The Xephyr Ritepad

The Xephyr Ritepad

Project 2013-05-22 02:02:00 +1200

Hello

We need your HELP :)

The young team at Xephyr need your help to build the Xephyr Ritepad (tablet). We hope the Ritepad will become one of New Zealand's many success stories, however we need your support. Please help us so we can reach our goals and aspirations. 

The Xephyr Ritepad

Xephyr was founded to support and distribute the development effort on creative and open source post-PC devices, the initial design being a tablet called "The Ritepad". To support the creativity on our platforms we have developed our own operating system (OS), the Koru Implicit OS, which through stronger modularity will give greater capability & simplicity to user interaction with your data. The Ritepad put simply is a tablet that will have a newly designed operating system (an operating system being the systems that runs a computer's hardware and software, examples include Windows, iOS, or Android) that will be known as Koru Implicit OS. 

The Xephyr Ritepad will be a data centric touchscreen tablet designed for low funded creative people. While it's interface will focus on documents, it's OS, The Koru Implicit OS, will be implemented as the transfer of those docs yielding unmatched powerful extensibility and streamlined workflows over that prevalent on the desktop. We will further improve creation by adding advanced text entry using technologies like stylus handwriting recognition and dictation. All this will be complemented by a focus on standards like USB and screen which is large for the tablet's size. 

Ritepads Points Of Difference 

The Ritepad has six strong points of differences to other tablets. Points of Difference: 

1) Document focused interface, other tablets do app/algorithm focus. 

2) Customisable- Easily transfer docs to other apps, the apps allows for you to do want with them, other tablets use limited “share” menus. 

3) Advanced text entry- as opposed to simple soft keyboards. Minor: 

4) Focus on standards (this is why Xephyr is going open source), including USB. 

5) Large Screen for its size. 

6) No planned obsolescence (long lasting)

Features

IO (input, output): 

· Large multi-touch touchscreen

· Hover-able stylus with inbuilt holder with sensor

· Micro-USB port for I/O and charging

· Stereo positioned speakers

· High quality front and back facing cameras

· Microphone

· Headphone jack

· wifi (cell option if we can)

· Bluetooth

· High accuracy accelerometer

· GPS

· Power, volume, and home buttons with three additional user defined buttons

Software:

· Streamlined workflows and greater simplicity through our document centric system

· "Recents shelf" for quick switching between apps and docs

· Advanced text entry system featuring:

· Internationalized software keyboards

· Integrates smoothly with physical keyboards

· Fast and internationalized online handwriting recognition

Dictation:

· "Open With shelf" for access to more capabilities on your doc

· Notifications (local) to keep you up to date

· Keep your docs, apps, and notifications organized in our Shelves homescreen

· Inbuilt help system

· Central settings app

· Full screen web browser

· Anything else you could want on our Koru Shop:

· Built on the well tested APT system from Debian Linux

· Reviews, suggestions, and user collected app "groups" to help you select apps

· Automatically suggests apps for hardware and software you don't have

· Donation, pay-what-you-want, fixed price, and freemium business models offered for apps

· Upgrade, downgrade, or uninstall any of your software

· Standards focused protects your investment and eases your transition

· Third party apps will be selected after our developer release to offer additional features inbuilt

Hardware:

To be specfied

Team

Although many believe this project is optimistic we believe our team can achieve fantastic results. The team is based throughout New Zealand and consists of many talented people. The development is led by a diversely skilled five person team covering the fields of: Software (Adrian Cochrane), Hardware (Antony Jones), Art (William Tongue), Web (Sheldon Levett) and business and marketing (Josh Neil). While the core development team is quite settled, we are looking for “open source” contributed/ invested development effort as third parties. We can do this as our technical architecture would provide us the flexibility and developing it open source allows us to accept help. In particular, we are looking for contributions on: Development of various apps, we plan to run a competition early next year in order to incentivise this. ◦ In particular we are looking for developers with an understanding of AI to develop the advanced text entry systems, which they can base on resources we have found. ◦ We may also want someone to create a Koru compatible rendering engine which will (indirectly/modularly) build some of the core apps. An electrical engineer to design a low power system for detecting the hovered stylus position

Funding 

Xephyr is receiving a small amount of funding currently, but we need more to build our first prototypes. The funding so far has allowed for us to establish the website, buy servers, develop and buy equipment. However we now need funding to begin buying hardware to put the prototypes together, Once we are 100% satisfied with our prototype we will begin production and by this time we hope to have investors backing us. We believe each prototype will cost around $1000 and we will need at least four as a minimum to create the perfect tablet

For More Information Visit: http://xephyr.co.nz/

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