Quote: Originally Posted by
midiwall 
Agreed, but something also has to be done about all the folks that will by the product who are NOT on this forum. Ya' know?
Joe Consumer will come onto the Flux Media site, go "oh, lookie here, something I can put in my car and make use of the old D6 license on my laptop!". THEY are gonna be the ones that David really cares about 'cause they're just gonna flip him off and walk away - without paying a dime.
We at least have a chance to have a discussion about this, and David will hopefully show up here when he gets freed up from SEMA.
Except that they need a serial for CF. Which they have to pay for!
How many people are going to look at the systems in the beta testers cars and say where/how do I get one of them - Field advertsing will no doubt bring paying customers to flux.
IMO People are more likely going to want one once they've seen it in action.
I know a lot of my friends are waving moey at me to fit systems in cars/caravans/campers etc. for them but I refused, waiting for a non-techy front end pogram like CF to come along, otherwise I get a million phone calls constantly asking how to do this, and why won't that work, and will you come have a look at my CarPC...
I know this will happen as it has been happening for last 10 years with ordinary PC's and reasonably well developed and established software!
I might make £100 for fitting it all, and then spend forever fiddling with them like I do my own, that where CF currently has the advantagea for me, adding more negatives like propriety map standards and things change!
Or are the rest of you not considering the market outside MP3car. I'd say at least 50% of potential buyers aren't computer whizz kids capable of tinkering an fixing, otherwise they'd be using RR
And when all's said and done Mappoint uses same maps as Autoroute, which I can buy outright for about £30, WITH MAPS. I think anything over £100 retail for CF WITH maps (and not just your immdiate country but full EU maps) is pushing the boat out too far!
My brother has just bough an RAC GPS device which runs Route66 on WinCE, and plays media etc for £169. Its a 4" touchscreen too IIRC - very nice piece of kit too
These are the devices that the carPC will have to contend with in future, you watch, they'll ge even cheaper and more integrated with more features and portability to boot. Even a cheap CarPC in a double DIN ready to just drop in to a car can't even get close on price!
People who aren't good on a PC or who can't be arsed pulling their car apart will tend to buy this kit of PDA based kit, which going back to what I said before, will infact restrict sales to techy bods such a us lot
Smaller prices, more exposure (partly by us lot demo'ing to anybody interested, car mags/clubs etc), and bigger market is what CF needs to become world wide household name stuff, not just relying on short term big revenue from relatively small number sales.
What I'm trying to get at is that you can get hold of some pretty heavy weight software packages for £100 that probably had way more in terms of resources, advertising and development hours spent on them.
The whole attraction of the CarPC (other than the tinkering side which I DO enjoy) was that I get the functionality of a lot of the off the shelf expensive hardware items like GPS bluetooth, phone, ECU monitoring, etc. for less money than the seperate items.
Well with the large added cost of software & maps & OS, makes the CarPC much too expensive to ever be a proper long term commercial prospect. Or at least pts CF at a huge disadvantage to the likes of RR
If however, CF was something more like a full OS/Frontend solution in one package then it would be worth muh more.... A CF Linux box maybe
Then it could be sold with custom read to fit hard ware and be an out of th box solution for anyone with an empty double DIN
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