Posts by garryo

NexDock 2: Electric Boogaloo. Crowdfunded laptop shell sequel touts less plastic, more pixels

Superbook did finally ship, at least to me. It was two years late, rather than three and when it finally turned up, unfortunately was rubbish - it basically worked, but flakily, and the quality of the laptop shell was very poor (especially the trackpad). It was a great idea, but poorly implemented. Other than the Gemini PDA, I haven't yet had a good experience with Kickstarter/Indiegogo - delays of more than two years seem to be par for the course, and the standard excuse that crowdsourcing means you have to expect this doesn't cut it any longer - it's just being used as a reason for borderline fraud. I'm in the middle of yet another ill-advised so-called crowdsourcing 'investment' with FlowMotion - a smartphone stabilizer/gimbal, also nearly two years late and made even more infuriating by the lack of communication, ridiculously overoptimistic hyperbolae and glossy marketing that ignores the central problem - the product isn't ready for mass shipment. Crowdsourcing is a superficially attractive proposition for early technology-adopters, but I'm not falling for it again.

HP denies rumours Elite x3 is for the axe, admits coveting neighbour's OS

DOH!!

It's a pity - the Elite x3 experience is actually really pretty good: the handset is well designed and powerful, and the Continuum/HP added value model works flawlessly, especially the docking station. The laptop shell is a beautiful piece of engineering. The obvious problem however is that nobody and their dog is buying Windows Mobile. If only they would have chosen Android, the whole ecosystem would make a lot of sense as a business solution. In the meantime, Samsung have stolen a march in this space with DeX (although they don't have anything like the beautiful HP laptop shell) and there are other interesting startups with offers in this area, such as Sentio.

Now, what am I going to do with my Elite x3 laptop shell?