This has popped up. “The Edge.”
It certainly doesn’t look like the iPhone does it! TGDaily didn’t have any specs but I’ve managed to track something down for you.
If its this device (it certainly looks like it and I’m told that it probably is) then Its simply a screen and keyboard running browser software and it connects to the Internet via Bluetooth through your mobile phone. It pulls pages through a proxy server to reduce the bandwidth required and improve the formatting for the 640×240 transflective screen. As a concept, this is pretty good. Mobile access to the Internet is possible today on your mobile phone and Yahoo and Google are doing good things to help the very small screen Internet experience, but you can’t beat a decent sized display and QWERTY keyboard to access full-sized websites.
The PocketSurfer model I’m looking at costs $200 which, when you consider that a Bluetooth folding keyboard is $100, isn’t bad. It weighs under 100g and is only 15mm thick.
I doubt if it can handle Web2.0 style client-side processing very well and admittedly it could do with a styling job. If it really is monochrome as in the image above then its going to feel somewhat retro too but I tip my hat to this thin-client effort. How about a super-thin 800×480 version with firefox on Linux, OLPC style dual-mode screen and 10 hours battery life. Brand it with Google or Yahoo and give it away for free with every [insert non-Cingular carrier name here] mobile phone purchase. It could be a way to keep people from jumping onto Jobs’ virtual network.
More of my thin-client thoughts here.
Steve
Via Engadget.
