Thread: Found perfect convergence device. Its not a N8XX.
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johnkzin is offline johnkzin
2008-08-29 , 19:14
Posts: 1,878 | Thanked: 646 times | Joined on Sep 2007 @ San Jose, CA
#200
Originally Posted by qole View Post
Actually, I live in a very mountainous place, too. All the little "nook and cranny" 400-person towns have high speed Internet now (just in the last 5 years). A weird thing is happening; in nook-and-cranny places where you can't get cell phone reception, you can find open wi-fi APs.
I'm not talking about towns. I'm talking about "no more than 2 or 3 houses in that nook and cranny". And they're all luddites. And, yeah, those exist. Even less than 40 miles from the center of Silicon Valley.

Nah, thin clients were a bit of a dead end. You definitely want all the computing power you can stuff into your device.
Yet, the device you're talking about is essentially a thin-client. Which doesn't mean "lower CPU power" it means "little to no local state". There are plenty of thin client devices out there that have currently moderate consumer device CPU speeds. They just don't have local storage (the better ones give you a card slot, or support for USB drives, though).

As for here-and-now can-be-done convergence, I still want a little bluetooth module that ties my tablet to some kind of high-speed data network. It should be the size of my Holux M1000 and it should come as part of a $40/month unlimited data plan. Is that so hard?

Technologically, no. Politically, yes.
Technologically, not very hard at all, if you're willing to go slightly larger. Look up the CradlePoint routers. One of them has an internal battery and will work with USB dongles. Another one has an ExpressCard slot (but not an internal battery). My problem with them is that they don't give you support for the voice and messaging aspects of the (current) WWAN environment. I'd like to see them add a small SIP server and Jabber server, for the reasons I outlined previously. And add a model to the lineup that has a battery AND an express card slot.

Oh, and they're 3G only (HSPA or EVDO, they disconnect when you're in an EDGE or 1x area). That's the other thing I'd like to see them fix.

The hard part is probably the $40/mo. But that's not technology nor politics. That's sales. But the current price from the carriers isn't TOO much more than that ($10-$20/mo more).
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