Will there every be another computer like the amiga?

[Belial6]

A non-windows home computer/games system could be built again.  The trick would be for someone like Acer to partner with Adobe and at the same time start building a good gaming SDK.

My son plays a lot of flash games.  While a lot of the games are crap, there are actually a lot of them that are really quit good.  When I say a lot, I mean A LOT.  Basicly what would be need would be:

* Acer supply the Revo in a game system case.  It is mostly there now.
* Adobe to add gamepad support to flash.
* Have the default setup so that a non-chatty Linux loads and boots into a full screen flash dashboard
* Write a decent dashboard in flash that can run the flash games and act as an 'app store'

With this approach, Acer could have their own game system ready for market with an extremely small team, tiny budget, and the system could be released at under $200.

Now, this approach could be massively improved from there with a little forethough.  Things like, making sure that the system can boot from a USB port would greatly increase their market, as geeks could buy the system knowing that they could always repurpose it to a generic PC.  For the general user, they would get a good gaming system, and for the enthusiast, they could boot into the simple game system, or plug in a usb drive and have a system they could run whatever they want on.

Anyone could write software for the system, and there would be a huge library from day 1.  Since the initial environment being flash, would be 100% abstracted, they would not be locked into an x86 world, although they could stay there as long as they wanted.

They could follow up the initial release with added functionality like the ability to run C64 software, DOS software, Amiga software, etc...

The possibilities go on and on.  The key is to keep everything abstracted.  Heck, they could even go so far as to use a Wine, or ReactOS image running on a PC emulator to package up Windows games.  By doing it that way, they don't tie themselves down to x86 and they don't care if future versions of the software have regression errors.  They also don't have to care if ugly hacks are necessary to get the specific title to work, since the entire OS has been stripped down, and tweaked for the specific app.

[Belial6]

I'm not saying that the iPhone sucks, but to say that it was designed as a device that "Just Works" is a huge stretch.  The thing didn't even do cut and paste when it was released.  It still can't be used as a mass storage device, and if you plug it into a PC, you can't even put music on it without going online, downloading, and installing some extra software.  Sure iTunes isn't exactly a driver, but at the end of the day, it might as well be.

A better way to describe it would be, "It just works, AFTER downloading and installing the right software, as long as you don't plug it into the wrong computer, and you don't consider all of the things that it should be able to do trivially, but can't."

[Belial6]

To me, the iPhone is more like the new classic Mac.  Does some things well, is advertised REALLY well.  Has some massively glaring faults.  Has a dedicated following.  And will likely still be around in a decade.

Of course that puts the Android as the PC.  Not quite as good or polished yet.  Far more open.  Hardware produced by a ton of companies.  Improving at a dramatically faster rate than Apple, and destined to be the 90% market compared to apples 10% market.

Nokia and Palm seem to be the Atari and Amiga of the smart phone story.  I haven't used either, but from the sounds of it, they are superior to their competition in hardware, and what software they do have, but they just don't seem to be able to get enough mind share to really compete.  Those that have them love them, but the software selections are limited due to small market share.