Cathena: the instant-on Windows CE laptop
posted September 27th 2004 9:32AM
It sure looks like a regular laptop, but the Cathena is definitely not a regular laptop, especially since it runs on
Windows CE rather than on the full Windows OS. It's sort of like that movie Big, just with a PDA that's woken
up in the body of a laptop instead of some forgotten child actor waking up in Tom Hanks's body (and it's also not a
movie, but whatever). The specs won't blow you out of the water (64MB of ROM, 128MB of RAM, a 12.1-inch LCD screen,
802.11b WiFi, and a CompactFlash memory card slot—but NO hard drive), but you do get an instant-on laptop that weighs
under 3 pounds and that'll work just fine for taking notes, sending emails, instant messaging, and accessing the web.
We'd be digging on this way more were it not for the semi-outrageous list price of $799, but we absolutely want someone
to investigate a version that runs on the Palm OS (and yes, we're very aware of the AlphaSmart).
[Thanks, Tom]
So wait, this laptop gets to sleep with Elizabeth Perkins?
I am patiently awaiting my new AlphaSmart NEO -- I am told that it comes with my novel already inside of it. I support the longer battery life, the instant on, and the speed of these new devices. I would love a $500-$700 2 pound, 10" reflective screen based on CE
I have the old Clio C-1050 from these guys (eBay - $60). It was perfect, except that the screen was too dim, the keyboard was too small, and the processor was too slow to support a 128-bit encrypted WiFi connection and RDC to my server at the same time. But it was so freakin' cool - a perfect recipe-browswer for the kitchen.
The standard battery on the Cathena is only 4 hours. I hope this is only the first of many - I miss the old HPCs.
i suppose few people will remember the microsoft jupiter refrence design. this would circa windows CE 2.0 or 3.0 ('98? '99?) -- it was more or less the exact same thing: a CE/PPC-based micro-laptop.
and oh yeah, it bombed horribly. the HP jornada version that i eventually wound up getting for a song cost soemthing like $800-900 when it originally came out. when i finally got one, it was for $200 (about 18 months after release.)
about the only feature that would excite me about such a device is 'instant on'. with flash memory being so small and abundant now, i really wish someone would devise a solution to create an OS install that you could just drop on somehting akin to a PROM. boot time of 10s or less (still would take some time to execute the registry startup).
This is the basically the same form factor, weight, and battery life as my toshiba portege 2000, but minus a hard drive, windows xp and a lot of screen real estate. in exchange it gains....instant on.
don't get me wrong though, I like the idea. I'd like to see something like this in the form factor of a sony picture book or NEC MobilePro 900...with a full sized (or nearly full sized) keyboard and a 1024ish by 480ish screen. if there were such a thing that could also use an ipod as a hard drive, I could quit carrying my laptop.
I had one of the bootiful Sigmarion 3 ( http://handheldpcs.superboxes.com ) handheld PCs. It is kind of the successor to the Jornada 720- small enough to fit in a small handbag or big pocket, but the keys are large enough that even someone with with beefy hands like mine can touch type at a good 60 WPM. Mind you, if an iBook keyboard is too small, then this isn't for you. The keys are 72% full-size or so, which is pretty small. But the key mechanism is the same as with a laptop, so unlike something with a thumboard like the Zaurus C-series, you can actually touch type at a very decent speed.
One really cool feature of the Sig3 is that is has a USB host port. So, if you have a driver installed, you can use pretty much any USB device. These are pretty rare on PDAs, though there are a couple around that have them- the new Zaurus SL-6000 is one, not sure about any Pocket PCs with them. Anyway, I tested a mouse, keyboard, iPod and external DVD/CD-ROM drive and they all worked great. It was definately slick... Though I didn't make a habit out of using the iPod as my hard drive, as it was my girlfriend's and not my iPod.
It has some similar specs: a beautiful transflective 800x480 color screen, 400 MHz XScale PXA255 CPU, 64 MB RAM, WinCE.NET 4.1, Dual SD and CF slots. Battery life was decent, but not as good as my Jornada 720- I got 4-5 hours of battery life while using a CF AmbiCom wifi card the whole time. You can get them for a decent price- $450-500 if you can get them at what they're sold for in Japan, more if you're buying from Dynamism or something. This baby was my primary computer at home for around a year, but I just had to sell it to make a school loan payment. :/ And when I say "primary computer" I mean it! In addition to web browsing, email with pine via SSH, IRC and IM, I also did a lot of development (in Squeak Smalltalk, Perl/Tk, Lisp and Scheme), mathematics (with GNU Maxima + GNUplot), write papers in LaTeX (!) - all without having to run apps remotely or deal with a desktop computer. Well, pine was run on the remote unix machine at school, but LaTeX, Maxima, etc was all run directly on the Sig3. But for when I needed to connect to somewhere else, I had Telnet/SSH, VNC, Windows RDP, and even X11- there's a version of XFree86 for CE that works well. For development, the code was typed, compiled, ran and debugged all on the Sig3. For old skoolers like me, there are a lot of good Linux/Unix ports available for CE, a better variety than available for my Zaurus C760. Higher quality ports with a GUI that made sense, not just a quick and dirty command line port.
Even without a hard drive, I got a lot of work done and had plenty of fun. I just had two 128 MB SD cards. I occasionally mounted a network share- unlike PPC, vanilla WinCE can mount SMB/Samba shares no problem- to play MP3s, for instance.
an iBook or PowerBook with instant-on wakes up in less than a second, the only problem is that battery life is five hours maximum...
From my understanding of instant on PC's and instant on PDA style devices, they work on the basis that they do not need to load the OS or any applications from a hard drive.
As mentioned by 'RevAaron' the 'sig3' (which i have never personally used) offers a USB port that will allow an externel HDD to be connected. So why can we not create an 'instant on' PC that includes an internal HDD, when switching on the PC it boots the OS using the built in 'flash' memory and then powers up the HDD (in the background) to load any user documents.
So will this evenually lead to the end of the 'Hard Disk Drive' as we know it?
Does anyone know if the Cathena will actually make it to market? They should release it while it's still useable, before it becomes obsolete as an internet machine as unfortunately the MobilePro 800/880 have.