B4?

[fmvaz]

Hi, got a B2 and happy about it but I was just wondering how far along you Excito guys are with what I assume will be B4. Would hate to upgrade to B3 and find out 2 month later that B4 is available!

[johannes]

All I can say is that B4 won't be avalble in the next 6 months at least.

[fmvaz]

Thanks, bubba two still going strong (uptime more than 1 year!!), will wait for B4. Keep up the good work!

[86ivar]

Should be right araound the corner then

[wep]

What is the roadmap and timetable of hopefully soon to be released B4 or similar? The hardware and pricing of the current B3 is already outdated. Even my 300 euro mobile phone has better specs than the current B3.

I think there is a lot of people waiting for an upgraded version of the current B3 including me. I would definitely order couple of these upgraded devices immediately they appear to stores. The current version with its current price, no thanks. The reason for this is outdated hardware vs price. From what I've read, software seems to be ok, have you plans to sell only the software package?

[RandomUsername]

Even my 300 euro mobile phone has better specs than the current B3?

You are somewhat missing the point. First of all, you are comparing apples to oranges. Second your phone doesn't (I assume) come with a large hard drive, have two network ports and USB ports and a number of other components that would push the price of the B3 up. Third, your phone is probably either subsidised by your network or at least manufactured by a company that is orders of magnitude larger than Excito and therefore can keep manufacturing costs lower and can afford to make less profit per unit due to higher volume of sales.

Finally, if your main concern is performance over silent running, low power consumption, convenience and whatever other benefits a B3 gives, you are probably looking at the wrong product for your needs.

[wep]

Okay, well maybe my comparison to mobile phones was not that good but I think you're also missing my point. You're denying technological evolution. There aren't many similar devices that can hold their price for several years without actually upgrading the hardware that comes in the box. (or maybe you can tell me how this B3 has evolved during the past couple years)

More power, memory etc doesn't always mean more noise, energy consumption, increase in size etc. It's vice versa. These are the criteria I also appreciate and require for my possible applications for excito like devices. I don't refer to any specific CPU maker or model, but think for example multicore solutions where more power in many cases actually mean less power consumption etc. Maybe excito could learn something from the mobile industry to create a super-low-power consumption device in the future that can actually produce more computing power.

And if you haven't noticed, solutions for these kind of 'home clouds' are expanding and in the future we are about to see more and more solutions that require more efficient computing power than the current B3 can provide.

Still gonna wait for the upgraded device.

(ps. and in fact, my phone has more memory than the current b3's default ssd drive holds, a well equipped usb port that can also serve slaves and a number of other components like the amoled screen... )

[nobody]

Besides the points mentioned above, the cpu in the b3 blows the cpu of any phone out of the water when it comes to server tasks. It's been quite a while since mere clock speeds meant anything usefull.

[DanielM]

Well, I have to admit wep HAS got a point. Everyone here knows I'm an Excito fanboy and I'd never use anything else, but the B3 is now over two years old and of course there has been much evolution in these kind of things. Actually I read a review of Qnap TS-269L last week and I got the feeling that it has some good stuff that B3 lacks (like for example some nice Android apps). With that said, I'm going to buy a B4 as soon as it's released, but in the meanwhile I'm very happy with my B3

Oh, and sorry for being slow in approving posts. Actually when nobody wrote his post above wep's post above wasn't approved yet, so the "points mentioned above" he's talking about actually is RandomUsername's points. Just so that you know

/Daniel

[ingo2]

All I can say is that B4 won't be avalble in the next 6 months at least.

My personal guess: somtime in late spring - a while after Wheezy "is done".

My additional whish: allow to include http://security.debian.org/ in sources.list, so it receives regular security updates shortly.

Happy New Year,
Ingo

[DanielM]

My personal guess: somtime in late spring - a while after Wheezy "is done".

Well, I really hope B4 is equipped with Wheezy.

Note though that B3 was released with Squeeze, and that was like half a year before Squeeze was officially released upstream.

/Daniel

[DanielM]

My personal guess: somtime in late spring - a while after Wheezy "is done".

I just noticed that there's now an official release date for Wheezy, it will be released next weekend. I'm not drawing any conclusions from this though...

/Daniel

edit: Source: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-an ... 00006.html

[86ivar]

I think it would be smart to make the B4 motherboard as small as a 2,5 inch drive. You could then make a regular bubba and a bubba mini with the same motherboard. I travel a lot and miss the features bubba gives me. would be nice to be able to put up a small bubba with wifi when you are on vacation etc.