New Nobu 8" touchpanel available

Foosh..instead of dragging this on and creating a never ending flame fest I'll just stand by my original post

Personally I think its way overpriced even with all the features you list, an 8" screen doing 800x480 rez for $3600?

If you can't accept my comments so be it, look around.. I'm not the only one telling you that your product is way overpriced for what your selling.

Instead of sitting here going on and on and trying to make it sound like your 8" is actually worth $3600 you should listen to our comments instead of trying to belittle me for telling people what parts can be used to make a homebrew in wall.

Once again we are talking about a 8" touchscreen thats mounted in wall, not a 12" and not a 15" but a measly 8" screen with a resolution of 800x480..you can try all you want to claim the 8" screens I refer to are not of the same quality but most will laugh at you without even making a post.

Not once did I ever say your product was junk or looked like crap, in fact I'd say your in wall is one of the best looking I have seen on the market but the price of $3600 is laughable and you won't sell many to the typical HA crowd that frequents these forums.

Lets also remember this is an in wall touchscreen with an 8" screen that most typical people will walk up to, adjust a few lights and maybe choose some music and then walk away..they are not gonna be standing for hours in front of it saying "Gee honey check out the 800x480 image I'm getting for only $3600..Wow!!"

Imagine if you sold this 8" as the PRO model but yet also offered a DIY kit, yes thats right a barebones DIY and you provide a list of touch LCDs and nano-itx boards that would fit your chassis design..a DIY buys your bare bones kit and builds it with off the shelf parts that you recommend and hell you could even sell the parts for the kits and you leave the assembly to the DIY's..let them choose what they wanna pay for an 8" LCD and let them choose what they wanna pay for a nano-itx from a list of compatible parts you know will work in your chassis.

Once again Tyson your product is not junk but its way overpriced, look around as I'm not the only one telling you this...sitting here trying to make other 8" lcds and nano-itx boards out to be junk compared to your parts won't get you much mileage at all, the typical user I see on the Cocoontech,CQC,Cinemar, HS forums are trying to avoid mega-buck Crestron/AMX systems and they are looking for affordable products to mate with the less than $1000 home automation software they have purchased.

You do indeed have a market for your touchscreens but its very tiny compared to what you could have with a $1500-2000 retail price, you can spin it any way you want but I'd say in 1 years time of all the HA users I have met on these forums I'd be sorta amazed if even 1 member of the forums I mentioned above will say they have purchased one.

The earlier post by Steve says it all

Nobu obviously has their market they are going after and it is not here on CT or even close. Looks like a nice product but it needs to be *reasonably* priced for the technology. Right now its just another overpriced element for the high end Crestron like customer.
 
I think it's a bit high, even for pro systems. Obviously the market volume (pretty small) has to be taken into account. But, I think that maybe Nobu is underestimating a bit what the market would be for something like this if if was closer to $2500. Not sure if they could make up for the difference on volume or not.

But, in the end, if Nobu wants to make something that would be the cat's pajamas for our market, it would be basically this guy without any local storage. It would boot off a server based OS image and use that server's hard drive for any disk I/O it needs to do. That's what we need for our product, since it's that centralized maintenance would make all the difference for our installers and help justify the price a bit more.

For the automation world, we don't need much power and we really don't want a bunch of individual PCs in the wall that will have to be individually addressed when it's time to do updates. We want minimal hardware functionality, just enough to run our touch screen client, XP or Embedded XP would be fine, good graphics functionality since it's a touch screen client, no local storage we'd just set up a drive share back to the server in the loaded image, a couple of hard buttons that get sent out as the special keyboard keys so that the software running there can see them and react, something in the 800Mhz range would be fine.

That's what's really needed in the automation world, and there's nobody selling such a thing that I know of. If someone had such a thing at the, say, $2500 retail price, they'd have something. If it was in the $1500 dealer cost range, they'd really have something. For us, we wouldn't much care if we made a lot of margin on such a thing. We are more interested in it as a means to sell our main product. So we could pass it through for not much more than that.
 
az,
That's a question of scale. The OQO was designed and manufactured for higher volume anticipated sales. The in wall touchscreens are still considered a niche market in consumer electronics terms. There are very signficant reductions in component price at those higher volumes. Also, when designing a package, you can spend more up front monies on plastic injection molded parts for lower per piece prices. This makes sense when high volumes are expected. In wall touchscreens are tiny business compared to a UMPC or similar consumer electronics like an OQO.
I really doubt Nobu would follow your lead on the 10%...they wouldn't have any dealers if they were to do that. No margin for the dealer means no interest in selling.

DavidL,

Again with the wisdom. Well said.

~Tyson
 
Dean Roddey said:
I think it's a bit high, even for pro systems. Obviously the market volume (pretty small) has to be taken into account. But, I think that maybe Nobu is underestimating a bit what the market would be for something like this if if was closer to $2500. Not sure if they could make up for the difference on volume or not.
...
For the automation world, we don't need much power and we really don't want a bunch of individual PCs in the wall that will have to be individually addressed when it's time to do updates. We want minimal hardware functionality, just enough to run our touch screen client, XP or Embedded XP would be fine, good graphics functionality ....

That's what's really needed in the automation world, and there's nobody selling such a thing that I know of. If someone had such a thing at the, say, $2500 retail price, they'd have something. If it was in the $1500 dealer cost range, they'd really have something. For us, we wouldn't much care if we made a lot of margin on such a thing. We are more interested in it as a means to sell our main product. So we could pass it through for not much more than that.

Dean,
Are you saying that $2500-ish (with XP Pro, to Cocooners) would be a fair/realistic price ?
 
The hi end pro market has a very high price point and considering the nice look at these I can see them selling if the marketing is done correctly.
 
Bring something to market under $2000 retail running Windows XP able to smoothly run HA client software such as CQC and Mainlobby and of course using your inwall mounting system and I'm sure you will have many sales..I'll be one of the first.

When I say under $2000...I'm okay with $1999 :)

**Personally I'd prefer something with no graphics limitations if possible, no Windows CE or limitation on using transparent graphics.
 
Dean,
Are you saying that $2500-ish (with XP Pro, to Cocooners) would be a fair/realistic price ?

Perhaps. I don't know enough about it to say for sure. I was mostly speaking to the point that what we really want is something pretty different to begin with.

I think that an ongoing problem with products like this is that they cost too much and partly because they offer too much for what this market needs. The bulk of our customers are looking for something that does nothing but run our user interface client. That's light CPU work, requires what is moderate video performance these days, not a lot of memory, and running XP or eXP. So part of the reason that the price seems high is that they'll never use it for more than that and they don't want to pay $3500 just to do that.

For what our clients are wanting to do, I think that they are looking for something in the $1500 range, which is very minimalist. About 600Mhz to 800Mzh CPU, 512MB memory, a reasonably quality video card (has to have good performance on alpha blending) with a reasonable amount of memory, something in the 800x480 to 800x600 screen resolution range, and some hard buttons that the OEM software can be configured to react to.

That's all that's required to do what they want to do in an automation world. If the device does a lot more than that, they are paying for things that they don't want or need, making it seem even more overpriced than it may or many not be.

Further, from a professional installer's POV, distributed maintenance is a huge deal. They want centralized maintenance. If we had such a thing that booted from a server OS image, that would be a huge benefit, and it would further reduce the hardware requirements of the device itself, so a double win. That way, when it comes time to install new patches (OS or product), they get a new image together on the server, then send out a command to make them all reboot and pick up the changes.

That's what we really need. I think that perhaps, in order to get as wide applicability as possible for these types of devices, they are really being created with horizontal applications in mind, but they really (I would think) being sold mostly into vertical markets where the higher cost and unneeded features is actually a negative in many ways.

The same applies to the UMPC devices as well. They do more than is required, when folks like us want something with constricted features, minimal size, minimal weight, minimal cost. At $3500, if someone wants 5 rooms worth, that's $17,500, which is more than the rest of the automation system combined in many cases. They aren't going to pay that just to run the automation system interface on that. They can do better buying a Crestron system, which offers non-general purpose touch screens (i.e. something closer to what I'm describing above) for less. They aren't as flexible but they don't need to be.
 
I agree with Dean and wanted to add that while the direct wire AC is nice, I think POE support if possible would be ideal. Nice thing about the Elk TS is you run one cat5 and you're done. It would give you a bit more flexibility in choosing install locations for retrofits.
 
You won't find this in my home, but I'm cheap - I'll admit it. I'm a DIYer on a budget, and while there are many nice features pointed out, I don't see the value in the product at that price point for me that would cause me to part with $3600+ or even $2500 of my meager savings.

The other fact is that I don't require a complete PC for an in-wall display/control system. I think that's overkill for the purpose. Others may disagree, but I'm pretty sure I'll still need other PCs or systems in a closet or behind a theater screen to get the bang out of the HA system. So spending $3600 for what is essentially a display device is more than a bit steep. More so now that multi-display systems for PCs are coming on the market, or VoIP phones are getting smarter and can offer similar capabilities.

I am, in fact, leaning more toward a phoneset-based system as it gets around a lot of problems with touchscreens and other control systems while offering better integration with voice-based systems. But I digress...
 
I started a response earlier but didn't... but now I see more responses that look similar so I'll join in with a "moo" from the herd:

I don't flinch at the $3600 total dollar amount but at what else I could do with the same dollars. I have ten touch-screen PC tablets in the house currently. I just wouldn't see $3600 each for them. I could see $1500 easily - as Dean suggests. Perhaps less of them - only the in-wall, I suppose - for the $2000 or $2500 range.

I think the CocoonTech users are not all high-end buyers or the dealers who sell to them. I know that is the category I am in; most posts I've read here seem to reflect similar positions.

I just don't see this solving quite as big of a problem as the presentation of it (first post) suggests. Maybe I'm jaded to the overall theoretical value of technology - especially PC-based technology, since I consider the most cutting edge PC stuff to be obsolete in six months to a year. For that reason, I tend to buy it after it's dropped to half opening price then keep it as "obsolete" for a year or two. I spend less and get "last years' stuff" every year. I wouldn't be doing that at $3000+ per unit. :(

Maybe I'll just have to buy the used version of it in a year for $1000. :)
 
Dean summarized what I was trying to say in a much more elegant manner :)

800x600 or 800x480, 800x600 preferred if possible

Has to have good performance on alpha blending

About 600Mhz to 800Mhz CPU, 512MB memory, a reasonable quality video card

Configurable hard buttons..YES!!!

400 nitz is a nice screen but 200-300 nitz is more than adequate in a home, 400 nitz I would say would be best for a convertable with the top down and sun shining directly on the screen...if you can do 400 on the cheap..do it!

Put this all into a package between $1500-2000 and you just earned another market and free advertising for your PRO version.

As mentioned, we don't need a high powered in-wall PC we need something a bit more basic at half the price and give it the same Nobu look and as Steve mentioned if you can do POE thats yet another selling point.
 
I have to agree with the others on this. When I look at touchscreen interface options I am always hunting for the same thing. Simple, small and able to interface well with my aps. All I would need is a very weak system that could load a flash site. Thats it. I just want a panel that will talk to Main lobby without having to use multiple user sessions on my main system. This means I need a small standalone system for 1 thing

talk to a Mainlobby or HS page. Is this too much to ask?
 
Ripper99 said:
Dean summarized what I was trying to say in a much more elegant manner :)

800x600 or 800x480, 800x600 preferred if possible

Has to have good performance on alpha blending

About 600Mhz to 800Mhz CPU, 512MB memory, a reasonable quality video card

Configurable hard buttons..YES!!!

400 nitz is a nice screen but 200-300 nitz is more than adequate in a home, 400 nitz I would say would be best for a convertable with the top down and sun shining directly on the screen...if you can do 400 on the cheap..do it!

Put this all into a package between $1500-2000 and you just earned another market and free advertising for your PRO version.

As mentioned, we don't need a high powered in-wall PC we need something a bit more basic at half the price and give it the same Nobu look and as Steve mentioned if you can do POE thats yet another selling point.
I am concerned also with solutions that are restricted to in-wall mounting. Not many folks around here are doing new construction (most houses are 100 years old or more). And low profile surface mount or tabletop solutions make a lot more sense than a solution requiring a hollow wall cavity.
 
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