here's something neat, and it was almost an Apple product! 🧵
the lid opens and folds underneath, revealing the nice large screen, still with the protective film. should I remove it?
the color reminds me a bit of the PowerBook, but as you can see it is different. the design language is not that similar. a lot of '90s products had this look
it's running Magic Cap, a '90s mobile operating system!
ahh yes, we have to calibrate the resistive touchscreen. there's a stylus, you can't just use your finger
no flash memory storage, so everything has to be stored in battery-backed SRAM.
Magic Cap was basically skeuomorphism to the extreme. here is my desk. there's an inbox and outbox for email, a phone, contacts list, notepad, and so on.
if I tap hallway in the upper right corner, it lets me navigate to different rooms. interesting idea, but it gets tiresome very quickly.
oh yeah it makes sounds! basically every action makes a very '90s sound effect. cute.
and they have these animated "stamps" that you can put anywhere. reminds me of the stickers feature on Google Meet.
when I say anywhere, that's what I mean! you can decorate your desk with them. 😂
I wanted to try out the web browser but I don't think this email still works.
anyway, this device was a bit of a technological dead end BUT it helped inspire the modern smart phone. I mean heck Andy Rubin, who founded Android, worked on Magic Cap. 🎩🐰
it has holders for two batteries. a main one and a backup, which is a CR123A. the switch in between locks the covers making it hard to remove both batteries at once, which would cause you to lose data.
there are two PCMCIA slots, presumably for memory cards. there's also a very strange RJ11 jack for connection to an analog telephone line.
check out this weird and ultra compact phone jack!
magic bus? 🚌
that is... huh, what an odd connector
it has a kickstand!
and three different lengths of screws. 😛
inside the back cover.
expensive OS-CON capacitors
after removing the card slots and the plastic cover, you can see what appears to be the CPU. I think those two cups on the right are ROMs.
chips. 😛
on the bottom are two RAM chips and some custom (?) chips.
took a bit of work but I got it back together again.
according to here, the CPU is a MIPS R3000. randoc.wordpress.com/2017/12/28/gen…
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