PC Mag 21st Annual Awards for Technical Excellence. The Winner Is...

[jlp]

In The 21st Annual Awards for Technical Excellence PC Magazine evaluated and compared this year's top technical innovations.

In the personal computers category 3 products were nominated: a powerful desktop, a versatile notebook and a tiny pocketable PC.

The Apple desktop iMac G5 is a finalist,
The Toshiba Qosmio E15 is the other one

And The Winner Is...

The OQO Model 01 !! (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1743968,00.asp)

Lauded for the technical prowess of extreme miniaturization: "The technical challenge of building this portable was cramming a full PC into something the size of a PDA"

The reviwers continue: "The OQO is a terrific business tool."

It's quite assuring that top industry experts put the OQO Model 01 in perpective and don't compare it with the uncomparable as it's neither a PDA nor a notebook.

The OQO handtop is a pocketable computer in its own right with its own strengths and weaknesses.

Every single device has some and their regular users learned to praise their strengths and do with the weaknesses or find ways to go around them.

[Darius Wey]

jlp, I'm confused. The OQO received a rating of 3/5, yet the Qosmio E15 received a rating of 4.5/5?

[jlp]

Quote from PC Mag Award title page:

"In this story, we honor the ones that most impressed us."

[Ed Hansberry]

Cool. Joins the ranks of DataPlay's quarter-sized optical drive. Lots of flash and attention, tons of awards for innovation followed by a bankruptcy.

[Darius Wey]

Quote from PC Mag Award title page:

"In this story, we honor the ones that most impressed us."

What happened to your previous post? The last time I read it, you said "I'm NOT the reviewer!!!" :?

[jlp]

Cool. Joins the ranks of DataPlay's quarter-sized optical drive. Lots of flash and attention, tons of awards for innovation followed by a bankruptcy.


In your above gratuitous sentence, at least you should imply or say it might happen, but not affirm something that 1) is NOT true, 2) may NOT happen at all concerning the OQO!!! :evil:

OTOH, while I believe the OQO will succeed, I never believed in the DataPlay's success.

We have 2 entirely different situations here:
First the DataPlay was plagued by many design flaws and drawbacks, while the OQO faces technological limits, not flaws; IF you can appreciate the difference.

DataPlay's flaws and drawbacks are:
they never really were available in shops, if at all (AFAIK)
AND that's the single most serious drawback. Nobody can buy something that's not available.
write once media
capacity that became less and less an advantage compared to growing flash card capacities; the DataPlay 500 MB was quickly caught up by CF cards and later SD cards
many moving parts, meaning severe battery strain
too strenuous copy protection (if you transfer a song from a DP disk and the tranfer fail you still loose the song; SDMI complyancy)
Other main serious drawback: it was designed at a time electronic devices were large and heavy, these quickly became much too small and light for the DP drives to appeal to digicam, PDAs, etc. manufacturers. OTOH flash cards were always much smaller, require much less energy to run and as I said their capacities quickly reached and surpassed that of DP disks


OQO drawbacks; they are in an entirely different league; as i said they depend on the technology limits at the time of design:
USB 1.1 not 2.0 (2.0 chips were much too large to fit in a tiny body crowded with more important electronics; I believe USB 1.1 is better than none at all, that's why they opted for it)
wireless B not G (same reason as above)
limited battery life due to tiny overall device size (therefore small matching battery; after all the whole device is smaller than most notebook batteries alone!!)
limited processing capability; however has the best ratio: tiny device size vs. hi CPU power vs low power consumption.
None the less has more than enough processing power for the intended targeted usage : office applications, email, web surfing, and the like.
For comparison purposes the OQO Model 01 is faster than the Compaq T1000 Tablet PC that uses the same processor/memory combination

OQO strengths:
desktop capable pocketable PC
runs WinXP Home or Pro and the vast majority of all XP apps
has the best ratio: tiny device size vs. hi CPU power vs low power consumption
overall size equal to or smaller than most PDAs in use today
large 5" transflective screen
viewable indoors and outdoors
active Wacom digitizer and pen
sliding screen on hi quality rack and pinions mechanism
that reveals a full spec keyboard with mouse stick and buttons
extra strong body that's 2.5 times harder than Titanium!!
freefall detection mechanism that parks the HDD's head in case of fall
1 GHz x86 CPU
20 GB HDD (30GB and 40GB planned when available from Toshiba)
802.11b WLAN
Bluetooth
full size USB connector
full size 4 pin Firewire connector
can connect to the vast majority of all desktop peripherals, from large TFT (even CRT) screens, projectors, large keyboards and mice, printers, to scanners, optical drives and burners, scanners, etc.

Edit: Post edited by moderator JR

[Kowalski]

its too small to be perfect i think,
yet a pda combined with a ultraportable notebook works best for me