Hey, remember when companies thought they could make scads of money selling $500 Internet appliances? The fad, which peaked in the year 2000, lasted about as long as pet rocks. The devices may have been cool, but the market response to them was even cooler. QNX provided the OS and windowing system for a number of Internet appliances, including the 3Com Audrey, perhaps the most sophisticated Internet appliance ever built. The Audrey lasted only 7 months before being pulled from the shelves, but subsequently became a popular platform among hardware hackers.
Other QNX-based appliances included the iOpener:
The SurfTV device from France:
The HomePilot iAppliance/home automation device from Norway:
An Internet-enabled TV from Loewe in Germany:
And let’s not forget NatSemi’s WebPad reference platform — think of it as the great, great grandaddy of today's tablet computers:
QNX gets a Jolt
To target this market, QNX introduced the QNX Internet Appliance Toolkit, which came complete with a customizable web browser, email client, Internet dialer, personal information manager, and other goodies. In 1997, the kit won a Jolt productivity award.
p.s. 3com named the Audrey in honor of Audrey Hepburn. The connection, however, eludes me. Does anyone know why 3com decided to name the device after her?
Do you happen to know what ever happened to these appliances? Were they just too ahead of their time? The Audrey looks like it came straight from the Jetson's living room.
ReplyDeleteHi Nancy. Unfortunately, these devices were hitting their stride just as the dot.com bust hit big time. From what I can tell, few of them had a proven revenue model. (Come to think of it, did *anyone* have a proven revenue model in 2000?)
ReplyDeleteOn top of all that, PCs were probably falling in price. So as a consumer you could go cheap and buy something that did one or two things very well, or go a bit more expensive and buy something that did lots of things middling well.
Middling well won.
Proven revenue models are overrated...
ReplyDelete... oh wait! no they're not...
Actually, I still have an Audrey, and I remember the Webpad... scary...
Hi Rennie. I'm pretty sure we still have a Webpad kicking around somewhere. Would be fun to dig it out. Mind you, I'm not sure how much browsing an HTML 3.2 browser would be capable of these days...
ReplyDeleteYou know what I remember about those days? The industry's quest for "the killer app". In hindsight, I think the killer app always was the internet and how to access its content. To Nancy's point, these devices were ahead of their time. And I absolutely see them as a precursor to the ipad class of device.
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree with you, Linda. A few things were missing back then. First, no one had Wi-Fi networks -- so deploying these things around your house was a pain. Second, few people had broadband connections. And third, the Internet hadn't gone social yet. No Facebook, no YouTube, no Twitter. Perhaps Web 2.0 was the killer app these devices needed...
ReplyDelete