Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 14:48:34 -0700 (PDT) From: David Chien <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Sony U-series development team interview, exploded pictures
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2004/0625/ubiq70.htm Use babelfish.altavista.com to translate. --- In summary, this is what happens when the design team focuses on trying new ideas without really testing the concepts in the marketplace -- an interesting product, limited market. Oh, let's get rid of the keyboard since it seems most people have a hard time using a laptop keyboard in the trains, a lot of people use cell phones to surf the web anyways, and why not? Bad idea -- you can't get input in fast with a touch-screen, and a small laptop PC doesn't have the connectivity of a cell phone for web browsing by default. (and certainly, nobody has wifi in a train, yet) Touch-screen?!? On such a high-res panel?!? Might as well forget the high-res part since you'll never really keep it that small (unless you really want to look at text that is displayed normally on a 15" LCD panel many times smaller on the U's 5" panel. In other words, imagine the text of this message appearing 3x smaller on the U-screen, and try to read that all day long!). And everyone hates to clean dirty LCD screens. Let's have an external, wierd looking stylus because we can't seem to find a good stylus slot location, so why not make it look stylish and have it external? Fastest way to lose the stylus and wind up poking at the screen with your fingertips because you've left it back on the desk. Let's throw out the PCMCIA card slot since we've got 'enough' things built-in. The moment any laptop design tries that, sales collapse. It's the only way to get hooked up to all of the latest wireless options not built-in, cell phone wireless connectivity, memory adapters, etc. It's literally and still a must-have in this age and era, and not having one in a laptop is just crazy (esp. on a $2000 mininote book). Let's backlight it with white LEDs instead of a fluorescent bulb. Okay, not too bad since Palm PDAs all have white LED backlighting, and 5" screens aren't hard to light properly with white LEDs. But oh, god! Just toss color accuracy and rendition straight out the door! White LEDs are far worse than fluorescent bulbs in rendering colors accurately on LCD screens, so forget about using this U-series notebook for color accurate video editing, photo editing, or simply viewing of such media. Here, think fancy PDA and you'll be okay, but definitely nowhere near the quality of the regular laptop LCD panels. However, if you look at the pictures of the motherboard size (in comparision to the 1.8" hard drive), you can see what is possible in today's designs, and hopefully, some company will release a 'sensible' Libretto-like design with built-in CD/DVD burner in a 2lbs, Libretto 110-like size and form factor. Personally, I would have greatly prefered a LCD panel U attached to a foldable keyboard unit (similar to those for PDAs) in a similar form-factor. This would have allowed the best of both worlds (tablet/laptop), and allow rapid text entry on the go or at the desk. ===== adorable toshiba libretto The latest news and information for the Toshiba Libretto owner. http://www.silverace.com/libretto/ __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail ************************************************************** http://libretto.basiclink.com - Libretto mailing list http://www.silverace.com/libretto/ - Archives -------TO UNSUBSCRIBE------- Reply to any of the list messages. The reply mail should be addressed to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Then replace any text on the message's subject line: cmd:unsubscribe --------TO UNSUBSCRIBE DIGEST------ Do above but with this on subject line: cmd:unsubscribe digest **************************************************************
