Mobile
Coincidence? OLO Concept and Apple’s New Touchpad
The timing of this struck me as odd as Apple headed to its new MacBook announcements this week. As Rob pointed out the new trackpad has some interesting potential. I’m waiting to see some hands on reviews (or is that fingers on?) of how folks take to a trackpad without buttons on a glass screen. That said, in the days leading up to the announcement, OLO Computer releasesd a teaser of a concept (read that as no where in real sight yet) of a kind of Foleo/Redfly like clamshell for the iPhone. The idea behind the concept is that you slap the iPhone into the clamshell and use it to power the device as well as the trackpad.
As just about anyone who has covered this so far has pointed out there are a number of questions that would need answering before anyone could get really excited about this. Especially in light of the Foleo’s failure and the the fact that Celio has sliced the prices considerably on the Redfly.
davidm
10/15/2008 at 10:26 am
The OLO would make a lot of sense if it were simply a case with a big battery, screen and keyboard to slot your handset in, which would be powerful enough for most daily tasks. If we weren’t stuck with the iPhone’s proprietary connector, this could be used with any mobile device.
turn.self.off
10/15/2008 at 10:46 am
one can wonder, will the macbook fade into this at some point?
as for it making sense, about as much as the redfly while using usb rather then bluetooth (in that it will charge the phone while connected).
davidm
10/15/2008 at 11:17 am
I guess my eyes are being opened to these things.. redfly is pretty neat. Too bad it doesn’t support a touchscreen/tablet form factor and higher res screen, it’s sometimes very useful to sketch, but with the long battery life I can see how these would be very useful for typical note taking/document editing/web browsing tasks.