ZDNews is reporting the end of the (short-lived) SONY eVilla by September 13th. Sony executives blamed the demise on “stability and usability” problems with the $499 desktop IA, but did not offer specifics. “The product did not meet our expectations,” Sony spokesman John Dolak said. “It did not operate as planned.” There were a lot of user reports that the appliance was slow and not stable. Also, in the ZDNews article is clearly stated that Palm has no plans to continue development of the BeIA, endorsing even more David Nagel yesterday’s answer that Palm bought Be for the engineering team and not for the technology.
Our Take: eVilla was slow because of two things: because of the very slow CPU (266 Mhz Cyrix which has the power of Intel Pentium 166) and because the graphics chip (incorporated in the CPU) could not handle the high resolution of 800×1024 with enough speed, especially because the monitor is a normal SONY 15″, but rotated (make sure you read this thread to understand why the rotation is an overkill). As for the stability issues (which they were indeed, I can personally verify that), it just seemed that there were some technical issues with BeIA, which we may not know about.
Sony Drops eVilla, ZDNews Reports that BeIA is Dead too
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
“What a waste of time” – this is a quote from BeosJournal, and I agree with it. I can’t help but think that if Be concentrated their efforts on BeOS as they did with BeIA, why, we would now have a perfectly viable OS, and it wuld probably have a much larger following. Maybe Be would have become even profitable or something! If not, I feel it would have left a much better OS behind.
I feel this as a very humiliating, very definite blow. Both the Sony and the Palm news. Sure, some miracle could still happen, no? But I am very, very discouraged, and am afraid that we’re heading to the Amiga destiny very rapidly.
Well the destiny of Amiga is starting to look bright again. Would it be enough to make a chance in the desktop market? I don`t know but I know for sure Amiga users will support with love. The fact that they continued spending cash has kept them alive for this long (and of course the technical excellence of the machine, forget upgrading a 286, 386 or 486 to modern specs comparable to modern upgraded Amigas). I love to see an outsider like Amiga give Micro$lut a run for their money eventually. Me crossing my fingers.
Damn.
Unfortunately, management around the world wont learn from BeInc’s mistake. Here’s a hint – when your core and most fanatical supporters start bitching and moaning about your new product, and even your core employees threaten to quit the company and actually leave because they think your idea is a load of shit, listen to them!!! Congratulating yourselves in board meetings saying how great you are doesn’t mean anything in the real world. People all over the world kept on saying “BeInc, I want to spend hard earned cash on R6” and you ignored them. You deserved what you got.
Instead of mourning the deceased, we’re angry at why a once smart company decided to listen to Dr. Kavorkian and jump off a bridge.
The whole Be saga reminds me way too much of the NeXT disaster. I’m rereading “Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing” and the similarities make me ill. I half to wonder if simply being associated with Apple amounts to a “kiss of death”.
First to clear things up… thing aren’t drawn and then rotated. They are drawn side-ways. For most things such as lines and filled rectangles there is no performance loss (unless say, horizontal lines greatly outnumber the number of vertical lines that have to be drawn). Because a rectangle is rectangle, side-ways or not. A vertical line is a horizontal line when drawn on a monitor placed side-ways. You can try this, turn your monitor side-ways and your computer will draw things just as fast =)
The problem is when you have bitmaps. The image file format most probably arranges the data row by row, from left to right. Because the framebuffer on the eVilla isn’t arranged side-ways, you have to read a row of pixels and then render a column of pixels. As Eugenia pointed out, accessing memory (e.g. the framebuffer and off-screen bitmaps) row by row is much faster than accessing in columns.
If the file formats were designed for columnar access then eVilla might not have this problem (or rather the images were stored sideways.. i.e. pre-rotated).
Bitmaps occur elsewhere, such as icons, fonts, and widgets. That’s a lot of algorithms, internal file formats, and media creation tools to change. Even if that has been done, it only solves the problem for internal resources, and not the media that comes through the internet.
Another problem was that the eVilla used a softmodem on what is basically a 266 MHz 486 …a sure recipe for disaster.
…did anyone actually expect this thing to survive? The eVilla was a solution for a non-existent problem, and not only that, the ‘solution’ was atrociously overpriced. I still laugh when I remember back to the video I saw linkked from benews with head marketing suit at Sony describing the newly-coined problem of “internet congestion” in households and “sure you can buy another PC, but why would you?” …”the eVilla Network Entertainment Centre, blah, blah, blah, blah…”. Hah…
Never ceases to amaze me how deluded marketing droids are about the realities of the market. Or at least how deluded they think they can make us.
Since Palm has such little interest in continuing BeOS as a product, they can build a lot of good karma by open-sourcing the BeOS now. Core features could be added over time. OpenGL, bone, Java support…..over time the techology would mature, like Linux has.
Please do something useful with the technology!
I wonder if there’s any chance someone at Be might have taken a cd containing the source code home in his lunch box……
If a 266 MHz cpu isn’t fast enough then it’s the fault of the OS,
My amiga with 50MHz was fast enough to get decent framerates.
BeOS has never been very quick with onscreen rendering.