Product Launch
anonymous
97 points
31 comments
Posted19 days agoActive18 days ago
Typeframe PX-88
typeframe.netlaunchedhardwareconsumers
Key Features
portablecomputing system
portable computingmobile hardwarechinese tech
Key Features
Really: you could lock me into a room with just a pencil and a ream of blank sheets, and nothing of value would come out, and that's not because of the technology or the distractions, but just... well...
Caveat: such a device should not be infested with shitty spyware like everything else these days.
The closest modern device is the Planet Computers PDA, which can run Linux, but it can’t run mainline Linux and it has a modern color screen that uses too much power.
This is the 21st century version of an axiom: it's an XKCD.
Pairing is a pain, charging is a nuisance, battery life is a constant worry, responsiveness is dodgy... there is nothing good about it. Give me something built-in, cabled, and always-on.
Wireless is for fashion victims.
It's fun to push old hardware to the limits and develop software/hw for it (such us wifi for apple 2 from 1979 hehe)
Clunky hardware has one advantage too: It's usually a single tasking tool. Great for focus and running away from WWW.
Your kid can play pac-man and Tetris without fear of popups, credit cards, scams, hate and porn.
I fairly frequently leave my phone in the office and take a clipboard full of lined paper and a ballpoint to a place where I can write without access to the internet - I've got a number of published CS papers and at least one funded grant where a significant amount of writing was done in longhand on paper.
Of course this would require a bit of software work and maybe a brain swap to make it into the sort of portable typewriter that I'm really looking for, but given this as a starting point it should be fairly easy.
One question I have - what is the finished weight?
I use an iPad with a keyboard when I need this kind of “writing room” thing, but I know someone who uses an ancient electronic typewriter.
FWIW when my disorganisation is catastrophic, I go out for a walk, leave my phone at home if I can, sit on a bench, and try to organise my life in one side of A4. And then if there’s a task that I can start by writing, I do it there, with a pen.
But this makes a lot more sense, can DIY, and uses the full body with the embedded touchscreen.
I know Bloomberg’s is iconic in the financial world but that’s a different persona.
Also, before the responses to me start to pile up, yes: I am aware of the UNIX underpinnings that NextOS/MacOS relies on for Terminal and the influences thereafter.
Though, considering all the model 100s I keep staring at are in the range of $600-1000, tradeoff seems acceptable.
I buy it, I play with it a little bit, but the reality is my phone, iPad, or my laptop can do every single thing better.
Maybe not with the same swagger. But ultimately, as I get older I realize I'm trying to produce with the least friction possible, and usually these devices have either highly constrained touch interfaces, shrunken keyboards, or both.
I've always said that if somebody would create a new HP 200LX device with the same chicklet keyboard that I'd buy it in an instant. But now I realize that "ideal" device for me just reaches back to my contextual memory of state of the art devices of the time. A time when we couldn't type on a 6" screen, or use a detachable keyboard. So a chiclet keyboard you could thumb type at 40wpm was a revelation. But we have come a long way.
In the end, alas, these devices really are just a novelty, at least for me.
I think as well about that… as well as the work I do that pays my bills, and how efficiently I need to do it to keep my job.
I get nostalgic after Psions. Small clamshell designs are great - I can do work on the go without lugging a fragile laptop!
Well, no, actually - I need to do things in R, _quickly_, and I need things that weren’t possible back in the 90s.
Edge to edge high resolution screens that can simultaneously show graphics and an terminal and a ChatGPT session. The ability to constantly pipe large datasets into memory to and from disk, while holding up to R’s profligate use of memory.
I’m just not meaningfully productive otherwise. So: I would love this, but it would be a toy that I’m sure I’ll use for a bit while I wax nostalgic about the mythical days people did everything on a VT-100.
But I am also 55, and my eyes can't deal any more with a screen less than 11" in a general-purpose computing device (as opposed to a phone or tablet, which have an OS and GUI designed for the small screens), so my portable devices are now a Chuwi Minibook X and a Thinkpad X13. The Thinkpad is a revelationm as despite its size it is lighter than almost anything else, including an iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard.
It isn't without its flaws: I wouldn't ever use the pre-installed version of Windows (the one that doesn't allow you to open services.msc or Task Manager), because I totally distrust it. The fact that the panel is natively 50hz portrait on an inherently landscape device is painful. The default hysteresis settings on the trackpad are awful, the RAM speed by default is stuck at 4000MT/s...
But after an hour or two of hacking Arch into an acceptable shape and solving all of those niggles, it does absolutely everything I need in a portable machine, and is small enough to fit in a tiny sling bag along with everything else I carry around on the daily. It "only" gets about 6 hours on battery, but that's the biggest downside. And 6 hours is plenty of time to cook.
With a full-screen terminal and a keyboard that is very acceptable for the 10" form-factor, I can hack on anything I want wherever I want. Niri as a WM is an absolute dream on this thing. I basically don't bother carrying around my personal M4 macbook pro anymore, and it has been relegated to sitting on a desk and never moving from home.
Wondering if I can make this cheaper.
Merge some of the parts together into a single piece. Instead of the Power Hat and battery I could maybe just squeeze a commercial Power Bank inside.
Still, it’s a nice design. But the iPad Mini I’m typing this on (even without a physical keyboard) can do so much more.
I was a kid in France, now I'm working remotely from Bangkok: dreams come true after all.
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/fhfmzn/th...
Nice bits of kit, but as I am old now.... my eyes don't work as well as needed for these small screens.
So it is a Raspberry Pi 4 c with 2 microHDMI and a strange keyboard. You need an adapter to connect it to a monitor or TV. Oh, no. It has a very small touch screen as a display.
I'm sure gnome-session will look great on it.
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