Ai Touch Book Is Shipping

[viridior]

For the people that preordered the Pandora...

The Touch Book, http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/home/, which has a lot of the same hardware as the Pandora, has started shipping in small numbers until production ramps up. It first-come-first-serve, so placing an order now might not get you a Touch Book until late Sept./Oct.

Arrival Pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/adricnet/TouchBook#

 

[danielliu88888]

i think someone has mentioned this before, but i can't remember.

 

[astro]

i think someone has mentioned this before, but i can't remember.

emmm yeah fink sumone did

 

[viridior]

i think someone has mentioned this before, but i can't remember.

emmm yeah fink sumone did

Its been mentioned, but the first photo proof was posted earlier today.

 

[Enverex]

You'd think that if someone was going to take pictures that were, in this situation, quite important (to disprove the "vaporware" issue) they'd take them with something that wasn't... well, abysmal in quality...

 

[viridior]

Some better ones here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/37213364@N08/sets/72157622087234296/

 

[sam fisher]

I am quite tempted to get one of these but I think I will wait until they have gone into proper mass production and there isn't a huge backlog.

 

[OrR]

Too bad I don't need one because it looks great... Maybe I'll get my grandma one for christmas. Should be a little faster for web browsing than her ancient Ubuntu Thinkpad.

 

[Spykez]

This is actually pretty damn cool, but for it to be successful it's going to need people to make open source shit for it just like the GP2X right?

 

[Enverex]

If it's running Linux (can't tell from their not-too-descriptive description) then it'll be the same as the Pandora, able to run anything Linux ARM based.

 

[Spykez]

so ANYTHING that's dev'd for the pandora, I can just put it right on this thing and wallah?

Might still just stick with the pandora for the convenience of portability

 

[Enverex]

so ANYTHING that's dev'd for the pandora, I can just put it right on this thing and wallah?

Might still just stick with the pandora for the convenience of portability

Not quite, you'd run into the same issues as you would taking an app from one Linux machine running one distro to another. You'd need to make sure you have the libraries and so fourth in place, but at worst it would be a quick recompile and it'd work. You're dealing with what is essentially a Linux ARM computer with the Pandora, so it is virtually the same as with your x86 Linux desktop, you simply get an app that is ARM compatible (and that you have the libs for) and compile it. Generally anything that doesn't use Assembler or OpenGL (due to needing the OGLES conversion) should work without issue (there will always be exceptions but that stands for any platform).

 

[lulzfish]

so ANYTHING that's dev'd for the pandora, I can just put it right on this thing and wallah?

It's voila, and it's pronounced, "Vwa-lah", not "Wah-lah".

 

[craigix]

That un-dressed battery looks very familiar, same manufacturer as us I bet.

 

[craigix]

Can someone who knows more about this project give me some background on how they handled their pre-orders and who processed them?

 

[r00tw00t]

Wow! It looks very nice. Hm. Why didn't I know about this project before- I might had second thoughts about the Pandora

 

[Keen]

lack of gaming controls otherwise it could be a Pandora Killer...

Craig, did you think to ship Pandora including some software as they do?

 

[kmob]

The pricing of this device seems really good.

 

[torpor]

Can someone who knows more about this project give me some background on how they handled their pre-orders and who processed them?

They handled the pre-orders pretty much the same way you did - announced that pre-orders can be taken, took the orders, etc. However, one big difference - they didn't actually do the charges on the orders until the last few weeks - that is to say, they didn't take any money until they had product to ship. The pre-order fulfillment has been spread out over the last 4 weeks, with a very small group of people getting their orders shipped 3 weeks ago, and its starting to trickle out .. now the news is that a larger group of pre-order customers (myself included) will be getting our touchbooks in next months batch. Still have not been billed for the device yet, though.

As far as fulfillment, it seems that they went with their own internal fulfillment house - not Google checkout, paypal, etc. Some sort of arrangement with their bank.

Anyway, I look forward to getting the Touchbook .. it will keep me busy compiling stuff for the OMAP while I want for my pre-order'ed Pandora .. I'm still *very* faithful to the Pandora, just I want to get moving on some software development and for that the Touchbook is going to be very, very nice .. hint: no cross-compiling, everything onboard thats needed for development.

 

[viridior]

I have a Touch Book now. Using primarily for Pandora development. It has some plus/minuses but overall pretty nice system. Uses "TBOS" which is effectively Angstrom, even pulls binaries from the beagle repo. You can find more out in FreeNode#touchbook.