Form factor would actually be a massive selling point for me. I loved my Vita because it allowed remote play and had proper controller sticks and buttons, without the need of bringing a separate controller to connect to my phone which I would then need to position somewhere. So while this device might not add anything new, it might offer the same in a way that suits me better. YMMV.
Getting a chip made IS the big hurdle. Soldering the chip is trivial by comparison.
A Sprinter is a tradesman's van. Outside the US, Mercedes aren't a luxury car maker, they are a general vehicle maker who also makes luxury cars. Aside from normal white vans, they also make buses, trucks, and cheaper cars that are popular as taxis.
The box is small and cheap, and is much easy to change when some new codec comes along making it obsolete, and you can keep the existing display.
If data can be charged (not something I've heard of) no one is actually charging for it. I can roam anywhere in the EU with no roaming charges on Vodafone.
How much does it cost for the user, though? Is it metered? If it is metered, you'll want a good proxy setup in front of it to block things like requests for ads, block the operating system's "phone home" and software updates while connected, block videos etc. as these can chew through gigabytes without the user really knowing.
British cars from the 70s maybe. But there is no British mass-market car industry left - the last British manufacturer went out of business years ago, so you don't have anything to worry about.
Incidentally, Audi use Lucas electrical parts (that Lucas, as in Lucas prince of Darkness). So you better cross German cars off your list too.
I don't disagree. I think crimping gets a bad rap because people are used to cheap crimp tools and cheap connectors which do a terrible job (which even un-strain-relieved solder joints will actually outlive). People see that a moderately decent crimp tool will set them back £100, so go for the cheap Chinesium non-ratchet one that costs £6, and the connector fails after 3 months because the wire just falls out the improperly crimped connector, so conclude that crimping is rubbish.
Since the login page is going to come from at least the same organisation (and likely the same server), if it's been compromised then that won't help - it just means the attacker has to do marginally more work adding a bit of code to the stuff sent to the browser to harvest the plain text password there instead.
Serial and parallel doesn't refer to the amount of signals, but how they are clocked. If you took 16 RS-232 ports and split your data into 16 parts and transmitted them, it would still be serial as each port is independently clocked. With a parallel port there's a single clock for all the signals. Every separate signal (there's 4 of them for USB-C super speed) is independently clocked, so it's not a 4 bit parallel link, but 4 separate serial links.
The red blue and yellow crimp connectors are actually very reliable (we use them in aviation) - if:
- you have the proper crimp tool (and a good crimp tool is quite expensive - at least as much as a mid-tier soldering iron), a proper ratchet tool with a properly made die, not the cheap Chinesium things you get for £6 at Halfords
- you don't get the cheap crap crimp connectors (good ones aren't really that expensive either)
- the person crimping them knows how to use the crimp tool - which isn't hard, you can probably teach a chimp to crimp.
Do all that stuff and you have connectors that take 1/10th of the time to install vs. soldering, and there are far fewer things to go wrong.
What sin has not been committed in the name of efficiency?
