to check wether this was Amiga.org or OldDuffers.org, it's funny how fans of a computer that changed the world 25 years ago now piss and moan about tablets, the most transformative innovation in the computer world in the last two decades.

Wake up and smell the coffee, if there even is a netbook market in 2015 it'll be lumped in the "other" category as statistically irrelevant.

"It's the future! It's totally the future because Steve Jobs said it was the future, so there, nyeah! You can't disagree with him because he's richer than you, and now that he's dead the Pope's probably gonna canonize him!"

Tablet = laptop - keyboard - useful OS - freedom of choice in software - hard drive. Yeah, that's innovation.

I believe that the OS is slowly becoming less relevant with the trend of moving everything into the cloud. A system just needs a good browser with up to date support for all the various standards.

Ahh, "the cloud," that magical invention of magic wherein your data ascends to a higher plane of existence, free from the toil and suffering of this physical world, to a Gnostic sort of heaven where it is freed from the corruption of the flesh forever and exists in a transcendent state of Pure Mind. Come one, come all, to the Temple of the Cloud, to speak with your data through the Spirit Links!

What's that? You say that it's not absolved of its physical nature? That it has been spirited away to a data center in Texas? But, but, that's a real place! Things can happen to it there! Why, if the Internet weren't faster than a hard drive, there wouldn't be any advantage at all to "the cloud!"

...what? It's not?

...Oh.

[commodorejohn]

That is why the public activity on the Natami page and forum is low. Surprisingly few people wants to know actual facts about the system in its current state, they want to hear promises and propaganda. And with the guy willing to make propaganda gone - well, you get it

I want to hear fact about the system. Hell, I'll volunteer: somebody keep me updated, and I'll update the site myself.

[OlafS3]

Natami lives and is being developed. I am one of the system testers. However the homepage and a lot of the promises about the system is the work of Gunnar von Boehn, who left the project several months ago. That is why the public activity on the Natami page and forum is low. Surprisingly few people wants to know actual facts about the system in its current state, they want to hear promises and propaganda. And with the guy willing to make propaganda gone - well, you get it

The Natami is most likely to resurface under another project name, with goals more in line with what the main developer Thomas Hirsch wants to do with the system. We will see if there will be further public updates or not until completion.

Nice for you if you are one of the "system testers". I cannot remember your "nick" in the Natami-Forum but that is not important. From my side Thomas can publish what he wants under the name he wants, I do not care. But stop this kind of "propaganda" with the bad guy(s) on one side and the white knight (Thomas Hirsch) on the other side because it nerves...

[ChaosLord]

Ahh, "the cloud," that magical invention of magic wherein your data ascends to a higher plane of existence, free from the toil and suffering of this physical world, to a Gnostic sort of heaven where it is freed from the corruption of the flesh forever and exists in a transcendent state of Pure Mind. Come one, come all, to the Temple of the Cloud, to speak with your data through the Spirit Links!

You are an excellent writer.

Thank you for mocking the Tablet Lemmings and Cloud Lemmings for me so that I don't have to.

[persia]

@commodorejohn

What makes you a better predictor of the future than current sales figures?  You are here on a board asking about a 20 year old computer that has around 5,000 users scattered across 4 camps, how do your tastes in anyway reflect the tastes of the general population?

It easy to fantasise the tablet away, I was in an Amiga user group meeting on the day Windows 95 premiered, when the presenter spent half his talk fantasising Windows 95 away.  That worked well.

Early PC users looked down their noses at this childish rodent thing called a "mouse."  Who in the world would ever use one of those?

[commodorejohn]

What makes you a better predictor of the future than current sales figures?

Simple: I look beyond current sales figures, not relying on the assumption that things will continue forever as they have for the last two years (in which case tablet sales would outpace global population growth by something like 25x,) and consider the ultimate long-term usefulness of the thing: it is no more capable than a laptop (typically less,) not very much cheaper, and typically a worse deal in terms of power-for-money. Its sole advantage is that it's lighter, which laptops are continually working towards anyway. Eventually they will reach a saturation point of "light enough," and tablets will have no more advantages left, Q.E.D.

Anything can sell well for a short time. As I've written, the Abdomenizer was able to sell 3.5 million units, and that was just a plastic saddle you were supposed to do sit-ups on with an imbecilic infomercial. A professional force with an enormous budget like the Apple marketing department could sell used Kleenex in iPad quantities for two years, and have the rest of the industry scrambling to get their own used Kleenex to market. The question is what's going to happen when the novelty wears off, tablets are no longer "cool," and people start assessing them based on their actual usefulness and not just their specs compared with other tablets.

Early PC users looked down their noses at this childish rodent thing called a "mouse." Who in the world would ever use one of those?

Yes, tablet evangelists do like to say this a lot. But the mouse actually solved a problem in computer input better than the other solutions, which is why it's stuck around as long as it has. The tablet solves nothing and introduces a host of disadvantages compared to the laptop. I think history will judge one a lot more kindly than the other.

[Hattig]

The question is what's going to happen when the novelty wears off, tablets are no longer "cool," and people start assessing them based on their actual usefulness and not just their specs compared with other tablets

Tablets are taking off as media consumption devices. If there's anything that the TV has taught us, it is that people love consuming media. Tablets are great at this. I see no reason for them to lose popularity.

However like TVs the upgrade cycle could be quite long, because there won't be a real need for the upgraded tablets coming out, much like if you aren't itching to buy the latest SmartTV because your current one is perfectly adequate. All tablets can do is get better displays, get lighter/thinner, and get faster.