If you think you could stand having a little less hard drive for a portable computer about twice the size of your credit card, a pair of former Apple laptop designers, Jory Bell and Jonathan Betts-LaCroix, have just what you’re looking for: the OQO.
The device premiered at last January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. "OQO undertook a ground-up redesign of the PC architecture resulting in radical miniaturization, extended battery life and full performance in a beautiful and useable package that is finally small enough to be called personal," Bell said at that debut. "This device represents a new PC category that could transform personal computing the same way the cell phone has revolutionized telecommunications."
Touted as the world’s smallest Windows XP computer, the almost 5x3.5-inch device is less than an inch thick and comes with a slideaway thumb keyboard comparable to the BlackBerry keyboard but with arrow and modifier keys and a separate number pad – although an early model showed the number pad upside down, according to a published report.
The mouse replacement might seem more compatible for Tom Thumb than your thumb: a pea-size, immobile circle between letter and number keys that you push in the direction you want a cursor to move, just like the red button on IBM laptops, but for a click you punch a button on the left edge of the keyboard. That might make it a two-hand mouse operation but, as the report said, your non-mouse hand on a desktop or laptop does nothing when you mouse, anyway.
The bad news: Memory munchers like Photoshop aren’t too workable on the OQO because of its 256MB non-expandable memory and mere 20GB hard drive.
But you can also have a microphone, headphone jack, FireWire connector to attach another hard drive or a camcorder, and a USB port, not to mention a Wi-Fi antenna and the Bluetooth transmitter to dial Bluetooth cell phones and swap files with lap and palmtops. On the other hand, be prepared to spend a lot of charging time: the battery life is said to be a mere two and a half hours a charge.
And OQO comes with a dock whose cable can handle a full-size monitor, a second USB and FireWire, and an Ethernet connector for high speed networking, the report said, presumably on the principle that you can leave your printer, scanner, keyboard, mouse, monitor, and network cable attached permanently and make your OQO a low-compromise personal computer.
And to think that you can have all that for $1,900, which is pretty close to laptop prices, though if you want XP Professional you can plan on scraping up an extra $100.
Bell hopes you want it especially for the gigaconvenience of it. "Users increasingly need their technology to be where they are,” he said at the CES debut. “Other handheld computers have attempted to address this, but generally are too limited to be stand-alone devices," said Bell. "We're pushing the limits of personal computing by offering a highly functional and versatile handheld wireless computer that easily becomes a desktop PC. With Windows XP, the OQO computer delivers full desktop applications in a handheld form factor."
Well, almost. They haven’t figured out a way to put a CD-ROM or DVD drive into the OQO. Yet.
