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This is the portable Internet Appliance that I've been working on at Inviso over the last two years called "eCase. Here's a paper about it that I co-authored for the Society for Information Display Symposium last year.
It uses our microdisplay technology which shrinks an 800x600 SVGA color display and into a package smaller than a matchbox. This display is viewed through a lens that sits on top of the package. The lens is designed in such a way that to the viewer's eye the display appears 3 feet away and around the size of a 19" PC monitor, making viewing *very* ergonomically comfortable.
We integrated this display with an appliance based on a 206 MHz Intel StrongARM SA-1110, 32-bit RISC Processor with 32MB SDRAM and 16MB of Flash Memory. This is all techno babble I know, but basically it's roughly identical to a Compaq Ipaq since they're both built off of the same reference platform. Except that on our device our display is *so* much bigger!
Since we constructed the Window CE operating system on the device from the ground up, it was possible to include internet capabilities on eCase that were about as damn close to a regular PC as could be. Viewing web pages with no compromise was our goal.
In this we were pretty darn successful. The version of IE on the device was equivalent to IE 4.01. This meant that the thing supported javascript, and a rich feature set of HTML (whereas Pocket Internet Explorer on an IPAQ did not). This meant we could go to Yahoo or MSN and browse just like a PC, whereas the IPAQ got stuck loading up the first line of code...
We didn't stop there. We also implemented IIS web server and vbscript on the device, plus support for XML. This made the device
capable of running full-on web server applications, database queries (via ODBC) and serving up web pages internally on the fly. Yup - the eCase is not only the world's smallest web server, it's also wireless and portable too!
Now the bad news - don't go looking for them in stores, cause you won't find 'em anywhere. Basically in October the company ran out of money and we couldn't get any more funding. We ceased operations and are now busy shopping around to find buyers for our "Intellectual Property." You'll probably see eCase or something like it in a year or so, but it'll be probably be badged SONY.... But just think - you saw it here first! :)
Now take a look at the eShades page if you want to see some even cooler technology....
Or if it's of interest, you can download the eCase Product Data Sheet, which is in Adobe Acrobat .pdf format.
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