New Clio NXT!

It looks like the Clio line is not dead after all, and the Clio NXT will be beta tested at Duke University! Although it runs Windows CE (probably not the Handheld PC variant), this is most definitely a H/PC form factor.



Not only that, Data Evolution's other WinCE product, the Cathena, is also going to be tested then!



Now if only I knew how much they are going to cost! It is a very tough market out there, hemmed in by subnotebooks/UMPCs and PDA/smartphones. I hope the manufacturers have learnt their lesson from the previous H/PCs and learnt to sell them cheap(ish)!

Check it out on Engadget and the Data Evolution website.


Edited by ZSX 2006-04-14 7:22 PM

Good news! But they better not set it at their original planned price of $999. That would be suicide (and very 1999). If it has a sub-$500 price, I think they might find a decent-sized market. (Better yet, a sub-$300 price--wishful thinking on my part, yes--would have me salivating...)

Edited by alphacrumb 2006-04-14 7:25 PM

Oh these guys have learned anything. You watch, that $999.99 price tag will accompany the release of these units.

oh, nice..

they're big for me but at least they're hpc's!!! probably CE 5... i really hope so hehe.

setting 999$ as the price is a suicide for sure... please don't..

The Clio price will be folded into tuition fees so yes, they'll be $1000 for the captive Duke students. This also means Clio might sell 1 or 2 to the public at large. They never learn....

I could imagine myself paying up to $600 for a Clio like HPC device if it had:

long battery life (8+ hours use with wifi)
instant on
600+ mhz Xscale processor
128mb+ ram
flash memory
active matrix screen
lots of card slots and full sized usb port

Release a device like this and I'll buy it in a heartbeat. Leave out features or up the price and it won't even get a glance from me. With the new UMPC devices on the horizon, prospective portable manufacturers are going to need to release very polished products at a competitive price point in order to turn heads. HPC manufacturers priced themselves out of the market the first time around and one would hope they would have learned from their mistakes by now. I can recall a long time ago a friend of mine showed off a Velo 1 and I nearly spit carbonated beverage through my nose when he told me the price. I went and bought the original Pilot 5000 later that same week, I believe.

Yeah, it's CE 5. (It's in the articles.) I think Rocketman's figures sound about right. (I found his last comment rather telling - sadly, the way CE was marketed in the late '90s, it only helped put US Robotics [the original manufacturer of the Pilot] on the map.)

I just see one manufacturer after another releasing devices with middling specs and then trying to charge a fortune for them to try and recoupe R&D costs in "vertical markets." If they are going to target a high end market, then make a high end device that the high end might actually buy. I looked at the specs on the NXT and it is going to ship with 64 MB of ram and 64 MB of flash. In this day and age, there is no reason not to load up. The cost to the manufacturer would be negligible and a device with nice specs might actually sell, even at their rediculous $1000 price point. There are some people for whom price is no concern, after all.

I think they'd sell boatloads of them at $500.

data evolution have licensing agreements with odyssey (on-schedule) and softmaker (textmaker/planmaker), both of whom produce outstanding applications for HPC.
I have a clio and the form factor is excellent if moving around a lot within the work environment is necessary.
If the licensed software and hardware come together it will be a great device. What other software would run on a CE 5.0 800x600 screen? I can see this as a corporate only device.

hopefully everything that runs on cenet 4.2 800x600. (and there's a LOT of such software, Rocketman can tell you.)




i dont see why buy a palmpilot if after buying it you realize you can't do anything with it except for a little PIM. then it is wasted money just like the 999$ hpc's

Edited by cmonex 2006-04-15 10:43 AM

Well, hindsight is always 20/20, but clearly a lot of consumers felt the same way as Rocketman did back then, cuz US Robotics Pilot/3Com PalmPilot/Palm device sales grew in the late 90s while H/PC sales fizzled. People tend to act first and think later - skilled marketers know this and tailor their messages accordingly.

One of the big arguments for why I use a HPC over a PDA today is the full-width VGA or better screens, that allow one to view documents in their original formatting, and the keyboard which provides a decent input method for working with longer documents. The keyboard on the Velo 1 was pretty aweful. It had oval shaped chicklet keys as I recall. I remember showing Ben (the Velo owner, and son of a Microsoft VP) how quickly I could enter characters using the graffiti system on the Pilot.

64mb for the NXT? Really? WM5? I'm no designer but those specs are retarded for 2006. Even more when the price is $1000. I personally would consider one for $300, maybe. Other than raw cpu and IE6 (?) what can it do that a 6651 can't?

Wow! Another bunch of losers without a clue. A very disappointing unit.