Poll: How much would you be willing to pay for a Neo900 (complete device) with TI DM3730 1GHz/512M-RAM/1GB
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How much would you be willing to pay for a Neo900 (complete device) with TI DM3730 1GHz/512M-RAM/1GB

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#1591
Originally Posted by wumpwoast View Post
Whether on my iPad, N900, or iPhone, battery life with VPN is just terrible.
HW crypto isnt going to change battery life much at all. I have multiday standby life on n900 with openvpn running. The big consumer is probably the radios, it's important to configure openvpn on both server and client to not do excessive keep-alives. Remember, on 3G, one single packet every 5s is in worst case same as a voice call, or even worse. Back it off to 20s and worst case becomes roughly 16h standby, so 60s is probably minimum.
 

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#1592
Originally Posted by Estel View Post
Whoa, that was like a quoting BS from some HDMI consortium sales manager. First of all, HDM signal, even while digital, is *much* more prone to interference, due to strict timing requiments and high bandwidth transferred + dropping signal entirelly, in case of errors. It results in much shorter acceptable cable length (without active signal boosters), and/or ugly fat cables.
If you say so. All I can say is that VGA is much more prone to interference due to the signal being analogue. Quality drops noticeably over long cables and over connectors, and I've never had any quality issues with DVI/HDMI. Problems I've had with VGA include worlds of pain from blurryness to brightness, stupid timing issues trying to get my TV's native resolution out of my PC, and everything in between. Arguing VGA is superior to HDMI is like arguing we should all abandon SATA and go back to PATA.

Fact is, more devices are going to come with only HDMI ports from now on. Having VGA on your Neo900 is all fine and well, but it's useless if your monitor/TV doesn't have a VGA port.

Originally Posted by Estel View Post
In my real-life case, just placing N900 on standing leg of my monitor (~5 cm from HDMI cable), listening to FM radio *and* getting a call results in ~3 seconds of black screen. Never happens with VGA.
Fair enough. Probably want better HDMI cables then. Point is that it's more robust from interference as the signalling levels have to drop much further to interrupt a binary stream than an analogue one, where by default *any* interference will affect the signal quality.

Originally Posted by Estel View Post
Also, HDMI is *not* royalty-free:

In comparision, DisplayPort is semi-royalty-free - you can include it in your product for free, but some parts of specification are free *only* for consortium members.
Never said it was

Originally Posted by Estel View Post
This is academic problem, though, as we need neither. As stated in my previous post, VGA adds missing piece, that allows us to get practical results of *both* HDMI and DisplayPort (minus things really not needed by anyone, like digital rights management through HDCP), with only one drawback of using more cables (or cleverly made custom cable). I don't know for you, but I can perfectly live with that.
HDMI is just a physical connector, the signalling is just DVI. I don't know if that requires licensing, but the HDCP part isn't required, you can put HDCP over DVI just as you can have HDMI without it. You're essentially arguing for analogue over digital, and that battle is nearly always won by digital.
---

Originally Posted by Estel View Post
BTW, analog video is not going to phase-out, at all! They're just planning to slowly replace physical connector, but you will be perfectly able to connect your VGA output to DisplayPort input of your monitor/TV (in case VGA input lacking, which I seriously doubt to happen anytime soon, BTW), using semi-active (powered through cable, from monitor/TV), lossless adaptor.

/Estel
Again, if you say so. I see no advantage of VGA beyond backwards compatibility, and it's a damn sight more fiddly to set up display compatible high resolution modes, in my experience.
 

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#1593
Originally Posted by mr_jrt View Post
If you say so. All I can say is that VGA is much more prone to interference due to the signal being analogue. Quality drops noticeably over long cables and over connectors, and I've never had any quality issues with DVI/HDMI. Problems I've had with VGA include worlds of pain from blurryness to brightness, stupid timing issues trying to get my TV's native resolution out of my PC, and everything in between. Arguing VGA is superior to HDMI is like arguing we should all abandon SATA and go back to PATA.

[...]

Fair enough. Probably want better HDMI cables then. Point is that it's more robust from interference as the signalling levels have to drop much further to interrupt a binary stream than an analogue one, where by default *any* interference will affect the signal quality.

[...]

You're essentially arguing for analogue over digital, and that battle is nearly always won by digital.
I beg to differ (in a friendly way, don't want to argue) I happened to have a high-voltage and powerfull device next to my computer few years ago. I was using vga cable then, and all cables (including power cables) were put together in a special plastic tube for cables to avoid spaghetti on the floor (it was not very clever to put high voltage power cable next to analog signal cables, I know, it wasn't a clever move). When turning that other thing on, I could see some strange effects on my monitor, but it still showed something and I could decipher the screen during that few seconds. When I switched to dvi later, it forced me to finally separate the power cables, as the dvi dropped the image altogether (screen was at best blinking or, more often, totally black for these few seconds). Maybe it was good after all (as I separated my cables properly and eliminated bigger interferences), but I wanted to make a point in analog-digital "war" that it's not always best to use digital. It's my personal experience and could be affected by crappy cables, etc., but I personally prefer to see something (even though it looks like it's 4am and someone's been drinking) when there are interferences than not seeing anything at all.

To add something to "digital side" too, on some devices the dvi/hdmi signal is displayed in a better way, too. That might be an issue of these devices (or shitty DAC/ADCs), but, well, if better ones would become more and more difficult to find on the market, dvi/hdmi would win with help of this little cheating.

And, I don't know anything about vga/dvi signals, but I imagine dvi output to take less space "on the board" and be less complicated electronics-wise (no DAC chip needed? but maybe some special additional encoding chip needed - as I said, I have no experience with these visual signals).

Just my 2 cents to this discussion

Originally Posted by joerg_rw View Post
Alas Nikolaus (the one of us both with experience on manufacturing side of the whole process) nuked my high-flying plans about that golden connector belt. Can't be done on usual affordable production process. We might be able to provide some ultra low profile connectors there for you to mill a breakout to the case spacer frame (the 2.x millimeter thing) so you could plug in something like e.g. VGA, so VGA is not entirely off the table yet. Cradle charging via pogopins however most likely is.
Sorry ;´(

/j
That's sad to hear Is VGA signal more probable then DVI one then?
 

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#1594
Originally Posted by misiak View Post
That's sad to hear Is VGA signal more probable then DVI one then?
Yes, since the BOM (components needed) is significantly lower for VGA, and the HDMI encoder chip comes with nasty royalties (at very least 5000EUR for one year, possibly even more. iirc) and NDAs we can't accept for a free device. While VGA actually only needs pretty simple D/A converters basically. Anyway without a proper standardized convenient way to connect a cable to any such signal, both have same likelihood to make it into Neo900: zero. For HDMI there's that weird USB abuse stuff that comes with a 10pin USB receptacle. But HDMI is out for above mentioned reasons. And same connector doesn't cut it for VGA I guess.




Now for something completely different: We managed to find some 3 or 4 suppliers for our major headache component: the 500246471 Molex display connector

We can probably source this obsolete component from surplus/returned volumes. However we need to do this NOW and we most likely won't be that lucky again in 6 months or one year.

So everybody who wants a Neo900 (complete device) or a GTA04-NeoN swapboard (mainboard only) please consider to do a "preorder" donation for a 100% rebate voucher on http://neo900.org/#donate

Odds are we can't build a device for you when you don't preorder now, due to critical components like this display connector might not be available anymore later on.
Again, your donation counts as 100% discount/rebate on a later purchase, the estimated cost for the bare board is still ~700EUR with a tendency towards <600EUR when we can reach higher volumes, we hope we can offer complete devices for no more than 150EUR on top of the mainboard price (incl mounting and test), with a tendency towards <100EUR - though the latter is way more complex to predict, due to it depending on N900 spare parts market.
And while we need to spend some money of the donations now (beyond the 25k we announced for R&D) to purchase the critical components, we still can say that for now we would pay back ~40% minimum of all donations, in case of unlikely catastrophic failure of whole project. Of course you're not obliged to buy, when you "donate" 100EUR now, you probably could find somebody else who wants to purchase your voucher when you're not interested anymore when we finished development and real sales open up. Anyway donations are basically not refundable.

For those who haven't noticed: this is the first call for "preorder window going to close (partially)" I announced previously. And sure, we will try to handle this issue as much in favor of our current and future customers as possible - I.E. we will consider how much more than the already preordered devices we can order for the critical components. But this is limited, we can't buy 10k of the connectors to get prepared for the next 3 years Neo900 production. But we could probably find somebody to build 10k connectors for us if we really would need that much. Same can't be done for 500 or 1000 connectors. So get your preorder completed now :-)

Best Regards
jOERG

Last edited by joerg_rw; 2014-01-07 at 17:56.
 

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#1595
How much would these connectors cost assuming a reasonable batch (e.g. 300 pcs)?
 
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#1596
Originally Posted by joerg_rw View Post
While VGA actually only needs pretty simple D/A converters basically. Anyway without a proper standardized convenient way to connect a cable to any such signal, both have same likelihood to make it into Neo900: zero.
It's not possible to just leave ANY_RANDOM cheap, easily purchase'able small connector (with matching number of pins, or more and some left unused) for people willing to do custom-build adaptors and outer body's modifications on their own? Or, at least as-smal-as-it-gets-to-make-solder-by-hand-possibly pads on the board (although, I guess ANY_RANDOM connector would be better for both users and production - the latter due to smaller footprint).

Think antennae hirose u.fl "test" connectors on board of N900, just for VGA.

/Estel
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#1597
Noooo I still haven't got time to preorder D: this sucks
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#1598
I hope preorder becomes available later as well, i need my savings currently, starting to work soon (hopefully) in Germany. Can't go there without money.... but in few months i will be able to afford it.
 
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#1599
Originally Posted by sulu View Post
How much would these connectors cost assuming a reasonable batch (e.g. 300 pcs)?
+1

The current number of pre-orders is 269. Unless the connector costs hundreds per unit, I don't see a problem in overstocking by a factor of 3 or 4. In the worst case it might increase the cost of each device by a few bucks/euros/pounds, but will leave the pre-order window open for people like Akkumaru and viktor80.
 

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#1600


Since my country is not in the dropdown list. I JUST CAN'T PREORDER NOW.
 
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