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Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

I'd certainly choose this over, say, a Kindle. If they can actually deliver, and at the price they've bandied about, I'd love to have one.

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One big bonus for the kindle is the battery life (2 weeks? vs a few hours). Obviously, the crunchpad has lots of other things going for it. I guess my point is that they're really meant for two different purposes.

OK, valid point. I have a Game Boy and a Nintendo DS for composing chiptunes. I only have to charge the Game Boy batteries every two weeks or so. The DS has to be charged every couple of days. I pretty much only use the Game Boy. And, it has almost nothing else going for it...it's bigger, crappier screen, noisier audio, etc. (The DS is emulating a Game Boy, though, and it has quirks, so that's another negative for the DS.)

One does expect "books" to just work.

What do you use to compose the chiptunes? I was never able to find a copy of LSD for sale.

> Obviously, the crunchpad has lots of other things going for it.

Maybe. I'll believe it when I see it: I don't expect this thing to make it to market.

At the expected price point, or at all? Could you articulate why?

Sure. It certainly will not be a quality product at that price point. And if it costs much more, it will not be competitive. I am anticipating a debacle in which they realize that they can't turn a profit by selling the device for any less than $600, making it a flop: Stores don't order products they know they can't move.

Best-case scenario is a Zune-like reception.

I'm not sure where they plan on having it manufactured but if they're first time overseas manufacturing virgins, I'm guessing "quailty fade"[1] will hit them like a freight train. If they do go on sale, buy one from the first run.

[1] Quality fade is the odd phenomenon where your first batch of manufactured goods from the asain factory is fantastic. You pop champagne, sell the first couple thousand at a tidy profit and the world's your oyster. Over the next few successive shipments, the quality of the products deteriorates until they barely remain assembled during shipping. The dirty trick was that the factory took a huge loss making that first run out of quality materials but then slowly substituted inferior parts without informing you until it became profitable for them.

$600 sounds plausible to me -- after all, the $100 laptop cost more like $200 when it was done. If a netbook with aluminium case, VIA Nano processor and 12" touchscreen was profitable to manufacture at $300, one of the Asian companies would already be selling them, I suppose.

If the thing is meant to live on your coffee table and couch, then a couple of hours is good enough. Just design an attractive charging station/stand so it can charge while it goes into "picture frame mode."

Another stand so that it can be used as some kind of secondary display would be cool. (Maybe not a real display, but one driven by something like VNC?)

If it runs Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows, just use synergy. It lets you share keyboard and mouse between several systems. It's awesome. The kind of OSS software I'd love to pay for.

It'd be great if it (or v2) has one of those Pixel Qi or OLPC XO screens. Better compromise between E-Ink's (sunlight) readability & low power consumption, and LCDs' refresh rate & color production.

Amen.

TC people, if you read this, get a hybrid screen like the Pixel Qi and I would gladly pay $500 for a Crunchpad.

Latest design is looking sweet. Ender would be proud!

They're definitely two different beasts.

Kindle if you plan on reading a lot. Doing real reading on E-Ink is much, much, much nicer than reading from an LCD.

CrunchPad if you want to browse the internet, and pretty much do anything else (within it's capabilities that is).

Am planning on getting a DX for reading books and research papers, however... the CrunchPad would be a great item for the coffee table, or... bathroom :)

what is the speculative price?

$300 last I heard. It creeped up from the original $200. But $300 is still well within the realm of "awesome".

$300 is a completely awesome price. The closest alternative (Wifi touchscreen PC) is Asus EEE Top PC at $500: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883220...

And CrunchPad sounds a lot more usable than carrying a bulky touchscreen.

Always Innovating has a detachable-touchscreen netbook for $400

http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/

And that piece has just an 8,9" screen and an ARM processor.

Replying to ieatpaste because of nesting limits:

The Always Innovating Touch Book looks pretty good but it's on Pre-Order. Asus is currently available in the market.

It's not a "nesting limit", it's a cooling-off period before the reply link is shown, which increases with nesting. It's supposed to discourage heated back-and-forth replies, which historically have low value. Replying a level up defeats the purpose.

PG, if you're reading: Instead of delaying the display of the reply link, it might be better to instead display the link, but during the cooling-off period make it go to a page explaining why the user can't post right away. (And maybe also make the link a different color?) Otherwise, it simply looks like a bug or artificial system limit.

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