No keyboard
I think they're really missing the point of the speccy with the exclusion of a keyboard. It's true that as kids we all played millions of games on the rubber-keyed wonder, but, a lot of us also *programmed* the bloody thing, both in Sinclair BASIC and Z80 machine code. It's actually the reason why a good chunk of us are employed in IT today, and the reason why we're here on this website reading the article. The inclusion of a keyboard would be an excellent opportunity to use it for programming, and, more specifically, would make an excellent computer to sit our children in front of to teach *them* programming. The problem with PCs and the like is that it's difficult to capture a child's imagination with respect to actual programming, since the things are so complicated. A kid in front of a speccy could pick it up in minutes. Show them how a FOR/NEXT loop works and then show them moving an asterisk across the screen. Show them INKEY$ and how to read the keyboard and move the asterisk around. Show them UDGs, PAPER colours, INK colours and they'd be totally hooked. Since it has an SD card slot, they wouldn't have to slum it with cassette players like we did as kids. I'm sure they'd be hooked.
This *could* have been a Pi beater (in terms of engaging the young in programming), but they aimed low and went for nothing more than a nostalgia games machine that will only have limited appeal to those that owned one as kids.
They missed it IMO.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
