Asus EEE Videophone
Partnering with Asus hardware engineering in Taiwan, the AiGuru SV1 was the very first standalone video calling hardware certified by Skype.
With a bespoke UI created by myself and two visual designers, this was truly the first physical product I worked on that started as an idea on paper that I saw through all the way to the mass production of the finished item.
In hindsight, despite shipping on schedule, we underestimated the efforts of developing an entire pseudo OS — we had to build our own network and settings UI and plenty more besides that we'd never attempted in a consumer facing product.
Additional problems included working at scale with an external partner who optimised for cost, rather than quality — for example considerable of effort was spent late in the cycle adjusting for non-square pixels on a cheaper screen.
With a bespoke UI created by myself and two visual designers, this was truly the first physical product I worked on that started as an idea on paper that I saw through all the way to the mass production of the finished item.
In hindsight, despite shipping on schedule, we underestimated the efforts of developing an entire pseudo OS — we had to build our own network and settings UI and plenty more besides that we'd never attempted in a consumer facing product.
Additional problems included working at scale with an external partner who optimised for cost, rather than quality — for example considerable of effort was spent late in the cycle adjusting for non-square pixels on a cheaper screen.
