Thank you, Booxtor, for your informative and receptive posts. Like Rizla, I would definitely like the new models to support less usual use cases such as their use as a monitor in some form.
The new positioning and layout of the buttons is certainly interesting as much as it looks like a regression from the M9X models, for instance in relation to where/how they are likely to be held. I suspect quite a few other orderings and layouts (such as that you and others have suggested) would be superior to the initial prototype one. I presume that this means that there is no joystick either. Others have already noted the mobile phone like trends. Does this mean that the hardware buttons are (gradually) going way? I don't know whether this is a particularly good or bad thing, but I would certainly encourage supporting the widest range of possible options for interacting with the device.
I can't see bluetooth and wireless being an issue. However, USB OTG functionality (USB host mode) definitely seems to have become an issue with the M96 in spite of the fact that, no doubt, the hardware supports it. Particularly in the light of the possibly diminished ways of interacting with such a device, I would hope that USB host mode as the basis for other options, such as high quality (eg. mechanical)(as opposed to merely bluetooth) keyboards, for example, would be supported. For instance, one of the less complicated ways of using such a device as a monitor would be to run the software on the device itself (accepting both its and Android's likely limitations).
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