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I found one of these when I was going through some old boxes at my parents house, totally forgot I had it. I really begged them for it - then played with it onc
by Mizza 4y ago
I found one of these when I was going through some old boxes at my parents house, totally forgot I had it. I really begged them for it - then played with it once, put it in a box and never saw again.
It's an amazing artifact of late 90s design - colored translucent plastic, sort-of-ergonomic form factor, weirdly shaped buttons that can only be used with a stylus, an aerial. The screen is actually amazing for the time, light years ahead of a GameBoy.
The glaring problem, sadly, is that there's nothing you can actually _do_ with it. There were no games of any quality, and the mesh networking would only work over a short range and if somebody else had one, which meant that feature was useless in the suburbs.
I think it has to be remembered that at the time, before smartphones, PalmPilots were a very big deal. Somebody thought hey, what if we made a PalmPilot for teenagers. Maybe not a terrible idea on paper, but they didn't need them.
Still, it's an awesome _object_. A pure crystal of optimistic new-millenium funk, not the drab industrial design of slow, perpetual decline we have now.
- indymike 4y ago> which meant that feature was useless in the suburbs. I bought my kids a box of cybikos on eBay. My daughters gave them to their neighborhood friends so they could chat, and the FM transceiver had a range of 300-500 ft, so they had our whole suburban neighborhood chatting. There were a couple of good games. The real problem was batteries. They used prismatic batteries which were simply hard to get, and the batteries would die after about 8 months of use. If I bought at a local store, the battery would be $30 per cell, but if I bought a box online, I could get 144 for $50. I paid $50 for the box of cybikos!