I’m sitting under a tree, looking out on the Rhein river and the world is good! I’ve got time for one of those on-the-spot creativity moments and I’m thinking hard about what would be the ultimate travelers journaling PC. The Q1b is good of course but there’s always room for improvement and the first thing I see that needs improving is screen brightness under sunlight. I’m actually in the shade right now and with full screen brightness its still not that good. A screen with the clarity and contrast of the one on the SH6 would be much better. 300nits, LED backlit is the starting point for any outdoor work in my opinion. 800×480 at 7″ would be the ideal size I think.
Wait for it. I’ll get to battery life in a minute!
Full keyboard is a must. The Samsung organiser keyboard is one of these best there is although maybe there’s a possibility that it could be a little smaller. Not too much though otherwise you have to concentrate on typing rather writing. A keyboard like the one on the SH6 and Nanobook would be the best size but it would be better if it was detachable because being able to split components up is good when you’re traveling.
Price. This is important. These devices need to be sub $500. There’s no point having $1500 worth of equipment with you when you travel and even $500 is a little too much.
I’m pausing at ‘operating system’ and wondering exactly what a traveler would need. Instant, or at least sub-3 seconds on and the ability to provide a rich but efficient writing environment like that provided with LiveWriter. HTML WYSIWYG, image drag and resize, capability to save drafts and post through different API’s. I’m not sure about the full Internet experience but something close to it would be good. I have no intention of watching YouTube or any sort of video media on my tour so a plugin-free browser would probably be OK. This bring up the question of processor base and I’m wondering if something like an Advantage with an 800×480 screen and large format detachable keyboard would suffice but you’d have to find the right software. Taking the step down to RISC processors also brings the advantage of cheaper components and battery life, which really needs to be 6 hours or more with a quick charging time of 1-2 hours. You can not creative while you’re worrying about battery life.
And here we reach a point where there is no device to satisfy the above requirements. No WM5 device has an 800×480 7″ screen as far as I know. The HTC Shift is close to the ideal device but so so expensive and having the dual OS just makes it more complex. For 800×480 at 7″ you have to look at X86-only devices (Yes I know WinCE is an option but software would be a major issue here. WinCE is still Web 0.1!) then you really have to look closely at the Nanobook platform. I don’t believe it will have 6 hours battery life but if the outdoor screen clarity is good and it really is $600 then it could be the best travelers PC available at the moment. If you’ve got the money then the HTC Shift or SH6 would be options. None of these really bring me any major advantages over the Q1b and to be honest, if this device had a brighter screen it would be perfect. What do you think?
I’ll have time to think about this again tommorrow and if I have any ideas, i’ll leave a note in the comments.
The entry posted from the trees HERE. Follow my journey on the map here.
