A quick update: I haven’t posted anything recently, as I’ve been preparing for a whirlwind tour of our foreign offices. I am in Tokyo today, and will see Beijing, Bangalore and Tel Aviv over the next couple of weeks. Regular posting will resume in early August!
Fun fact of the day: they have noodle joints here where you place your order from a vending machine. The process of choosing a random meal based on Japanese characters and a number is a bit like “breakfast roulette”, though most of us lucked out and got something tasty.
You can pour water on the keyboard…You can dip the base into a bathtub. You can carry it the rain. It’s more robust than your normal laptop. It doesn’t even have holes in the side of it. If you look at it: dirt, sand, I mean, there’s no place for it to go into the machine.
I got a chance to play with one of these the other day. The hardware is indeed very nice, with a distinctive design and a very solid feel. Unfortunately the software is horribly unintuitive. Maybe it’s still in development, maybe I didn’t spend enough time with it, or maybe I’m just too used to regular interface paradigms. My guess is that it’s a consequence of trying to reinvent the wheel, in the process disregarding decades of accumulated user experience knowledge.
