[Arm-netbook] Proposal: screen and touchpad

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 7:56 AM, Baybal Ni <nikulinpi at gmail.com> wrote:
> Can the project go to touchpadless design and smaller screen?

 there are dozens of such systems already in existence, thanks to the
lower cost....

> In my
> opinion, on screens smaller than 10" and conventional DPI, touchpads
> have no use and it's easier to work with keys, trackballs and
> joysticks or devices like the one on sharp z1. Also there would be no
> need in lvds transmitters on this sizes + less battery drain.

 ... for exactly these reasons.

 for example the skytone alpha 400:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skytone_Alpha-400

 there is a successor, the 400P, which uses an ARM XScale.

 so - the short answer is: no, i don't believe it's necessary to spend
$100,000 on case design or $20k and upwards on duplicating something
that already exists.   however, if you can think of ways in which
costs can be cut down to manageable levels, _great_, because as the
Skytone Alpha 400 shows us, if you can get the cost down to a
sufficiently low level, people will buy it.

... or maybe they won't: the linux version in maplin's was withdrawn
very quickly, and i no longer see the wince version on the maplin's
site.  so, maybe the retail stores have had their fingers burned by
these low-cost devices - we just don't know: it's not like they're
going to tell us that they made a significant profit or loss on them.

l.