Urgh. . . .
Hmm, I've always hated that design of computer and games platform. PSP? Hell. N-GAGE? Hell. That. . thing? Hell.
The way I see it, I only really play games with controllers If The PS2 conn is too small, try and get hold of an Original (LARGE) XBOX controller. It's USB, so it can be directly patched in to the Z's socket. Also the analogue stick? I'd rather have a trackball any day, and Those kinds of sticks are far more annoying for general use (Browsing, scrolling, selecting) than your average D-Pad. I have in fact NEVER seen a laptop being used with it. It's irritating and cumbersome.
On the point of the pad and ball moving to the top corner? I'd find that irritating as hell, too. Screen is even worse. . . And the OQO design? Sucks. Stick with the clamshell case design.
On the laptop. . . I thought Dual-CPU would get their full memory content each? Or do they share the combined 512MB DDR bus?
The more I thought about the PDA sliding into the case of the laptop, the less I liked it. When they can communicate wirelessly at 54mbps anyway, it seems kinda a waste of time. Better to use the Laptop almost-separately, but do a wireless resource share (Via Samba and X11?) to access the files and hardware on the pocketpenguin.
Also my note about combining the two framebuffers was sheer guesswork. I take it it doesn't work like thet? XD Perhaps it,s better if we add an external graphics chipset, such as a budget Nvidia go chip? Since the laptop can power this, it would be fine. We'd lose another chunk of battery life, but we'd get a full 1280x1024 display functionality.
Rough estimate of what I'd consider a featurelist of the DeskPenguin. . . 2iMX31, wifi, Bluetooth, USB/VGA/DVI/Serial, keyboard, touchpad/trackball/Anaglogue-stick, Another biometric scanner, a HDD, 512mb ram, a budget 3d accelerator of your choice, a batt and an optical drive.
It's basically a low-power notebook which requires the PocketPenguin to log in. The whole thing could have the same Embedded kernel secure bootloader system as the pocketpenguin, andd because it shares the hardware (Mostly) of the pocketpenguin, with SD slots etc, it should run the same applications natively, although the OS will have to be different to handle the external framebuffer, and the PP linking stuff. You could even forget the second bioscanner, since there'll be one readily available on the Penguin you're using to log in. Essentially, the penguin connects to a wifi card in it, and logs in over 802.11g SSH or similar. The rest of the OS is then brought up, the second (User data) partition on the hard disk is decrypted and accessed, (The first is just a basic system with wifi tools to accept incoming PP0 connections. This could also be done from flash if the flash was larger.) If say, it had 2 wifi chips, it could then log into another local wifi network which it could use to access other computer's resources. Of course, the DP0 has no 3G, no camera, no acellerometer etc. . . So for other functions, as well as to log in, the PP is required. But of course, since we're looking at the PP0 being X-based, the applications could literally be run as they are on the PP0, running in windows on the larger screen.
C'mon. You know it's genius. And because of the lack of hardware such as 3G, Cameras, touch panels, second screens, etc, I can't see this costing more than the standard PP. It's board density is lower too, thanks to the larger available space, bringing down the cost of production.
Maybe I'm going insane, but I'm not too sure about some of the last few ideas. . Keep 'em coming though. XD I'm hardly running this, so it's up to DB really.
And DB? You were right, we DO need a separate baseband processor. I'm following up some reccomendations FS made, and I'll get back to you.
