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The thing that gets me about a lot of these products being built around the iPhone, iPod, etc... is what happens if the next generation changes the physical for

by 51Cards 14y ago

The thing that gets me about a lot of these products being built around the iPhone, iPod, etc... is what happens if the next generation changes the physical form factor? It may mean getting a new iPhone also means having to replace 10 other gadgets you have come to enjoy. Edit: looking closer this one does seem to have a module the phone sits in so it may be future upgradable however... you still require the upgrade, and it seems the module isn't much wider than the iPhone4... not much room to adapt if the phone gets bigger.

nknight 14y ago
At least on the prototypes they're showing, that whole panel appears to easily unscrew. I could see it possibly being practical to replace with a more accommodating piece for a few tens of dollars.
- ShirtlessRod 14y ago
  Seems like a more extensible/future-proof approach would be to have some sort of built-in storage that was accessible via USB. I'm not sure precisely what part of the iPhone is required to make this work, but it seems far easier to not tie it so directly (i.e., the physical enclosure). Plus then you have the benefit of not limiting the product to only those people who have an iPhone. :)
  - nknight 14y ago
    It seems like they're using the iPhone for pretty much all intelligence, which makes sense. Custom embedded systems are non-trivial to design, manufacture, and bootstrap software for (I've been involved in some capacity with several). You'd save significant effort and trivially enable many more features by relying on something as powerful and mature as an iPhone.
idanb 14y ago
We literally got buried by all of the outreach and attention due to layering the Disrupt / Kickstarter launch, so sorry about the crazy delay... The dock is removable, you can pop it out using a flat head screw driver pretty quickly. There's a cavity in the body and we're actually making a small change to the design of how the electronics are integrated into the dock itself instead of the underlying assembly so that if the 30 pin changes we can adapt to it. Another benefit is that through a generic expansion port we could also support other phones / devices. The ability to dock the phone into the body was a really awesome experience, which is why we did it even with the risk of making people concerned with the form factor dependency. However, the gTar has a USB port so you can hook it up to any device that supports USB hosting. This is possible with most iOS devices with the aid of a camera adapter kit. We might eventually be able to produce such a special cable allowing you to hook it up directly to an iOS device. The gTar tech was not originally intended to be for iPhone, that was a bit of an unintentional pivot we made when we met with a particular iOS app company we had a lot of respect for and wanted to impress them. Long story short, they weren't impressed but our next investor meeting went much better than those before it.

by 51Cards 14y ago

nknight 14y ago

At least on the prototypes they're showing, that whole panel appears to easily unscrew. I could see it possibly being practical to replace with a more accommodating piece for a few tens of dollars.

ShirtlessRod 14y ago
Seems like a more extensible/future-proof approach would be to have some sort of built-in storage that was accessible via USB. I'm not sure precisely what part of the iPhone is required to make this work, but it seems far easier to not tie it so directly (i.e., the physical enclosure). Plus then you have the benefit of not limiting the product to only those people who have an iPhone. :)
- nknight 14y ago
  It seems like they're using the iPhone for pretty much all intelligence, which makes sense. Custom embedded systems are non-trivial to design, manufacture, and bootstrap software for (I've been involved in some capacity with several). You'd save significant effort and trivially enable many more features by relying on something as powerful and mature as an iPhone.

idanb 14y ago

We literally got buried by all of the outreach and attention due to layering the Disrupt / Kickstarter launch, so sorry about the crazy delay... The dock is removable, you can pop it out using a flat head screw driver pretty quickly. There's a cavity in the body and we're actually making a small change to the design of how the electronics are integrated into the dock itself instead of the underlying assembly so that if the 30 pin changes we can adapt to it. Another benefit is that through a generic expansion port we could also support other phones / devices. The ability to dock the phone into the body was a really awesome experience, which is why we did it even with the risk of making people concerned with the form factor dependency. However, the gTar has a USB port so you can hook it up to any device that supports USB hosting. This is possible with most iOS devices with the aid of a camera adapter kit. We might eventually be able to produce such a special cable allowing you to hook it up directly to an iOS device. The gTar tech was not originally intended to be for iPhone, that was a bit of an unintentional pivot we made when we met with a particular iOS app company we had a lot of respect for and wanted to impress them. Long story short, they weren't impressed but our next investor meeting went much better than those before it.