Yeah, it's MOSR, but... [iPDA?]
[quote]Here's a rumor that a lot of people have hoped for, but no one has had serious reason to believe in until now: an Apple Digital Picture Frame. A small LCD flat panel display, slightly larger than your average photograph, with a small hard disk and a Firewire connector for copying pictures onto the Frame. We will be talking about this a lot more in the weeks and months ahead; this device is probably still a fair ways off -- next year, probably -- but we have significant reason to believe it is indeed in the pipeline.
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Okay, imagine the above. *I* can't see it being all that useful, but some might.
But... what if the screen was touch-sensitive? Toss in Ink, make it a full QuickTime playback unit, and...
Makes ya think. Apple gets to market an iFrame, but with a couple of small tweaks (touch screen, software), it becomes an iPDA. If it's just a touch larger than a photo, that'd be what, just over 4"x5"? Nice form factor, if so.
Right size, right shape, right basic hardware... hmmm. This is, essentially, what some have been hoping the iPod would evolve into, after all.
<hr></blockquote>
Okay, imagine the above. *I* can't see it being all that useful, but some might.
But... what if the screen was touch-sensitive? Toss in Ink, make it a full QuickTime playback unit, and...
Makes ya think. Apple gets to market an iFrame, but with a couple of small tweaks (touch screen, software), it becomes an iPDA. If it's just a touch larger than a photo, that'd be what, just over 4"x5"? Nice form factor, if so.
Right size, right shape, right basic hardware... hmmm. This is, essentially, what some have been hoping the iPod would evolve into, after all.
Comments
HOLY CRAP
Nothing zooming or panning or you may get sick just walking down your hallway.
No touch screen, nothing incredibly spiffy, just kinda interesting to have on your wall, and fun to impress guests with. I doubt apple would make it.
<strong>what if you configured it with an updated version of iphoto on your computer. Imagine having a picture frame in your hallway that worked kinda like a screensaver, the picture changes every 5 minutes or so with a nice cross fade.
Nothing zooming or panning or you may get sick just walking down your hallway.
No touch screen, nothing incredibly spiffy, just kinda interesting to have on your wall, and fun to impress guests with. I doubt apple would make it.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Where's George Jetson? That would fricking be too cool.
<a href="http://forums.appleinsider.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=001097"; target="_blank">iFrame and other iPhoto Hardware THREAD</a>
hope this helps...
Drew
<strong>Is it just me, or does an iPicture frame sound like a stupid idea?</strong><hr></blockquote>
Well I just wanna know how Kickaha got PDA from a 'digital photo album'... I mean I wan't a MiniMac myself (not calling it a PDA any more) but..
It's kinda like...
Look at that bicycle now imagine if you rip off the chain and peddles and replace them with a turbine engine and then loose the frame and replace it with body and some wings and next thing you know it BANG you got yourself a flying bike! <img src="graemlins/bugeye.gif" border="0" alt="[Skeptical]" />
D
[ 06-19-2002: Message edited by: DaveGee ]</p>
Imagine a big flat panel screen with IR receiver on it's face. Tou have wireless IR mouse, remote, keyboard and optional pair of gaming controllers. CPU unit with DVD player as well as TV+HDTV tuner built in Amp and 5.1 output is very compact (about the size of iMac base) and can be placed up to 50' from screen thanks to the crazy new wireless screen tech discussed here in other threads (and used in Mira). The CPU unit has dual head capabilities so a conventional screen or a display tablet for Jaguar can be attached. You can put the CPU unit on coffee or end table and swap out DVDs without leaving the couch or chair since the IR receiver is on the screen where you put the CPU is pretty much irrelevant.
WIth OS X Jaguar you can run the movie or TV in the dock (checkbox option in iTV prefs as well as docklet contextual menu choice whether or not plays sound) you can double click to go fullscreen or whatever size you have specified as the default and you can also drag the video window in the dock off the dock like you can do with minimized windows and place it anywhere on the screen you want. You can play multiple stations each in their own little window in the dock or drug onto the desktop (audio plays only for currently selected one). Screen can also be wirelessly driven by any iBook (mirror) or powerbook (mirror or 2nd display) with next gen Airport,
I think it will be introduced right after iWalk <img src="graemlins/smokin.gif" border="0" alt="[Chilling]" />
<strong>
Well I just wanna know how Kickaha got PDA from a 'digital photo album'... I mean I wan't a MiniMac myself (not calling it a PDA any more) but..
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Because, dingleberry, folks have been saying that the iPod could be the beginning of a PDA form factor. It's got the hard drive, and the fast connect, after all. What it needs is a larger screen, ditch the wheel, and have an OS. I wasn't saying that Apple is *making* a PDA, for god's sake, I was just pointing out that this is in the right direction from the iPod.
This is what? A larger screen, with the same drive and interconnect of the iPod.
The size is damned near perfect for a PDA, yes?
A PDA-sized unit with a large color screen, FireWire interconnect, and a sizable hard drive, and you're telling me that you can't see this evolving?
Sheesh.
To repeat: I don't think Apple is making a PDA from this. I think the iFrame idea is silly. I think that the iFrame would be a great move *towards* a PDA, but as an end to itself, it's pretty lame. It's been done before, and it never took off... which makes me think that *if this rumor is true*, that it's a fleshing out of the iDevice lineup that the iPod hinted at, beyond a silly little digital photo wallet.
Seriously. Assume this is correct. Think of the size (a frame would be all screen, essentially), the storage, the interconnect. Add a touchscreen, and modify the built in software (like Apple did with the iPod for Contacts), and ta-da. I'm not saying they *WILL*, I'm just saying that the pieces are all there *IF* this rumor is true.
The size would be incredibly more useful than the silly little Palm screens, but more compact than the Newton 2x00 line. Perfect, in my book.
[quote]Look at that bicycle now imagine if you rip off the chain and peddles and replace them with a turbine engine and then loose the frame and replace it with body and some wings and next thing you know it BANG you got yourself a flying bike! <hr></blockquote>
Er, no. More like "Look at that bike... you know, if we put a motor to drive the chain..." which is, after all, how the motorcycle started.
Good god man, have some vision!
[ 06-19-2002: Message edited by: Kickaha ]</p>
<strong>Lord knows people would be falling all over themselves to buy a $350 picture frame... which could hold 2000 pictures!!!1! And you can move pictures on and off real fast!!!1!
Exactly... digital picture frames have never sold. They're just silly. The iFrame doesn't make any sense, IMHO.
But add the touchscreen, and suddenly it becomes a viable PDA basis.
You get the idea....
<strong>Kickaha - DaveGee is right. 'Just toss is a touch sensitive frame and ink...quicktime...' His analogy about the bike to the flying bike wasn't that far off...just because someone points out the flaws in your idea doesn't mean they don't have 'vision', it just means you need to think a bit more.
Thanks for seeing my point Thai!
Kickaha, I have vision but what you are saying takes a lot more than 'throw in this add a dash of that'.
Fact's:
We (pro-apple-pda folk) have been told ad-nasuam that "Steve hates PDA's and even said so"
My/Our reply - Yea Steve hates them so much he tried to buy Palm.
Palm is NOT doing well. Their IPO started at $140 per share had a day-high of $160ish and closed that same day at $98 (I think)... Since that day Palm has been going down hill... Today that same share of stock is selling for $1.51 cents. Talk about a down hill skid!
At the close of the day PALM had a Mkt Cap
of 874.7M. In other words (#-of-Shares)*(stock price). Apple has that kinda cash-in-the-bank like four or five times over!
Speculation:
What happened to Palm?
Either they didn't or couldn't G-R-O-W their market with new customers and/or they couldn't convince current customers to UPGRADE to newer models. I think it was a little of both.
How many people still use their Palm? I dunno but I do know that I still see a WHOLE LOT (of those who do) still using the Palm III and the Palm V. I've heard it said (or written) in the usenet news-groups that those users don't 'need' to upgrade they are happy with what they have. Well that sure is a problem... Either Palm has built a machine that has WAY TO LONG a useful life (could be) or has provided little to no incentive for someone to move up to the newest version.
Good for the customer (short term) but bad.. bad... very bad... for Palm.
They added wireless access in a model but since both the Palm III and the Palm V could be '3rd party upgraded' to provide similar access most people didn't move to the Palm VII. They added color to their screen but it was too little too late and since the screen being what it is just didn't add too much in the end and it had to shorten the battery life. At the end of the day the they just aren't doing what it takes to get people to upgrade their older handhelds and for whatever reason those who don't yet own a Palm still aren't excited by what they see.
I've gotta admit Palm has been pretty boring...
Now we have PocketPCs... Now were are starting to get somewhere. CPU speed and memory matters a whole lot more. Crisper displays faster CPUs, more memory different IO, Wireless support etc are all reasons to upgrade. Probem with them have been WinCE. These devices still need developers to code stuff specificly for WinCE now since Microsoft is... Well.. Microsoft! They can get people to develop stuff.
Apple has done a great job at getting developers to move to X. Can they now come out with 'something new' and push the developers yet again? I don't think so...
If we are talking PDA form factor here is what Apple needs:
- FANTASTIC Color LCD (touch screen)
- PowerPC G3 500+Mhz CPU (System-On-Chip)
- 128MB Memory
- OS X Lite
- 10Gb HD (ipod sized)
- BlueTooth + Airport
- One heck of a battery
- Firewire
- Audio Out
- Video Out (maybe just svideo?)
- USB (or maybe not with Bluetooth)
First thing is I'd need it to be about an inch (two?) wider than the Palm V and about two inches higher.
I just don't think Apple can do it at a price that people would be willing to pay. Also it might not be do-able with todays battery technology... But I for one would pay for a device like that because it's exactly what I want but I'm not sure the rest here would.
I want a device that can run most of the Apps I'd want to use on the road.
E-Mail
Web
iTunes (audio)
QuickTime (video)
Notepad
Calculator
Calendar (fat chance since Apple don't do em)
Filemaker (lite?)
PowerPoint Player would be nice
Simple Games and Junk
The thing being that many Apps that already work under X would work on this device but some might need to be 'tweaked' to either support smaller screen sizes and or memory footprints.
Well anyway I've ranted enough and other than what I've said above - Kickaha is right I don't really have any vision about this stuff at all...
Dave
[ 06-20-2002: Message edited by: DaveGee ]</p>
[ 06-20-2002: Message edited by: yurin8or ]</p>
[quote]
- 10Gb HD (ipod sized)
- One heck of a battery
- Firewire
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Alright, that's the iPod...
[quote]
- FANTASTIC Color LCD (touch screen)
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Required for the iFrame, except for the touch screen...
[quote]
- PowerPC G3 500+Mhz CPU (System-On-Chip)
- 128MB Memory
- OS X Lite
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The CPU is quite irrelevant, really... an embedded PPC core wouldn't be shabby, but OS X is becoming increasingly less dependent on any one chip, which is nice. Assume that this iFrame thingy has a sufficiently hefty CPU for image or other media playback.
The memory is high, IMHO, for a Lite OS and apps. The real problem is that the MTBF for the Toshiba drives used in the iPods are much lower than your standard drive.
The OS? Er... maybe. Rather hefty for a PDA though. (I used to be in the OS X Lite crowd myself, I understand the reasons and desires... I just no longer think that that much is required for a highly useful PDA. *Extremely* Lite, sure. Say, enough to run QT + a stripped down Cocoa. Certainly not enough to handle all possible MacOS X apps...) And here we run into the drive MTBF problem - OS X, in general, is a thrasher. Not as bad as NT, but not great. Certainly much worse than you'd think a PDA would be.
And one other thing... size. At 'slightly larger than photo' size, you're looking at basically very close to your requested size of a bit larger than a Palm.
At this point, the difference between a hypothetical iFrame, as described, and a useful PDA isn't *that* huge. Hardly the turbine/wings/etc example you gave. Sheesh. I was rather assuming that an image only iFrame was useless, and a video enabled iFrame would be a given... at that point QT becomes almost an gimme. QT requires some hefty memory management behind the scenes, which provides much of what an Obj-C runtime needs as well.
So given the iFrame, adding a UI and Cocoa-Lite on it (and Ink - c'mon, it's just a C family library now... not exactly rocket science to port) takes care of the software side. The hardware side, from the above, isn't a huge step either, given the requirements for image playback (and possibly even video). I mean really - my Newton 2100 does email, web browsing, (web *serving*), all the normal PDA functions... with what is, comparatively speaking, a wimpy little CPU... images and video are fairly hefty for it to handle.
[quote]
- BlueTooth + Airport
- Audio Out
- Video Out (maybe just svideo?)
- USB (or maybe not with Bluetooth)
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Can't really agree with these (with the possible exception of Airport and audio out)... I think the iPod has shown that a single FW cable is simple enough for most folks, really. With FW, USB is pretty weak, and I'm still not sold on Bluetooth.
Audio out would be nice for media playback though, and *maybe* video out for remote playback for presentation to a group. Actually, I can see both of them on a QT based playback iFrame.
Alright, tally it up, hardware-wise, as significant differences between a QT enabled iFrame, and this envisioned PDA... (leaving out the USB and Bluetooth)
-touch screen
-airport
Not that big a list, is it? Pricy enough to ensure a price difference appropriate for a new product line though.
The software, depending on the iFrame base, could similarly be a relatively short step. The UI doesn't have to be a full Quartz implementation, no OpenGL needed, etc, etc. Ink is a portable library now. Cocoa (or Cocoa-Lite) depends on an Obj-C runtime... again, a portable C system. Heck, if you're really looking for a MacOS X Lite, that's quickly becoming portable as well.
C'mon, really... the original blurb was from MOSR. That alone should make the whole thing suspect, right?
Forget I said anything. Mods, LOCK!
[ 06-20-2002: Message edited by: Kickaha ]</p>
<strong>
If we are talking PDA form factor here is what Apple needs:
- FANTASTIC Color LCD (touch screen)
- PowerPC G3 500+Mhz CPU (System-On-Chip)
- 128MB Memory
- OS X Lite
- 10Gb HD (ipod sized)
- BlueTooth + Airport
- One heck of a battery
- Firewire
- Audio Out
- Video Out (maybe just svideo?)
- USB (or maybe not with Bluetooth)
I want a device that can run most of the Apps I'd want to use on the road.
E-Mail
Web
iTunes (audio)
QuickTime (video)
Notepad
Calculator
Calendar (fat chance since Apple don't do em)
Filemaker (lite?)
PowerPoint Player would be nice
Simple Games and Junk
Dave
</strong><hr></blockquote>
Maybe all of those features should be implemented natively on the iBook first?
I think a pda with all of those features would be too large...
But an apple branded pda with a little less features could perhaps be more appealing, at least to me.
/NeM
Not so easy - it's a major development compared to iPod. And the engineering capabilities of Newton are long gone from Apple - the alternative, of course, might be to buy out-of-house capabilities, as they did with iPod. Then there's the economy: a "fantastic" color screen with touch-sensitivity would send the device up in a range where it became uncompetitive, especially since it would be seen as a Mac appendix (and only interact with Macs) .
MacOSX Lite - it's a major undertaking to port and minimize OSX (just think of the latest developer version - TWO CD-ROMs). It doesn't seem feasible.
Then what? The easiest development would be to keep the iPod, except for the screen which must be "fantastic" (color, 320x480 or something like that) but NOT touch-sensitive. Add to that A FEW extensions to the iPod OS, enabling it to:
- store and display pictures for viewing
- store and display addresses, phone numbers, etc
- store and display text (notes, price lists, spare parts)
- store and display emails downloaded from the Mac
- store and display webpages, best in the Palm format
- store and display e-texts for brief pauses
All that on top of iPod's primary capabilities as an MP3 player!
The key phrase (being didactic here!) is "store and display": it is not an input device - it's an output device. Your Mac (or otherwise?) is the input device.
The iFrame idea (suggested originally by IBM in the 'seventies) is not practical - how do you charge it?; nor is it economically feasible or viable marketing-wise.
An extended iPod is viable - development-wise, we are talking changing the screen, adjusting the form factor and adding a few storage-and-display modules to the OS. The CPU is strong enough (it's an ARM chip, I believe) and the control wheel on an iPod is perfect for the king of display- tasks I outlined.
It is viable marketing-wise: people would want to buy an iPod with these extra, very cool features, and the price-tag would only be slightly higher ($50 ?).
Portability is the key - for the iPod, and for the xPod. Thus, the stationary iFrame is too clumsy and uninteresting.
Engineering is the stepping stone. Apple doesn't have the in-house capabilities for a PDA anymore.
Usability is the goal: "Let every part be true to itself".