Hmm
So... it's a monochrome battery-powered unreliable user-generated encyclopedia for $99? Phew, just what the market's been crying out for!
OpenMoko's Project B: WikiReader, a hardware implementation of Wikipedia offering mobile users access to the font of all knowledge, goes on sale today. Openmoko promised the new hardware when the company admitted it couldn't afford to develop a new handset, the GTA03. We had no idea what the mysterious "Project B" would be, …
So there was this meeting, right, and the guy from marketing, you know, the one with all the sell options on Openmoko stock, did this presentation. Well, you wouldn't believe what he persuaded the board to do....
Beer, because the people who green-lit the WikiReader sure must have imbibed a few.
It only took a few months for someone to develop my idea for making The Guide a reality (not trying to claim any rights to the original masterpiece)
Just a shame that many (many) phones these days have access to the full version of wikipedia as well as other sources of information (both more dubious and more reliable)
Offline Wikipedia in a handheld. Well it's an interesting idea at least. I doubt it will be a big hit, but for those who do buy it, the main appeal must be the gee-wiz factor. I suspect it had never occurred most people that such a thing was possible. Still, if I was going to be spending a long time where internet was truly unavailable (though it's increasing hard to imagine where that might be) it might well be nice to have this.
I had this setup about 5 years ago on a Sharp Zaurus PDA with a 2GB microdrive, squashfs filesystem, fbreader (I think) and a dump of wikipedia. True it was limited to the first 1000 words of each article and no pictures, but it did the job. At least the Zaurus had a keyboard.
It's a shame that after all that time and with all the progress in the metadata from openzaurus through openembedded to openmoko and angstrom, the openmoko/openembedded/openzaurus people are still developing for developers and end up with the same old end user functionality.