Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 3rd May 2007 23:26 UTC
It's the original UMPC: Epson's HX-20, announced in 1981 - 25 years before Intel and Microsoft formally launched the ultra-mobile PC category, in April 2006. Epson's machine wasn't the first portable computer - that honour goes to the Osborne 1. But while the Osborne was a beast of a machine, designed more as a desktop you could take from place to place, the HX-20 was a truly a system for computing on the move. So while the HX-20 combined not only a full QWERTY keyboard, a display, storage and even a printer into its 28.4 x 21.3 x 4.4cm casing, but also a rechargeable Ni-Cad battery.
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Member since:
2005-08-28
On much the same note, I occasionally wonder if they could make a computer as robust as my 5 year old first-model-run TI Voyage 200 Graphing Calculator.
It's in that wacky GBA-esque form factor the TI-92 and TI-92+ were in; tiny QWERTY keypad, does complex calculus (hooray!), plays grayscale games with a 14 MHz 68000, lasts for hours on 4 AAA batteries... and still works perfectly even though I've lost count of the number of times I've dropped it. It could, and there ARE apps specially for such a purpose, serve as a word processor if I really needed it to be...
Now, the TI-V200 is 2002 (ish) graphing calculator technology and it's quite durable, so the mystic art of durable computing clearly isn't lost...
Could they do that with a PC nowadays? Would anyone/enough buy one?
PDAs and now smartphones are similar but far less robust from what I've been led to believe.
Edited 2007-05-04 04:40