Unfortunately it's impossible to get a TouchPad at that price any more. If you're going to pay $200+ for a tablet, then you might as well get something that's not discontinued and will have an app/support ecosystem going forward.
Right now I am using a Logitech Revue (Google TV) to display my GeckoBoard on a normal LCD display. The Logitech boxes are very low power, are only $99, and will be upgraded to Android 3.0 in late September.
So is there a market for a super-dumb LCD that can have information pushed to it over WiFi? Forget the touchscreen, forget the storage. Why aren't we hacking photo frames to do this?
Conceivably with a USB remote you could even control the computer from the wall. I have three iBooks from my last job and a few old Windows laptops that I want to try out when I get a chance.
Ideally I'd like to create a dashboard with a bunch of data points that I'd be interested in so that I can scan it all while I'm eating breakfast or something. At the very least it would make a nice digital wall clock.
A decent 10" digital photo frame can easily cost $100. For that price, you can buy a Logitech Revue -- Google TV running Android with Chrome and wifi. Hook it up with a HDMI->DVI adapter (<$1) and it'll drive a 1920x1080 display. Got a spare monitor?
"very modest sales” of the Revue were exceeded by returns of the product, CEO Gerald P. Quindlen is leaving and the Revue itself is being slashed below cost to just $99 — a move that’s costing Logitech some $34m in one-time charges. "
Chumby would be my best bet too. I have one running next to me right now, it's very nice. The only downside is the app universe needs to be in Flash, but that's fixable.
Latest Chumby OS version that's in the Chumby 8 supports an embedded WebKit view that can be invoked from Flash. Too bad it seems like the Chumby app development world is dead right now.
I was actually looking for a digital picture frame that could display a webpage for this very purpose before the fire-sale. I couldn't find one that could do it out of the box.
For a while I toyed around with a startup idea that was essentially what geckoboard is doing.
I decided the size of the addressable market is too small to be interesting but one of the revenue ideas I had was to essentially build out a big screen tv-based dashboard product customers could buy from me.
The idea is to ship the customer something that could just be hung on the wall, plugged in, connected to wifi and immediately display the dashboard - just using an off-the-shelf TV and a cheap mini-ITX board or similar plugged in behind the TV.
Are they cheaper? 'Cause I think that would be the 3rd metric of importance, right behind "Has a screen" and "Has WiFi".
Anyway, he says it just does that while it's charging. So, he could well use it for other things too.
Don't let yourself drown in bitterness over "I'd use it better!". I used to do that when I was a teenage car enthusiast, lamenting morons crashing their Ferrari's. But really, the world's not fair, and in the end the TouchPad doesn't give a damn how it's used.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2905724
Unfortunately it's impossible to get a TouchPad at that price any more. If you're going to pay $200+ for a tablet, then you might as well get something that's not discontinued and will have an app/support ecosystem going forward.
Right now I am using a Logitech Revue (Google TV) to display my GeckoBoard on a normal LCD display. The Logitech boxes are very low power, are only $99, and will be upgraded to Android 3.0 in late September.
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6209/6080298965_6ede3e2cb0_z....