Hello everyone for a last time, Recently, and from the beginning, I have felt that I may not be very useful on this list. Many months later, I am rather sure of it. Despite my demands and visions, I have little power to enforce or inact them, so ended up frustrated. In addition, since I found out about the Nanonote from the Jlime website, I imagined it would have similar capabilities to the HP Jornadas, in particular the J72X series. I have come to learn that it is not yet near even the Jornada 690's capabilities, since even that 10+ year old handheld has a crude web browser. What little software it has is well integrated, and one can find it all easily by doing a little poking around. I do think I have some potintially positive recommendations for the next nanonote, if it gets produced. I do realize however, that for one thing I am no engineer (I am somewhat thankful most of the time for this) and also I realize that these will be mere suggestions, not necessarily to be listenend to as if I am the project manager. That being said...
We should aim for at LEAST a VGA (640x480) screen on the Ya. The Pandora has a 4.3" 800x480 screen, so I know there should be something out there...so many of my (and your) problems probably hinge on that QVGA screen being more restrictive than other system components. Work out the keyboard issues. Since the Nanonote is international, we should not assume that everyone who gets a Ben or Ya speaks English or even uses qwerty. Either we make one option everyone is happy with, or we make the Ya keyboard rearrangeable. Include pointing device on Ya and work on soft-mouse for Ben. If anyone can do it, OpenSource guys should be able to...what happened to the whole Linux gospel? Include mainstream networking solution. If theres no ethernet, then wifi, provided there are no legal problems. And finally this one is small but it always annoyed me. Why do you call the new versions of the OpenWRT OS "images"? To me it always made more sense to call them "versions"... I did say that the things I love about the Nanonote are its small size, complete lack of heat/fan issues, extremely good battery life, etc. However, I feel those pros come at too great a cost right now, which is inability to do what I wanted from the start. (full creative suite) Perhaps it was my mistake for even stretching my imagination to imagine it possible on the Ben, or even MU, so I am correctiong such a mistake by laying my Ben in its case for a while to kill all my excuses for not producing. Another issue still unresolved to this day ,I believe, is the .mp3 controversy. If the solution is just to never support them, then I can't see the Nanonote replacing my laptop because as wrong or inefficient or patented as .mp3's are, a bunch of them exist, even in the Free/Open Source world and converting them all to .ogg's in my view is a waste of cpu power and time, though I have done it in a few cases. Another unfortunate result of this "affair" with Qi-hardware is based on misunderstanding.When I saw the Ben used a MIPS cpu, in concurrence with the knowledge that that's what RMS uses in his laptop, I thought it was desirable in itself as superior to the x86 chips. As it turns out, I email RMS himself about how he likes his MIPS laptop (and his is 64 bit as I recall) and he tells me that the video playback sucks! Imagine! So not only is MIPS technically inferior, it also is no less good when it comes to patents as Sebastien pointed out! Lose lose, and guess who the loser is? Me, who had this idea that MIPS were such good people who copylefted their chip. Now as an artist, the idea of using a Free architecture as a political and technical statement is alluring, but I don't know of any sufficiently mature projects. It looks like MM's acceleration apabilities are impressive, but they are live, I'm not sure how that would translate into say, vector animation production. Even though I don't really like Intel, it looks like Linux shines the most on the ol' x86 platform, which my laptop has, and which I have simply been avoiding as if my Ben were better for, around 8 months now. Now in my spare time I guess I'll be scoping out other handhelds, versions of Linux, etc. (btw have you all heard of angstrom Linux, it's what the Pandora uses in hacked form, might it be useful to Qi?) Mainly I'll be producing content that I fully intend to share with Qi in relevant ways, but Qi has notheg to do with them. I'll be hanging out in Blender, Synfig, Ktoon, LMMS, and many more! Here's to one less frustrated (albiet nerdy) girl sulking around the list! If I return, it will be in spirit, as a friend and room mate may make a new account on the wiki with myself occasionally chiming in :) Thanks for the experience, best of luck with improving all the Qi-hardware! -Jane Andreas _______________________________________________ Qi Hardware Discussion List Mail to list (members only): [email protected] Subscribe or Unsubscribe: http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/mailman/listinfo/discussion
