7 ms·

Why the Vivaldi tablet never came to market

52 points by Tsiolkovsky 12y ago

DiThi 12y ago
> Seigo also concluded that trying to deal with Asia while resident in Europe was a mistake. Just as it happened with the OpenPandora.
- TheCraiggers 12y ago
  As an OpenPandora backer back in the day, I can totally vouch for the problems the project had from their Asian parts manufactures. In fact, I think just about everything can be attributed to sourcing their parts in Asia. I think they later moved some aspects of production to Texas or something, but at that point it was too late. I can also totally understand the position they were in. My understanding is the vast majority of parts manufactures are over there, and surely all the cheap ones. The Pandora was already going to cost over $300 USD, and I remember the project was taking on some of the costs themselves when reality didn't match with their projections. If they had any hope of getting it out the door at a price that people would willingly pay, you have to take on some risks.
- Pxtl 12y ago
  There must be US/European companies that will manage this relationship for you.
  - bradfa 12y ago
    Yes, such as Dragon Innovation: http://www.dragoninnovation.com/services/manufacturing http://www.dragoninnovation.com/services/manufacturing But you can also find a few US or EU based contract manufacturers who have very good partners in Asia such that you start low volume runs and work out the issues close to home and then transition to Asia for the low cost labor once all your manufacturing is working well and has good yields. But this is also not free in cost or time and some companies cannot afford to bear it.
talles 12y ago
For who is wondering how it looked like: http://bit.ly/1tsn8aK http://bit.ly/1tsn8aK (photo not mine)
- j_s 12y ago
  aka http://www.netbooknews.com/wp-content/2012/04/vivaldispark-550x341.png http://www.netbooknews.com/wp-content/2012/04/vivaldispark-5...
  - toni 12y ago
    Just a couple of days ago I was DDGoing a phrase like "Debian cheap tablet" or such and found this page[1]. I still can't understand why there is no market for a Linux tablet. [1] http://www.gregwar.com/posts/debian-on-a-low-cost-tablet-50 http://www.gregwar.com/posts/debian-on-a-low-cost-tablet-50
    - 01Michael10 12y ago
      Why does Linux always have to be associated with "cheap"? There is no market for Linux devices because everyone wants them to be "cheap". I would like a high end tablet that runs Linux myself...
      - toni 12y ago
        My bad searching abilities :) Didn't really mean it must be cheap per se. I actually backed Ubuntu Edge. One thing I realized is that adding "cheap" to your search phrase will show up more hacker-type attempts to install Linux on Android devices.
      - keithpeter 12y ago
        Linux does not always have to be associated with cheap, I recollect that Dell's 'Sputnik' tie up with Canonical wasn't at the $350 end of their laptop range. I read the grandparent comment along the lines of 'I want to see how to put Linux on a tablet. People will be hacking this with the possibility of bricking the device. I'll search for cheaper devices'
anon4 12y ago
This kind of project might see more success if it was made to work on Android devices. I'm cautiously optimistic that once KDE works on Wayland and Wayland works with Android drivers (or there are good quality mainline video drivers for the various chipsets), we would be able to root most any Android tablet and install a KDE/Wayland stack on it. I think that enabling that kind of thing - running an alternative environment on already existing hardware is a better goal than making your own hardware from scratch. Better as in more realistic to gain a userbase, I mean.
- sp332 12y ago
  Why wait for Wayland instead of running KDE on X on Android?
  - ChuckMcM 12y ago
    I take it you have run KDE on X on Android on a small memory foot print ARM system? I tried something similar on the Pandaboard (OMAP4, 1GB, VRX) and it was unusable but if you've got a system or perhaps a configuration that makes this work it would be useful for development.
    - sp332 12y ago
      Nope, just wondering why Wayland would be any less painful.
      - yellowapple 12y ago
        Wayland cuts out a lot of the legacy cruft that X11 has accumulated over the decades, and is inherently much simpler; resource overhead is expected to be much lower on Wayland-based systems. It might not be less painful in terms of getting it to work, but it would be less painful in terms of getting it to work in a resource-constrained system like an ARM-powered smartphone.
        kefka 12y ago
rburhum 12y ago
To the risk of sounding completely insensitive, I honestly don't understand why they did not invest $5k in a good Kickstarter video and campaign. This is exactly the kind of project that has people automatically drop money on for two factors: 1) geek factor and 2) philosophical factor. It is a no-brainer.
- rasz_pl 12y ago
  Your takeaway from a failed hardware project is that authors should sucker a ton of people out of money using crowd funding in order to not be in debt when project inevitably fails? Brilliant! You want a thermal camera with that (muoptics)? or maybe a smart watch (ostro)? or a magic nano ultra capacitor AA batteries? Main problem was economies of scale, no experience with manufacturing, NIH syndrome, and no market. 1 NOBODY wants a tablet with 2 year old specs. 2 almost nobody wants a KDE/gnome/firefox tablet. There was nothing stopping them from simply ordering 1000 (pretty standard moq for crazy low prices in $30-50 range) already shipping tablets, and porting their code over.
  - zanny 12y ago
    > porting their code over. They have been stuck with x86 based hardware since the ARM GPU drivers are a collective wreck and they use X, so the shitty Android blobs aren't even close to being an option. I think it was just premature. We need Lima / Freedreno / that open Tegra project to mature into their own, so we can have first class Mesa GPU acceleration on ARM systems, before we can try bringing desktop Linux to said devices. It is the same mistake Canonical made with Mir, and I think it is a mistake with Wayland - the Android GPU stack is a lost cause, and trying to work around it and have the tumor of Qualcomms / ARMs shitty blobs is doomed from the start.
  - rburhum 12y ago
    nobody said sucker anybody from money. When undertaking a project of this kind, you will need capital. It is clear from this post, the they ran out of personal (?!?) money. Heck, to even "save" money, the manufacturing was taken to a UK company (?!?!?). Not manufacturing hardware of this kind in China is a really really bad idea for several reasons. > 1) NOBODY wants a tablet with 2 year old specs. You are mistaken. the low cost tablet market exists. I would rephrase that to most people do not want a slow / unresponsive tablet. those are two very different things. > 2 almost nobody wants a KDE/gnome/Firefox tablet. How can you even make that statement when you don't even know what that would be like? People want a tablet that responds well, to browse the web, send email and check their Facebook acct. For some segments of the world population the ecosystem of 3rd party apps is irrelevant since they never ever download an app.
616c 12y ago
I am about to give up on Android. I have an Android phone. Once the new Phoenux (GTA04) brings pure Linux back to a mobile phone, I will ditch that as well. I have an old Android tablet, and I just never got into it. And I love Linux variants and playing. It is just too much cruft on top of what I care about. So if Vivaldi will not come to be, and the alternatives are so so (I did see that project to make a RPi into a tablet with a custom shell; very cool), I am definitely going to pony up the money for a tablet laptop with a touch screen and just spend a little more and save myself the hassle. I have seen decent reviews of the Yoga 11s. I think I am going to splurge on that. Honestly, it is not much more epxensive than a high end of the line Android tablet, but with no one of the flexibility I waste my time on Linux for so. So yeah. If someone makes Vivaldi I would be super happy. But I have come to see the truly open tablet as the year of the Linux desktop, in terms of them being pipe dreams, and I would rather focus on things I can use instead of praying for hostile industry players to begrudgingly give me and then make me do a song and dance to get back to root for.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  Support http://neo900.org/ http://neo900.org/ if you want a traditionally Linux phone - it's another GTA04 project. Right now it's my best prospect for a Linux phone, piggybacking off the huge N900 community. I have fears that the software porting effort is lagging far behind the hardware effort, but I'm putting the odds of getting a usable jessie or Maemo phone a bit higher than the odds of Jolla retreating from the iOS/Android strategy of sandboxing the user for business purposes.
  - 616c 12y ago
    Yeah, thanks for clarifying the neo900 or Pheonux project or whatever they call themselves now are what I am waiting for. If I had money, I would pledge but I am tight on cash and 500-900USD promise of a phone is out of my league for the coming year.
donniezazen 12y ago
I think KDE has a long way to go before I should jump into mobile market. There are problems in both technological level and philosophical level. Technologically, developers need a great platform, sound APIs and good design guidelines along with specialized tool to make it happen. On a philosophical level, it would be a nightmare to use KDE on tablets. KDE is nowhere polished or simple for touch screen. Grossly put KDE is an orgy of settings. Open does not mean that you can put any crap on user's plate. And one ring to rule them all principle is that the most important factor is monetization. If developer's are not making money no development will happen.
- zanny 12y ago
  I don't think Plasma Active has ever been about "da apps". It also doesn't hurt that inherent to its design, you bank on the same demographic that Jolla and Ubuntu Touch do - Qt mobile apps. Any of those that ran on any of the above platforms, which would also run on iOS and Android, would also run on Plasma Active. And all the desktop OSes as well. Also, mobile is the perfect direction for a perceived "top heavy" desktop to move towards, because it requires you to simplify your UI to accommodate it. The thing in the KDE world to understand is that QML changes everything. The Plasma widgets we have now were built on top of Qt4 series technologies and were often language hodge podges of Python, Ruby, Perl, C++, etc. They weren't hardware accelerated, and the standard toolkit was lacking compared to the QtQuick Controls of today. And the entire QML thing is about fluidity. Whereas old Qt Widgets let you build wildly complex UIs that were pretty much static, QML is best suited to simple parts doing crazy transitions and fancy effects. Even if you convey the same complexity, the appearance difference can be enough to be intuitive for some where, say, kdenlive is not. So I don't think Plasma Active is a "mistake". It is a great place to see the next geenration of applications for KDE in general come from, since they have to be focused. It is slow, and it is not going to see any market adoption any time soon, but trying to aggressively take the mobile market I feel is a mistake right now - it needs mindshare that requires Qt5 adoption which requires the KDE5 series to get into its stride first.

52 points by Tsiolkovsky 12y ago

DiThi 12y ago

> Seigo also concluded that trying to deal with Asia while resident in Europe was a mistake. Just as it happened with the OpenPandora.

TheCraiggers 12y ago
As an OpenPandora backer back in the day, I can totally vouch for the problems the project had from their Asian parts manufactures. In fact, I think just about everything can be attributed to sourcing their parts in Asia. I think they later moved some aspects of production to Texas or something, but at that point it was too late. I can also totally understand the position they were in. My understanding is the vast majority of parts manufactures are over there, and surely all the cheap ones. The Pandora was already going to cost over $300 USD, and I remember the project was taking on some of the costs themselves when reality didn't match with their projections. If they had any hope of getting it out the door at a price that people would willingly pay, you have to take on some risks.
Pxtl 12y ago
There must be US/European companies that will manage this relationship for you.
- bradfa 12y ago
  Yes, such as Dragon Innovation: http://www.dragoninnovation.com/services/manufacturing http://www.dragoninnovation.com/services/manufacturing But you can also find a few US or EU based contract manufacturers who have very good partners in Asia such that you start low volume runs and work out the issues close to home and then transition to Asia for the low cost labor once all your manufacturing is working well and has good yields. But this is also not free in cost or time and some companies cannot afford to bear it.

talles 12y ago

For who is wondering how it looked like: http://bit.ly/1tsn8aK http://bit.ly/1tsn8aK (photo not mine)

j_s 12y ago
aka http://www.netbooknews.com/wp-content/2012/04/vivaldispark-550x341.png http://www.netbooknews.com/wp-content/2012/04/vivaldispark-5...
- toni 12y ago
  Just a couple of days ago I was DDGoing a phrase like "Debian cheap tablet" or such and found this page[1]. I still can't understand why there is no market for a Linux tablet. [1] http://www.gregwar.com/posts/debian-on-a-low-cost-tablet-50 http://www.gregwar.com/posts/debian-on-a-low-cost-tablet-50
  - 01Michael10 12y ago
    Why does Linux always have to be associated with "cheap"? There is no market for Linux devices because everyone wants them to be "cheap". I would like a high end tablet that runs Linux myself...
    - toni 12y ago
      My bad searching abilities :) Didn't really mean it must be cheap per se. I actually backed Ubuntu Edge. One thing I realized is that adding "cheap" to your search phrase will show up more hacker-type attempts to install Linux on Android devices.
    - keithpeter 12y ago
      Linux does not always have to be associated with cheap, I recollect that Dell's 'Sputnik' tie up with Canonical wasn't at the $350 end of their laptop range. I read the grandparent comment along the lines of 'I want to see how to put Linux on a tablet. People will be hacking this with the possibility of bricking the device. I'll search for cheaper devices'

anon4 12y ago

This kind of project might see more success if it was made to work on Android devices. I'm cautiously optimistic that once KDE works on Wayland and Wayland works with Android drivers (or there are good quality mainline video drivers for the various chipsets), we would be able to root most any Android tablet and install a KDE/Wayland stack on it. I think that enabling that kind of thing - running an alternative environment on already existing hardware is a better goal than making your own hardware from scratch. Better as in more realistic to gain a userbase, I mean.

sp332 12y ago
Why wait for Wayland instead of running KDE on X on Android?
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  I take it you have run KDE on X on Android on a small memory foot print ARM system? I tried something similar on the Pandaboard (OMAP4, 1GB, VRX) and it was unusable but if you've got a system or perhaps a configuration that makes this work it would be useful for development.
  - sp332 12y ago
    Nope, just wondering why Wayland would be any less painful.
    - yellowapple 12y ago
      Wayland cuts out a lot of the legacy cruft that X11 has accumulated over the decades, and is inherently much simpler; resource overhead is expected to be much lower on Wayland-based systems. It might not be less painful in terms of getting it to work, but it would be less painful in terms of getting it to work in a resource-constrained system like an ARM-powered smartphone.
      - kefka 12y ago

rburhum 12y ago

To the risk of sounding completely insensitive, I honestly don't understand why they did not invest $5k in a good Kickstarter video and campaign. This is exactly the kind of project that has people automatically drop money on for two factors: 1) geek factor and 2) philosophical factor. It is a no-brainer.

rasz_pl 12y ago
Your takeaway from a failed hardware project is that authors should sucker a ton of people out of money using crowd funding in order to not be in debt when project inevitably fails? Brilliant! You want a thermal camera with that (muoptics)? or maybe a smart watch (ostro)? or a magic nano ultra capacitor AA batteries? Main problem was economies of scale, no experience with manufacturing, NIH syndrome, and no market. 1 NOBODY wants a tablet with 2 year old specs. 2 almost nobody wants a KDE/gnome/firefox tablet. There was nothing stopping them from simply ordering 1000 (pretty standard moq for crazy low prices in $30-50 range) already shipping tablets, and porting their code over.
- zanny 12y ago
  > porting their code over. They have been stuck with x86 based hardware since the ARM GPU drivers are a collective wreck and they use X, so the shitty Android blobs aren't even close to being an option. I think it was just premature. We need Lima / Freedreno / that open Tegra project to mature into their own, so we can have first class Mesa GPU acceleration on ARM systems, before we can try bringing desktop Linux to said devices. It is the same mistake Canonical made with Mir, and I think it is a mistake with Wayland - the Android GPU stack is a lost cause, and trying to work around it and have the tumor of Qualcomms / ARMs shitty blobs is doomed from the start.
- rburhum 12y ago
  nobody said sucker anybody from money. When undertaking a project of this kind, you will need capital. It is clear from this post, the they ran out of personal (?!?) money. Heck, to even "save" money, the manufacturing was taken to a UK company (?!?!?). Not manufacturing hardware of this kind in China is a really really bad idea for several reasons. > 1) NOBODY wants a tablet with 2 year old specs. You are mistaken. the low cost tablet market exists. I would rephrase that to most people do not want a slow / unresponsive tablet. those are two very different things. > 2 almost nobody wants a KDE/gnome/Firefox tablet. How can you even make that statement when you don't even know what that would be like? People want a tablet that responds well, to browse the web, send email and check their Facebook acct. For some segments of the world population the ecosystem of 3rd party apps is irrelevant since they never ever download an app.

616c 12y ago

I am about to give up on Android. I have an Android phone. Once the new Phoenux (GTA04) brings pure Linux back to a mobile phone, I will ditch that as well. I have an old Android tablet, and I just never got into it. And I love Linux variants and playing. It is just too much cruft on top of what I care about. So if Vivaldi will not come to be, and the alternatives are so so (I did see that project to make a RPi into a tablet with a custom shell; very cool), I am definitely going to pony up the money for a tablet laptop with a touch screen and just spend a little more and save myself the hassle. I have seen decent reviews of the Yoga 11s. I think I am going to splurge on that. Honestly, it is not much more epxensive than a high end of the line Android tablet, but with no one of the flexibility I waste my time on Linux for so. So yeah. If someone makes Vivaldi I would be super happy. But I have come to see the truly open tablet as the year of the Linux desktop, in terms of them being pipe dreams, and I would rather focus on things I can use instead of praying for hostile industry players to begrudgingly give me and then make me do a song and dance to get back to root for.

pessimizer 12y ago
Support http://neo900.org/ http://neo900.org/ if you want a traditionally Linux phone - it's another GTA04 project. Right now it's my best prospect for a Linux phone, piggybacking off the huge N900 community. I have fears that the software porting effort is lagging far behind the hardware effort, but I'm putting the odds of getting a usable jessie or Maemo phone a bit higher than the odds of Jolla retreating from the iOS/Android strategy of sandboxing the user for business purposes.
- 616c 12y ago
  Yeah, thanks for clarifying the neo900 or Pheonux project or whatever they call themselves now are what I am waiting for. If I had money, I would pledge but I am tight on cash and 500-900USD promise of a phone is out of my league for the coming year.

donniezazen 12y ago

I think KDE has a long way to go before I should jump into mobile market. There are problems in both technological level and philosophical level. Technologically, developers need a great platform, sound APIs and good design guidelines along with specialized tool to make it happen. On a philosophical level, it would be a nightmare to use KDE on tablets. KDE is nowhere polished or simple for touch screen. Grossly put KDE is an orgy of settings. Open does not mean that you can put any crap on user's plate. And one ring to rule them all principle is that the most important factor is monetization. If developer's are not making money no development will happen.

zanny 12y ago
I don't think Plasma Active has ever been about "da apps". It also doesn't hurt that inherent to its design, you bank on the same demographic that Jolla and Ubuntu Touch do - Qt mobile apps. Any of those that ran on any of the above platforms, which would also run on iOS and Android, would also run on Plasma Active. And all the desktop OSes as well. Also, mobile is the perfect direction for a perceived "top heavy" desktop to move towards, because it requires you to simplify your UI to accommodate it. The thing in the KDE world to understand is that QML changes everything. The Plasma widgets we have now were built on top of Qt4 series technologies and were often language hodge podges of Python, Ruby, Perl, C++, etc. They weren't hardware accelerated, and the standard toolkit was lacking compared to the QtQuick Controls of today. And the entire QML thing is about fluidity. Whereas old Qt Widgets let you build wildly complex UIs that were pretty much static, QML is best suited to simple parts doing crazy transitions and fancy effects. Even if you convey the same complexity, the appearance difference can be enough to be intuitive for some where, say, kdenlive is not. So I don't think Plasma Active is a "mistake". It is a great place to see the next geenration of applications for KDE in general come from, since they have to be focused. It is slow, and it is not going to see any market adoption any time soon, but trying to aggressively take the mobile market I feel is a mistake right now - it needs mindshare that requires Qt5 adoption which requires the KDE5 series to get into its stride first.