GeCube: first Asus Eee PC competitor to lose its head
At a passing glance, the GeCube Genie looks like yet another low-cost notebook entry over at Gizmodo. It runs on Linux, offers a 7-inch display and crams in a keyboard as well. The device doesn’t look like a Cube or a Genie, but don’t get hung up on the name because you might miss the the Genie’s magic: the display is removable!Actually, the magic is more of an optical illusion; it looks like you’re removing the display, but you’re really removing all but the keyboard as the PC innards are behind the display. You still have a working device without the keyboard and base, but of course, without touch capabilities you’ll be “hard pressed” to be productive. Pop some touch goodness on this idea and you’ve got a dockable UMPC with a keyboard… best of both worlds I say. Thanks for the tip, Aaron!
I don’t get this thing.
The lack of a touchscreen makes it seem like nothing more than a gimmick.
Reminds me a lot of the HP TC1100 and TC1000 series of Tablets. If HP still used the TC1100’s form factor, and put a faster machine in there, I’d buy one TODAY!
I agree with Scott. I love the TC1100!
also know in the uk as the elonex one…
and probably other names in other parts of the world…
would have been cooler to leave the cpu and such in the keyboard, disconnect the lcd panel, connect to bigger moniter, and there’s your desktop pc.. thats if you don’t have a touch screen.
it got a “mouse” on the back of the device. more correctly a oversized “nipple” and a button above and below.
It’s more a competitor to the OLPC. As TSO mentioned, it’s the Elonex ONE. Interesting but I’m sure it runs very very slow.
Yeah, touchscreen that baby and *that* is what UMPC should have been, dammit!
I’m wondering if UMPCs would have sold better if some had been dockable slates like the above. It might have been an easier sell to the Mossberg types to have a detachable keyboard instead of making the keyboard an accessory.
What is the added cost of making keyboards detachable?
— Steve
motion computing have a keyboard like that for their LE1700:
http://www.motioncomputing.com/products/tablet_pc_le17.asp
I’m liking this idea. It would need a touch screen of course but what would further improve it is if you could take the screen out and flip it round to fold it back on top of the keyboard. I know thats proberbly not the idea they are going for as it looks like the keyboard is a bit thick for someone to want to carry the device around with the keyboard attached but this way you would be able to keep the two peices together while having the device in slate mode. The developers just need to slim down that keyboard by the looks of things.