Plasma-Active pre-installed

[Mario Fux]

Am Freitag 16 Dezember 2011, 11.56:37 schrieb Sebastian Kügler:
> Hi Mario,

Morning Sebas and other PA people

Here finally my answers to your question.

Be first a quote from some Point of View support guy:
"I have found some video demonstrations of the working tablet and it looks 
very promising." He speaks of course about PA.

> On Monday, December 12, 2011 16:09:21 Mario Fux wrote:
> > I know that's a bit on the last minute as IIRC tomorrow is the release of
> > PA Two. So here in short my proposal or thing:
> > My company (which atm consists just of myself and I ;-) will ship PA pre-
> > installed on the PointOfView TAB-TEGRA-10-1 including a 8GB microSD Card.
> > The device and offer is of course targeted to developers and bleeding
> > edge users (and not yet end users). The price would be 350 CHF or 290
> > EUR (excl. shipping) and 5 EUR of each sold device will go (as with the
> > other simple computers on asimplecomputer.com) to KDE e.V. (and another
> > 5 EUR either to PA directly or to
> > MER, don't know yet enough about the MER structure). I hope this doesn't
> > interfere with any plans of the PA companies and as an 10inch device it
> > shouldn't interfere with your 7inch tablets (which I'm still interested
> > in of course). So would this be of interest for you and your
> > announcement tomorrow? Thus you could even fulfil your idea/annoucement
> > (as done in Randa and other places) of shipping a preinstalled device
> > with PA till the end of the year... ;-).
> 
> I'd like to know more about it, hoping you can share this information here.
> My basic concerns are quality and Plasma Active's brand value. When Plasma
> Active becomes available as a real product, I really want it to be good.
> There's a bunch of unknowns for me there, which you might be able to clear
> up, or maybe you haven't thought about that in detail, yet.

To make one thing clear at first. The above mentioned Point of View device 
will be a device targeted to developers which want to play (and hopefully 
develop for) Plasma Active. It's not intended to be an end user device as I 
think PA is not yet ready for this.

> - Do you create, test and support your own OS images? Is there a process of
> quality control? How do you escalate functional problems? If a product
> featuring Plasma Active gets on the market, and these questions haven't
> been answered, you'll just nuke brand value and make it very hard to
> succeed with Plasma Active in the future -- for anybody.

I don't want to see the PA brand nuked as well! I plan to first use or build 
on the image done afaik by Basyskom. And then hopefully contribute back, 
patches probably, and other feedback.

> - What's your upgrade story? The initial shininess does wear off, and as
> Plasma Active progresses, people will need and want upgrades. If there's no
> after-sales support (for example supported software upgrades even after 14
> months), people will be disappointed, and that will reflect badly on Plasma
> Active -- and scorge commercial ground for others.

There is no upgrade story. But a thing I probably will work on as I already 
tried to upgrade from PA1 to PA2 on my WeTab with not much success 
unfortunately.

There won't be much support I can deliver. E.g. the device from PoV loses it's 
warranty by installing another software on top (but they told me that they can 
help fixing hardware problems and are interested in PA images but I keep you 
informed about these stuff).

> - Also, how do you intend to give back to Plasma Active? I read that you

Feedback, hopefully sometimes patches, user testing...

> intend to donate 5€ sold device to KDE e.V., but see this only as very

... another idea was to spend the second 5€ somewhere to PA but there is no 
legal foundation (simple computers of asimplecomputer.com always have two 
times 5€ to some foundations. Normally to KDE e.V. and Debian but this time 
(tablet) there is no Debian, probably Mer would be the best but need to check 
their legal status).

Oh and btw this tablet thing won't appear as another normal product of 
asimplecomputer.com on the page but as a temporary offer to developers.

> indirect contribution to Plasma Active. The people working on PA have all
> invested a lot of time, energy and money. In my opinion, if you want to
> expoit PA commercially, you should first show the same kind of commitment.
> 
> Cheers,

So I hope to have answered at least some questions. Don't hesitate to ask back 
or further questions.

Good night
Mario