Amiga as a Tablet

[ne_one]

@namochan

"Wow... i really like that idea. Amiga tablet... I would take it anywhere and proudly show it to everyone. I really hate microsoft and their "os" and im not the only one."

Let's hope you are. If the best marketing strategy you can come up with is that it doesn't involve Microsoft or Windows that's pathetic. Who is honestly going to invest in the development of an unproven technology and direct it towards a niche market? And who is going to buy it?

There is a simple way of appealing to mainstream consumers and making the same technology available to Amiga diehards: port the operating system to other architectures. Then encourage developers to create applications that make use of it.

See the reason why many of us keep chirping about x86 support?

[ne_one]

"Billy wants this market, but Billy has a problem. You see, Billy wants to OWN this market, like he wants to own all markets in the software field. But -- in order to do so, he must find some way of wedging his currently monopoly widget, Windows, onto the goddamn thing. Windows XP no less. Good luck, that thing is huge and slow and boring."

Er... have you read any of the specs? These tablets run a special edition of XP on 800 MHz+ PIII chips. And just to be interesting they throw in minor technologies like handwriting recognition to make it useful. Oh... and if you're not sure what to do with your slow and boring tablet it's compatible with software that runs on 600 million other PCs.

If people want to come up with an Amiga pipedream think small before taking over the world. Like maybe a portable MP3 player/phone/game system that someone else develops and you can OEM just for funzies.

[ne_one]

@CodeSmith

"I believe that the important thing here is interoperability. As long as I can plug the two things together, I don't really care what they're running."

And on this (hypothetical) interoperable Amiga OS what would you be running in terms of applications that would justify laying out $1500?

See the issue?

[ne_one]

@Strangedisk

"Well why x86 particularly?"

Because even a fractional percentage of 600 millions PCs is more than all the other markets combined. This doesn't preclude other architectures, it just makes sense to go with volume first.

"Rather, if it goes onto something like this, it needs to be StrongARM. If and when Amiga is running under DE, if that's the direction they go, it will run on Intel just fine.

DE already runs on x86 and Amiga has indicated that XScale is something that they/Tao are considering. The point is, the market will bring forth new hardware not Amiga.

[ne_one]

@Strangedisk

"You are wording it like you are disagreeing with me, but how so? I said Windows XP was huge and slow and boring. And you answer, "have you read any of the specs, it runs a special edition of XP on an 800 MHz" -- my point exactly."

No I *am* disagreeing. I'm running XP Pro on an Athlon 550 right now and it's fine. 'Special' doesn't mean inferior. Obviously tablets have specific requirements.

"I've read the specs, and they suck. For your $1500-$2000 you get a machine where the batteries last for two hours, and the machine weighs 3-4 pounds."

Tablets aren't designed to compete with notebooks - right now they are portable desktop machines that can operate standalone for limited periods of time. Like most laptops, they can be plugged in and expanded.

"With a responsive enough OS, and a fast enough GUI, the only issues would be streaming video or similar."

People will buy tablets to run their favorite --software -- . Like PDAs, current models will increase in power until the delta disappears. A smaller, faster operating system is not going to change this.