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WikiReader: OpenMoko's "Project B"
Dear Community! Today, with the greatest of pleasure, I am ready to share with you the birth of our third product -- WikiReader. Three simple buttons put three million Wikipedia articles in the palm of your hand. Accessible immediately, anytime, anywhere without requiring an Internet connection. No strings attached. With WikiReader you'll be prepared for those unexpected moments when curiosity strikes. And once you have it, you'll realize how often you ask yourself questions during the day. WikiReader takes our original ideas of openness and accessibility to an even greater realm. WikiReader is so amazingly simple. There really is no interface. You turn it on and instantly become immersed in the rich world of reading specific topics or the serendipitous pleasure of discovering something by chance. It's perfect for all ages. From the "Aha!" moment when we held our first prototypes, to the last few months as we worked around the clock to polish every last detail, this product was a joy to make and even more fun to experience. We are head-over-heels in love with WikiReader. Never have I found so much fun in the little moments of curiosity life offers us. Try one and I'm sure you'll agree that we've delivered the essence of reading Wikipedia in an addictively simple form factor. Sales start today at http://thewikireader.com. Enjoy. Tell your friends. And let us know what you think! Sincerely Sean Moss-Pultz (Log in to post comments)
WikiReader: OpenMoko's "Project B" Posted Oct 13, 2009 16:32 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
For those who like me are wondering about the hardware and code, it
seems some information and code is available here:
WikiReader: OpenMoko's "Project B" Posted Oct 13, 2009 18:56 UTC (Tue) by cjb (guest, #40354) [Link]
That's interesting; it's obviously not running Linux.
WikiReader: OpenMoko's "Project B" Posted Oct 14, 2009 1:54 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
My speculation was wrong, apparently that isn't the code and there will be more info available soon.
http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2009-Octobe...
WikiReader: OpenMoko's "Project B" Posted Oct 17, 2009 14:39 UTC (Sat) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
The topic in the IRC channel now points to github:
WikiReader: OpenMoko's "Project B" Posted Oct 13, 2009 17:40 UTC (Tue) by kerick (subscriber, #53036) [Link]
Hitchhikers guide!
Hitchhikers guide to Wikipedia Posted Oct 13, 2009 17:48 UTC (Tue) by phd (subscriber, #952) [Link]
With a big friendly letters "Don't (kernel) panic"!
Hitchhikers guide to Wikipedia Posted Oct 13, 2009 19:59 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
You mean, with big friendly letters WP:DONTPANIC...
WikiReader: OpenMoko's "Project B" Posted Oct 13, 2009 18:30 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
For $40 this might be the sort of thing that people would buy for each other as Christmas gifts. But $100 for a dedicated device?? I don't know of many people that would go for that. Just spend another $20 on a Nintendo DS and use DSWiki. Or another $60 will get you an iPod Touch.
Ah well. I wish them luck! It's a shame they appear to have missed this year's shopping season.
WikiReader: OpenMoko's "Project B" Posted Oct 13, 2009 20:03 UTC (Tue) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]
The difference between $40 and $100 is peanuts for people who can afford to buy extra gadgets in first place. People pay more for a day at disney world. I pay more when I buy full tank of gas for my car. Many have larger monthly cellphone bills. Or you could buy a single console game with same price. A dinner for two? A new graphing calculator? A new jacket? new shoes?
Claiming that a $60 price difference is going to be a deal-breaker for gadget buyers speaks of lack of marketing experience ;) The real challenge openmoko has is convincing people that this gadget is useful enough to buy in the first place. Once they have a use for it, it will look cheap at $99 next to a $350 kindle in a electronics store.
WikiReader: OpenMoko's "Project B" Posted Oct 13, 2009 21:55 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
My point was only that the price puts it into the same territory as a number of prettier, more general purpose devices. It doesn't matter what a tank of gas or any of that other junk costs since that isn't the WikiReader's competition.
Really, unless you can comfortably read books on this little device, why would anyone compare it to a Kindle?
Nice little jab about marketing experience, guess I was told.
Price point Posted Oct 14, 2009 20:14 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] You are completely right, the price point may determine whether it is successful in the market or not, provided that every other condition is met. Many interesting gadgets had everything to make them useful, entertaining and engaging; but at a high price point they failed to reach mass volume and therefore were sold only to a rich minority. For instance: the Apple Lisa or the Psion 7. I am sure you have other favorite examples.There are certainly aberrations, but that's the general idea and it seems reasonable. I know I wouldn't pay 60 for a wikipedia reader, but I might pay 25.
WikiReader: OpenMoko's "Project B" Posted Oct 14, 2009 13:17 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
Contrary to your beliefs (and apparently those with 'marketing experience', though since that group of people tend to have the collective IQ of a wet biscuit I think their experience is probably rather less accurate than they think), there are actually people who aren't upper-middle-class with money to burn, and who are nevertheless interested in technology.
Sorry, but your comment, and the prejudice displayed therein, *really* got to me.
WikiReader: OpenMoko's "Project B" Posted Oct 14, 2009 14:08 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] Come on. This is a new gadget. It doesn't take the collective IQ of a wet biscuit to realise that the price of a new gadget doesn't actually depend solely on what it costs to make and distribute. Many new gadgets are surprisingly cheap to make in large quantities but still carry hefty price tags, not just for the gadget itself but for the lifestyle aura that comes with it. Therefore, what you do when you are selling new gadgets is to put them out at an artificially high price first, to skim off all the people who must have everything that's new, at once, and are happy to part with $$$ for it. Then later on (when all the must-have-it-because-it's-new guys have it already) you drop the price somewhat so the folks who find the thing mildly interesting but are not ready to pay an arm and a leg convince themselves it would be nice to have after all. And so on. Finally after a while the thing ends up as a near-freebie at grocery store checkout points.
WikiReader: OpenMoko's "Project B" Posted Oct 15, 2009 13:51 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
I agree with all you just said, but it it *very different* to the original assertion which I found, and after waiting a day and re-reading, still find offensively prejudicial.
WikiReader: OpenMoko's "Project B" Posted Oct 15, 2009 18:01 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] One way to view the WikiReader is as a luxury item -- a gadget that nobody really needs desperately, much like smartphones or fancy shoes. In this way it does compete for the $60 or $99 that gadget-craving people would otherwise spend on a high-class dinner or a shopping spree at the CD store. But this would still be the case if it was $199 instead of $99; with gadgets like this you must pick the initial price point carefully since you don't want to make it too expensive (so even the gadget cravers will consider it outrageous) nor too cheap (so you hurt your revenue because people who would happily have paid more at the start will now pay less). The comparison to things like the Nintendo DS or the Kindle that other people in this thread have suggested is sort-of beside the point since these are either way more expensive and complicated devices, or else don't come with Wikipedia, anyway. Of course any nerd will be able to put Wikipedia on their Nintendo DS, but there is a large number of non-nerds who wold never bother to do so but would still like a WikiReader to use or show off. (Personally I wouldn't mind a WikiReader but I don't see myself getting a Nintendo DS anytime soon, even though it will also play games -- I'm probably stupid that way.) The OpenMoko people seem to see a market for a no-frills device that does one thing (display Wikipedia articles) reasonably well, and comes with an update plan. In that way it competes with large printed encyclopedias, which are vastly more expensive and bulky and are absolute bears to update (even if they usually contain pretty pictures as well as text). The other way in which you can view the WikiReader is as something that every kid should have in their school bag. At $99 this isn't really a viable proposition but chances are that prices will come down in time. It took some time for electronic pocket calculators (a luxury item if ever there was one when they first came out) to become standard household items, and it may well be that the WikiReader is the first step along a similar path. It's surely not the be-all and end-all of portable encyclopedia devices (let alone e-book readers) but IMHO it is something that is well worth trying. Whether its initial retail price is $39 or $99 or even $149 is, in comparison, fairly insignificant. How much was the first Sony Walkman again?
Wait, what? Posted Oct 13, 2009 18:51 UTC (Tue) by aorth (subscriber, #55260) [Link]
The website says "No Internet connection needed." So it has a dump of
Wikipedia or it uses Wi-Fi/WiMax (?) like the Kindle (if I recall correctly)?
Wait, what? Posted Oct 13, 2009 18:56 UTC (Tue) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]
Uses a microsd card -- you can update it that way.
Wait, what? Posted Oct 13, 2009 20:18 UTC (Tue) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
I wonder how large the SD card is? I once transferred the articles from August 2008 Wikipedia archive (HTTP format) onto a 16GB SD card using SquashFS; the actual filesystem image was about 12GB. You could access it with a normal web browser, but of course none of the special pages (e.g. search) were functional. I had to optimize the mksquashfs tool to allow it to handle that many files without running out of memory; support for insanely large compressed filesystems wasn't among the developers' priorities at the time.
Luckily I had over 200GB of free space at the time, as the format of the official archives precluded extraction of individual files on demand. Once I got it into SquashFS form, however, updates were trivially accomplished via FUSE-based union overlays.
Wait, what? Posted Oct 13, 2009 21:26 UTC (Tue) by popey (subscriber, #53979) [Link]
It's text only, no images which I suspect will bring the dump size down
considerably. Only one language per dump may also shrink it somewhat.
Wait, what? Posted Oct 13, 2009 21:45 UTC (Tue) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
Mine was also imageless and English-only. I imaging this device just stores the raw text, with perhaps some short formatting codes, which would save space over full HTML pages. (Not all that much, however, given that both versions are compressed.)
Wikipedia is *huge*; just the raw English articles in pure HTML really do take up some 200GB in uncompressed form. I actually had to create a loopback filesystem image to hold it, as my normal root filesystem, created with the default settings, didn't even have enough inodes for that many files.
Wait, what? Posted Oct 13, 2009 22:36 UTC (Tue) by cjb (guest, #40354) [Link]
> Wikipedia is *huge*; just the raw English articles in pure HTML really do take up some 200GB in uncompressed form. I actually had to create a loopback filesystem image to hold it, as my normal root filesystem, created with the default settings, didn't even have enough inodes for that many files.
The technique they're using, which is also the technique we used for our offline wikipedia snapshot at OLPC, is to have a single compressed archive containing all of the content, an index from article title into block number, and a tool for uncompressing (only) a specified block number from the archive quickly.
Wait, what? Posted Oct 14, 2009 21:11 UTC (Wed) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
Right, I've seen it done that way. However, I wanted to be able to access the articles as separate files without first pre-processing the archive to create a block index and writing a custom FUSE adapter to extract the files on demand. SquashFS is similar to an indexed archive, except that (a) it's more structured; (b) it's a more general solution, and (c) you don't need special software to read the filesystem image, as SquashFS is available by default in recent Linux kernels (with backports available for older ones).
wikipedia size Posted Oct 14, 2009 0:55 UTC (Wed) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]
I used to have an offline copy of Wikipedia on my 8GB iPod Touch. No images,
English-only, and it took about 2-3 GB.
Wait, what? Posted Oct 14, 2009 3:55 UTC (Wed) by AJWM (guest, #15888) [Link]
The website mentions a 4+ GB file if you want to download updates. (Download to your own MicroSD card and then swap them, there's no d/l capability in the WikiReader itself.)
Wait, what? Posted Oct 15, 2009 1:22 UTC (Thu) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
It looks like they used a 4GB microSD card, but only included a subset of the articles (about 3 million). Given that my stripped-down version had over twice that many (6,044,424 inodes, most of them articles), and that the full HTML almost certainly takes up more space than their custom-preprocessed pages, the difference in size is understandable. On the other hand, unless their selection criteria is way off, the other couple million articles probably won't be missed; at least half of them are probably stubs, advertisements, or niche fan-pages.
Wait, what? Posted Oct 13, 2009 18:57 UTC (Tue) by cjb (guest, #40354) [Link]
Yes, it has a dump of wikipedia on the SD card. The Kindle used a cell modem, not wifi, and this thing doesn't have either.
How Random... Posted Oct 13, 2009 21:42 UTC (Tue) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]
Only three buttons, and one is dedicated to "Random". What does that say? Maybe that they feel that 'fun' is an important part of how the device will be used.
WikiReader: OpenMoko's "Project B" Posted Oct 14, 2009 1:24 UTC (Wed) by DDevine (guest, #60717) [Link]
It seems quite hackable.
The processor sheet tells me that it is a fairly simple SOC. I would say the 'C' stands for Controller rather than Chip in this case. The source code is open (I am yet to read though it though) and we're yet to get more info on the hardware layout. We'll see in a few days. Could be a very fun toy.
WikiReader: OpenMoko's "Project B" Posted Oct 14, 2009 11:09 UTC (Wed) by spaetz (subscriber, #32870) [Link]
Pros:
- 12 month operation with a set of standard AA batteries (claimed) - Sun-readable display - No WiFI connection needed
Cons:
Unknown:
WikiReader: OpenMoko's "Project B" Posted Oct 14, 2009 13:02 UTC (Wed) by Sho (guest, #8956) [Link]
> - 12 month operation with a set of standard AA batteries (claimed)
"@evangineer In all honesty, I use mine for hours at a time.. I had to replace my first set of batteries after more than a month :("
> - No easily possible to load other content?
They plan to offer tools to digest and import other MediaWiki wikis. Source:
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