I voted Pro for myself for longevity and for the current pre-order price point, it’s great. I would love to get a Base model for my mother but she wouldn’t be ready for this yet especially when I’m just now trying to ween her off Windows to Linux. I would have to show her my fancy new Slate to see if she would want it/use it over her Samsung (she loves her games) and then purchase it at the later price point or a second batch. 
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Will dual booting be supported between Android and a Linux OS on the SSD ?
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We said it, not right now, later.
You said something different, as far as I know only Linux phones Pinephone and Librem can boot from SD, Android devices only from internal storage though maybe the case is different for this device.
I don’t know what people are doing on those devices.
Ignoring what the user feels that he needs, I believe the Base is more than enough for anything.
Speaking for myself, I do a lot of virtualization (it’ll be interesting to see how this SOC does with that), so the RAM would definitely be a limiting factor. Plus, I keep my devices forever, so it’s a little bit of future proofing.
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I can say, from personal experience in manufacturing (both Food Industry and Medical Devices/First Aid consumables), it’s never as easy as it sounds on paper.
As @plamen says, one tiny change means 2 SKUs. If your MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity - the amount to make it viable for the production line to run) is 5,000 units then now suddenly you have to manufacture a minimum of 10,000 units instead of 5,000… If your demand in total is say 5,500 (e.g. the orders from the original BraX3 production run) and you have 1 SKU then you just have to manufacture 500 more than the minimum of 5,000. Easy. But if you had 2 SKUs with 5,000 MOQ each you would have to manufacture at least 10,000 units and you’d be left holding 4,500 in inventory - which is a lot of capital tied up in stock that might take (for example) 2+ years to sell through (plus the cost of storing it, etc)… For some businesses that could be the death knell if a start up or still growing from a small start.
(P.S. It’s even more complicated in food and medical/first aid industries because you have expiry dates for products, so limited shelf life before they are unsellable, and in medical/first aid you have to have them sold to the end customers while they still have a meaningful portion of shelf life period - e.g. 40%+ - still present.)
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@plamen a random thought I had last night, thinking about the proposed tough case for the open_slate tablet, and the proposed SD Card’s inclusion in the spec of the tablet, would it be feasible to have an opening/slot in the tough case that aligns with the SD Card slot/tray to facilitate easy access even with the touch case installed? Maybe you have already thought of this?
The SD Card would provide a good way to have quick transfer of large amounts of data physically (to/from tablet) without needing any connectivity; and as an alternative to a USB storage device - so no need to carry an extra external item around like a USB thumb drive or similar. Especially if you have a device like a DSLR Camera or Video Camera or similar, etc, it could provide some nice synergies…
Not essential but might be a nice option to include if feasible?
This has been answered here several times previously already. Please read the existing thread (or search it) before asking about features/functions - most things have already been raised and discussed. It’ll help not filling the megathread with endless repetitive examples of the same questions.
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I think the storage capacity is not important. Maybe you could even ship the product with no SSD pre-installed.
- It is the most easily replaceable part.
- I guess a number of us already have a spare M2 at hand (my case).
- And what about those who want to use the slot for 5G (not my case)? Will they have to buy the M2 anyway?
- Since the product is not meant to be the user’s primary device, most of the data will be pulled from the cloud most of the time (my case).
- The price tag would go down!
Suggestion:
If the durability of the 8 Gb RAM version is one concern, and the number of SKUs to manage another (big) concern, then why don’t you just limit yourself for this first batch to just one configuration:
16 Gb RAM with no storage pre-installed.
You would provide the necessary software tooling and procedure for installing the OS on braxtech.net or brax.me. And you could even ship pre-configured SSDs as a separate service.
See the dramatic simplification?
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That’s already the intention as per original post with spec. M2 slot is there for user upgrade. The 128GB/256GB storage for the base and pro models is onboard, not the M2 slot.
Display
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- Can you please incorporate an OLED display? I use a linux laptop and attached 17” display, both of which are OLED. There is a huge difference between OLED and everything else. OLED is so much more saturated, has vastly superior contrast, has excellent viewing angles, and is very bright. The Brax3 phone gives me a bit of a headache because of the viewing angles, colors washed out, fugly android colour themes, and lack of brightness in the daytime. I still love the Brax3.
SD card is an absolute must have. And it must not extrude from the case because they get easy sheared off in backpacks or just in handling.
Audio
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- Please make sure it has decent speakers. All Apple tablets have really good sound, very loud, with excellent bass. The Brax 3 phone is quite tinny by comparison.
- The Brax 3 has a significant distortion / aliasing problem with 3.5mm output and listening at near lowest volume settings. It sounds like it’s being resampled to 8-bit audio at 8 khz, like digital samples played back on a Sega Genesis or Commodore Amiga. This doesn’t happen through bluetooth.
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No one is suggesting that.
I’m talking about being able to remove it without having to remove the rugged case every time you want to access the SD Card.
…if it does end up actually having an SD Card capability.
Thanks for the feedback. Access to slots will be discussed when finalizing the rugged case design!
It does seem I overlooked the specs. Thank you for catching me on that!
But the remark is still relevant, namely about proposing a single configuration:
16 Gb RAM + 128 Gb storage
- The storage is easily extendable.
- The product is not meant to be the user’s primary device and cloud storage will be used in most cases.
- You don’t have the pain to manage two SKUs, which means:
- A more expedite process, shortening the time-to-delivery, so also making the user happier.
- Not adding on the complexity for this first batch, so reducing the costs and keeping the price tag contained.
Conclusion: the “16 Gb RAM + 128 Gb storage” storage is not currently a proposed option, but it could be the most “one fits all” configuration: not compromising on the durability while keeping the price reasonable.
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I appreciate the feedback. It’s not that we’re necessarily lacking ideas on simplifying. It’s more that we’re lacking consumer data to help us make the right choice.
There are a lot of limitations with ARM platform when it comes to modularity. There is almost no one pushing for it in the industry, so we’re breaking “ways of doing things” with almost any decision. There are also some hard limits we face. We will evaluate and try to push the limits, of course.
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Thank you for your feedback. This was a point of discussion when designing.
I want to clear up some misconceptions in regards to OLED and IPS.
OLED doesn’t automatically mean better brightness, colors, contrast etc, than IPS. Top of the line IPS is better than the average OLED (I’ve been involved with launching products with IPS and OLED both).
What’s true is that the bottom of the barrel IPS is worse than bottom of the barrel OLED, but that doesn’t mean that all OLED are better than IPS. You can take many flagship tablets as an example, using IPS (iPAd, Huawei MatePad, some Galaxy S Tab configurations).
The display quality is almost as important as performance for open_slate. We will spend more on making sure it’s a good display after all, now that we have less cost restrictions than we had with the BraX3.
I don’t think we will be beating apple in sound quality with the open_slate. Nevertheless, we’re including 4 speakers so the quality should be decent. We have more “area” to work with in open_slate in comparison to the BraX3, so delivering a better audio experience will be achieavable without breaking the bank.
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Does this mean that the SSD can be upgrade to 512 or 1024 GB? Would this be to replace the current SSD or as a second SSD meaning two drives total?
so wait, there was no HDMI listed in the specs at the top of this megathread. Are you saying that you will now have a microHDMI port, allowing direct connections to TV LCD panels with full sized HDMI input ports?
if dual boot becomes available later, will we be able to implement that on an existing slate device or will we need to purchase a new one that supports dual boot?