I’m amazed no only that this thing ever got past the “What are you smoking?” stage of design and development, but that it took this long to kill.

But at least sanity prevailed in the end.

I’ll admit I own a Zune. It’s not sexy like an Ipod, but it plays music and videos on a larger screen than the Ipods. And I can fit it in my pocket. What more could you ask for?

An iPod.

So what’s the deal? They couldn’t pawn these POSs off on those kids in Africa.

Too true. Like when you try to donate your old computer to the neighborhood school…it reminds me of The Simpsons episode where Homer was trying to return the trampoline and is greeted by Krusty wielding a shotgun: “You just keep right on driving.”

My first box was the mighty TI-99/4A.

“the next major development will either be voice recognition that works so you don’t have to have a keyboard (size restrictive)” – I wonder how that would work on a crowded train, though, or with kids shouting in the background. Perhaps the future is a keyboard that can detect your thoughts via electrical impulses from your fingertips, or sweat, or something.

Easy to use controls, but the memory is a goner if you drop it.

Now if you could fold the big screen/keyboard in eighths so it fits into your shirt pocket and looks/acts like a cellphone…you’d have the FOLDeo! …which would be only slightly obsolete compared to iPhone…

Then there was a Commodore Colt (1989) this was pretty much the first IBM clone. It also hooked up to the TV, and had two 5 inch floppy drives. I inquired into a hard drive for it. It would take one, but no larger than 10mb. Yes, that’s 10 megabytes. Less than 10 3 inch floppies.

Then a 486sx. When I ordered it, it came with 1mg of RAM standard. Since Bill Gates’ “No one will ever need more than 640k conventional memory” was already obsolete, I splurged and ordered twice as much RAM. So 2mb RAM and a 345M harddrive.

Now it’s an “old” Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop with a DVD/CD-RW, a wide screen display, 80GB harddrive and 2GB of RAM.

This one didn’t cost much more than that old 486 with DOS 5 and 6 and Windows 3, and Lotus 123 v 4…

So tell me, what are the device’s sexual stimulation capabilities that are hidden in the advertisment? Please, reveal them to me and I will buy many, many of them, making all of us very rich. Please reply to this sincere plea.

Jeff Hawkins, co-founder and former head of Palm, revealed today that he is the love child of Marcel Duchamp, the late Dadaist and Surrealist. As startling as this news was to the technology industry, it did serve to explain the Foleo, which was canceled by Palm today.
Attempting to show the futility of modern electronics, Hawkins provided Palm with the Foleo, an obvious ready-made fabrication that any reasonable person would have immediately detected was a piece of performance art.
“Reporters kept asking me questions about it,” Hawkins said, “But they never penetrated beyond the mere futility of the device into the deeper artistic meaning.”
Hawkins’ father was one of the most prominent members of a loosely knit federation of Dada artists. And like his father, Hawkins said, no one understands his work either.
“How could you people not get this?” Hawkins asked. “I mean, look at that thing. It doesn’t make any sense. A laptop that’s a slave to a cell phone? It’s absurd.
“Absurd… ist.”

And, in all fairness, even though this product was doomed from the start, it’s not as though it was useless. It allowed you to use your Palm as a real(ish) computer, without that annoying (and, with more than two computers, problematic) synchronization step. It had a use. Just as did the Newton, the Internet appliance, and all sort of proprietary items that didn’t do enough for the price.

I wonder if the Zune will be the next on the chopping block?

Slublog on September 5, 2007 at 7:01 PM

I’ll admit I own a Zune. It’s not sexy like an Ipod, but it plays music and videos on a larger screen than the Ipods. And I can fit it in my pocket. What more could you ask for?

the next major development will either be voice recognition that works so you don’t have to have a keyboard (size restrictive), or it will be some sort of keyboard device with a paper-like screen that can extend and retract.

Another possibility is a keyboard (size restrictive) with a projector that can either project a hologram of the screen (3 or 2 dimensional) or just project it on a wall.

Anything less would not be that great of a leap. I still look forward to my flying car soon.