mendax.org

I can’t say I think too highly of MIT’s Media Labs, because although they’re a bright group of people, all of their projects seem pretty damn useless.

Well, some people from the lab are reinforcing my opinion. They’ve started a company, Charmed Technologies, that makes wearable computers. Sort of. If you look at the product pricing page, you’ll see that their base wearable computer model comes in at just under $2,000. Of course, that doesn’t come with an Operating System, nor does it seem to come with batteries.

But don’t worry, for an additional $500 dollars, you can upgrade the lowly Pentium 233 MHz to a Crusoe 800 MHz, and double your memory to 256 megs of Double Data Rate RAM (doesn’t DDR seem a bit extreme for a Crusoe?). But still no OS. Or batteries. For $1,000, with or without the $500 CPU upgrade, you do get batteries, and an install of Linux. And 30 days of tech support. 30 whole days!

There are, of course, a bunch more expensive packages on there, but this really seems like a highly overpriced toy that should have been released during the dot-com boom, when lots of nerds had too much money. These days, however, I think you’d have to be under a spell to buy one.

Popularity: 2% [?]