A review of the new Amiga hardware and software: The Micro-AmigaOne and Amiga OS4 Developer Prerelease via [MeFi]

My first computer was an Amiga 500, and what a fantastic machine it was — although snail-like in terms of raw number of MHz by today’s standards, it felt quick and responsive, and while many people remember it for its awesome gaming credentials, the OS was also powerful and easy to use.

Reading the article about the new Amiga, I experienced a pleasant feeling of nostalgia for my Amiga using days. Interestingly the article highlights that one of the problems with the new machine is the one application area where I always thought the Amiga to be weak, word processing software. Of course these days, provided there was a decent LaTeX implementation I wouldn’t need a word processor, but for many people it remains one of their most frequently used applications.

So is there a future for the Amiga? Given that I bought my first PC ten years ago this summer, I suspect that this new product comes at least 10 years too late. However, in his conclusion the author remarks how well the system works on what is practically PDA-level hardware. Could the Amiga find itself another profitable niche in the PDA/mobile phone market? The story of BeOS suggests there is little room for another player in the desktop market, but I’m sure there are plenty of former Amiga-owners who would love to be able to dual boot into a new version of AmigaOS if there was a inexpensive x86 port.