Luke was thinking about a smaller laptop and I think he did talk to me about
a 10" tablet (?) with a 4:3 ratio screen. Don't quote me on any of this.
There is a lot of information exchange... on a lot of different things. Not
all are all that relevant to me so I may not be recalling details as well as
something I'm actually working on or is in the works. Discussion doesn't mean
it's happening. It just means it's been thought about and discussed. All
sorts of feasibility scenarios are yet to be thought out on such things (like
is there actual demand?).
I think everybody agrees expansion is the plan. We still haven't finished
what we started with the 15.6" model and I wouldn't want to oversell here.
Particularly as far as time frames go. We've talked about phones, routers,
tablets, smaller laptops. Some of these I'm pretty confident we could sell
and some would have more value than others from a freedom stand point. A
phone or communications device for example would be extremely valuable given
there is nothing on the market that is privacy respecting. There can't be
really. Something radical has to be designed to complicate the tracking
built-into highly regulated components (modem). It's also an expensive
project to pull off relative to demand. A tablet would be nice, but it's not
that critical. You can easily choose to do your computing on a laptop rather
than a tablet. A tablet is more of a luxury item/fad. There is one use case
where it would be helpful and that's for POS-type systems. Particularly for
use with BitCoin related activities (in other words restaurants and such
wanting to accept BitCoin and other crypto currencies).
I don't believe it would be possible given the current design to upgrade
battery. Battery life isn't an issue though given the low power nature of the
design. Ram, CPU, and graphics are more important issues to deal with. The
CPU we've solved basically it seems. Unsure about the ram and the graphics is
definitely not solved even if there is work going on to try and solve this.
The problem doing more ram is that you can't just add more memory to the
design. It doesn't work that way. It's extraordinarily expensive to do and
not something that is feasible within the scope of these projects. What would
have to happen is we'd have to convince upstream companies designing these
components that it would be a worthwhile endeavour. These CPUs aren't being
marketed at desktop/laptops and they aim to keep the cost down. Unless the
market demands more memory they won't add it. They haven't even imagined
somebody would want more than 2GB at this point.
64 BIT is more complicated, but not necessarily out of the question. 32 BIT
quad core is more likely. It's actually better to do 32 BIT I believe given
the limited amount of ram. You'd get less ram out of a 64 BIT design with 2GB
than a 32 BIT design.
