HP’s Touchpad Makes the Ultimate Business Dashboard
dustyreagan.com
dustyreagan.com
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2905724
Unfortunately it's impossible to get a TouchPad at that price any more. If you're going to pay $200+ for a tablet, then you might as well get something that's not discontinued and will have an app/support ecosystem going forward.
Right now I am using a Logitech Revue (Google TV) to display my GeckoBoard on a normal LCD display. The Logitech boxes are very low power, are only $99, and will be upgraded to Android 3.0 in late September.
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6209/6080298965_6ede3e2cb0_z....
"very modest sales” of the Revue were exceeded by returns of the product, CEO Gerald P. Quindlen is leaving and the Revue itself is being slashed below cost to just $99 — a move that’s costing Logitech some $34m in one-time charges. "
I'd wager that it's toast.
I know Qt is very easy to run on the Chumby hardware, so making a widget w/WebKit that just loads a web page over and over would be a snap.
Conceivably with a USB remote you could even control the computer from the wall. I have three iBooks from my last job and a few old Windows laptops that I want to try out when I get a chance.
Ideally I'd like to create a dashboard with a bunch of data points that I'd be interested in so that I can scan it all while I'm eating breakfast or something. At the very least it would make a nice digital wall clock.
Seriously, other than the rare eBay auction, can you even buy these modules on the open market? Who salvages these things from old installations?
Here it is in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goQFce5cqLs
Also hitches onto a website to allow for real-time messaging. The day it hit Reddit's front page in 2009, oh god.
I decided the size of the addressable market is too small to be interesting but one of the revenue ideas I had was to essentially build out a big screen tv-based dashboard product customers could buy from me.
The idea is to ship the customer something that could just be hung on the wall, plugged in, connected to wifi and immediately display the dashboard - just using an off-the-shelf TV and a cheap mini-ITX board or similar plugged in behind the TV.
No offense, but I think there are better (dumber) devices for dashboards that don't have unnecessary features like a TouchPad.
Anyway, he says it just does that while it's charging. So, he could well use it for other things too.
Don't let yourself drown in bitterness over "I'd use it better!". I used to do that when I was a teenage car enthusiast, lamenting morons crashing their Ferrari's. But really, the world's not fair, and in the end the TouchPad doesn't give a damn how it's used.