One of the coolest things I've seen in a while turned up at FUDCon last weekend. The folks from pepper Inc were giving a demo of their pepper pad 3. It's relevance to FUDCon was due to the fact that their underlying OS is based largely upon Fedora Core 4.

It's quite a fun toy. Powered by an AMD Geode (though an LX, somewhat more snappier than the Geode found in the OLPC).
The screen was very nice. About the size of the screen you get in the back of a headrest on an airplane. Seemed to cope well when being viewed at angles too. The one gripe I did have was that the keyboard was a bit clunky. Due to the split in two, I found my head tracking from side to side. Maybe after a while, touch-typing instincts take over and this becomes a non-issue, but it takes some getting used to.

It's also a bit big. Not something you can slip in your pocket and carry around unless you have very deep pockets. This alone is the deciding factor for me not wanting one. I couldn't think of a conceivable use for something of this form factor. Slightly smaller than a laptop, but much bigger than a PDA.

Fun to see low power x86's turning up in things like this though. A bit of a pity that the Geode lacks some of the nicer x86isms brought about by the 686. I guess there's need for a 586 Fedora kernel for some time yet. Though the pepperpad does actually have its own custom kernel for some of the unsupported hardware (*cough* Atheros).

Hopefully when we get to F7 we'll have at least most of the pepperpad supportable with the standard Fedora kernel.

One of the nice things about this being x86, and having a USB host port is that compiling apps for it is a no-brainer. No cross-compiler to set up, no messing around with firmware images, just build locally on x86 with -march=i586, drop the executable onto a usb key, and you're done.

Like 499 others, I was fortunate enough to luck into a discount code for the n800 (Thanks Nokia!)
Getting it turned out to be somewhat convoluted, but well worth it in the end. After exchanging a .eu code for a .us code, and fighting nokiausa's website to accept the code, I got a mail telling me my order couldn't be processed without additional info, and that I should call a number. I did, and got put on hold for 50 minutes. When I finally got through to someone, I was told "We'll call you back". A few hours later, I got another mail telling me my n800 had been dispatched. Most bizarre.

So the unit turned up this afternoon by stealth courier (I don't know why, but recently delivery guys have an aversion to using my doorbell, choosing instead to abandon parcels outside).

After charging it up for a while, I spent a while playing, and getting used to its features. Maemo really is quite nice.
I've not yet found anything to gripe about at all. I need to fight some things, like make the media player able to see my shared music, and figure out how to get an ssh client on there, and I'll be really happy with this device.

I think my ipaq just got completely obsoleted.

It's my birthday.
I got myself some presents.

Black.
Skinny Puppy's new album.
Beer.

Has the makings of a good day, asides from a trip to the dentist.

Violence, Noise, Alcohol, pain and numbness. Sounds like I've covered all bases.

I just watched the origami experience video on gizmodo, which is pretty shocking.
The pepperpad UI wasn't particularly flashy like origami, but it at least worked. On a Geode, which should perform slower than the VIA C7M used in the UMPC in the video.

I've heard lots of complaints about the sluggishness of 1st gen umpc's, but I wonder just how much of this is down to the hardware choice, and how much is down to the over the top slidy wooshy effects. Given the comment "This is a really good ultramobile, it works fine in XP", I guess Vista is just too much for it.

Under Linux, VIA CPUs are well supported, but graphics chips are currently something of a disaster, with a number of different drivers, all supporting different subsets of features. The net result is that most Linux distros fall back to using the VESA driver, which is somewhat sad.