Organization:Quill

Quill is an electronics company founded by Steve Jobs in 12012 GHE.

qTalk
The original qTalk was launched in 12013 GHE. It was a beige clamshell cell phone with no screen and small rubber buttons, built to be as affordable yet durable as possible. It sold relatively well, but was infamous for the buttons wearing out after a couple years of use.

After complaints, Quill replaced the rubber buttons with plastic braille buttons free of charge, lending the device a nature of longevity it originally did not have.

qTalk (12014)
The qTalk as most people know it is about an inch thick, three inches wide and 6 inches long. It had a stylus-activated touch screen that was 2.5 inches wide and 4 inches long, framed by the colorful plastic case that was shaped into a form best described as laying a cylinder down on its circumference and squashing it until the ends were oval-shaped.

qTalk 3
The modern qTalk 3, released in 12016, has only two buttons for changing the volume, with both buttons being held down to power it on and off. All other interactions are handled by the touch screen. The device is designed to be able to easily replace the screen, which was the most commonly-damaged component of the iPhone in the Old Real.

qTop
In September of 12017 GHE, Quill released the qTop at a retail price of ¢1,400,000 COINs exclusively in licensed retail stores. Instead of stuffing a full-fledged computer into a plastic dome like the iMac G4, the qTop's dome only housed the electronics necessary to make the qTop a stylish and long-lived computer terminal, including USB-C 4.0 ports as well as a slot-loading optical drive capable of reading and writing Blu-Ray discs, DVDs and CDs.

The iconic optical disk slot and translucent plastic casing, all of which had LEDs that made the qTop glow according to user preferences, gave the qTop a luxurious and futuristic yet nostalgic styling. The touch screen, despite being framed with bulky kaybug-styled plastic, was similar to that of an iPad or Android tablet and supported by a robotic arm. Two touch-sensitive power button could be found on the backing of each lower corner of the screen, with the pressing of one putting the qTop into sleep mode and the pressing of both triggering an emergency shutdown.

Built-in webcams and microphones were outlawed from being included on desktop computer systems and televisions in the New Real. As a result, a quirk of the qTop was that the webcam/microphone were inside the VidModule docked with the top edge of the LCD screen, and could be replaced by third-party webcams or microphones designed for the VidModule connector.

New users were most annoyed that the system would not function without an afternet connection, mainly due to the complete lack of accompanying networking technologies in the New Real. Most of the connectivity was via a Power Line Communication (PLC) link in the power cable, with other transceivers such as the built-in Bluetooth 5.0 transceiver, LTE data transceiver, li-fi transceiver, and a GPS receiver also playing various roles in the qTop's capabilities. Aside from the highly useful connectivity with GPS satellites and Bluetooth peripherals, these transceivers were essentially an electric lamp in an 1800's home. This forced users to default to using an ethernet cable, instead of expensive cell tower bandwidth, or PLC connections only available to homes that are equipped with Electr-O-Mag walls, a rarity with older homes and the earliest Modular Housing Units.

Even more ahead of its time was the li-fi system. The photo-detector was built into the VidModule, while the Quill logo on the front of the dome doubled as the infrared transmitter. The li-fi network could provide 96 Mbit/s networking, if only the required infrastructure existed.

The qTop client software connects to servers within the Library of Virtually Everything, which hosted user profiles of the ExTen Distributed Operating System. This meant that as upgrades were made to the ExTenD OS servers, the qTop would get progressively faster, instead of growing obsolete. At least, in theory.

Since the qTop has been available for purchase less than a year as of October 12018, it is unknown if the qTop's cloud-based design will stand the test of time.

The Future
Quill is testing a new product, the Quill Lens, by providing prototypes to its qWorkshop employees. The device is intended to compete with BEC's EyeWare line of Augmented Reality devices, which currently have a combined 65% share of the smartvision market. The design remains colorful like the qTop, but with BEC already offering a wide range of devices in a similar style, Steve Jobs is pushing for a new design aesthetic.

Steve's rationale is that the iMac G3's colorful plastic was meant to be a stylistic choice, not a feature the way it seemed to be for many low-quality Apple imitators of the time period. Steve claims that the shiny iProducts which gadgets took the form of in the "McBling" era of consumer product design did not serve these ends, instead merely encouraging cheap imitators to keep up with the Joneses, and that the Quill Lens could very well use design cues never seen in the Old Real.