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Takes a Mac-head to equate browser == iPad.

Get over your orthographically challenged iPad, sure the media machine will sell it as the end all be all of tablets, and it will beat in sales superior products already miles ahead in functionality.

But. It will not change the web.

Google's extensive integration of everything into the browser has more potential to change the web than the iPad, Heck, even Mozilla's Weave and Prism have more potential to change the web. And then there's Flock.

And of course, none of these will run in the iPad. the iPad has already cemented its non-relevance for the future of the web.

I'm no mac fan... However, I will give credit where credit is due.

Much of the Apple stuff has style, class, and ability- while overpriced it was nice all the same.

However, while this thing is cool, it's just not the same thing as the other stuff. It's a scaled up iPhone/iPod without 3G/4G support in it. For $500 for the base model? As someone described...it's the Kindle re-made without the wireless access and the ability to play video back.

For the same price as what Apple's charging for the iPad, you can have quite a bit more ability from AlwaysInnovating in the form of the TouchBook- and they beat Apple to market with their device and it supports USB, a keyboard and your choice of Ubuntu, Angstrom, Android, and more. With Android 2.1, it's pretty close to what Apple's selling right now with only slightly less battery life and vastly more ability out of box. (We won't get into any of the other stuff that might be shipping in the near future because it's not shipped yet...yet...)

The iPad's cool and all, but it's pretty vanilla compared to what's already out before them and what's to come next- and it's constrained in the same manner an iPhone is, using the "experience" excuse for reasoning for it. Sorry...it's not as worthy of that Apple logo or the hype associated with it as items in the past from them have been.

http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/home/index.htm

The Touch book can do that: http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/ (well, not the 3G, but it has internal USB ports, so you can stuff a 3G card in there).

Also, it's definitively not an iPad copycat: it was released in March 2009.

What form factor? It's a fucking Touch Book with rounder edges (Note: it appears to be a normal laptop, but you can detach the screen from the keyboard. The whole computer is in the top part).

It has BT, Wifi, a similar screen size, 2x Ram, accelerometer, *plenty* of USB ports (4 external, 3 internal), and 10 hours of battery. It also has a fucking keyboard!.

The only difference is the screen being single instead of multi touch. Big whop. Yes, it's nice to have MT, but it's hardly a fantastic breakthrough in design :|

And this was present *a whole year ago* !

But really, when a company puts out a netbook in the form of a tablet, prices it like a netbook, then you'll see a lot of us come off the sidelines and buy.

I don't know about the polish of the OS, but it's GNU/Linux, so the sky is the limit: http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/

You can buy it without the keyboard.

So they've ripped off the Always Innovating Tablet and are calling it their idea?

No. Read the article or just look at the pretty pictures.

http://alwaysinnovating.com/ touchbook. removable keyboard has an extra battery, just to make the $100 pricetag for that extra bit worthwhile.

it's an innovative "new" concept, that has been shipping for several months, in the form of the http://alwaysinnovating.com/ touchbook

So they've ripped off the Always Innovating Tablet and are calling it their idea?

And somehow I don't think the Always Innovating tablet was the first.

You can buy a touchbook now, ARM touchscreen laptop with a removable keyboard (optional).

It's basically the iPad without the Apple lock in, and it is a bit uglier. If you really want a mobile OS on a device like this, you can put Android on it just fine, it comes with Linux installed and is multi-OS capable (though it doesn't do Windows, so Android might be a very good choice for non-Linux folk).

The significantly greater functionality is more important in my opinion, not to mention it's $200 cheaper than the iPad if you don't get the keyboard, but for some looks are everything.

http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook

Two month backlog but taking orders now. Can be ordered as a touchpad or with full keyboard. Uses ARM and any OS that can be used on ARM.

In reality, you can get significantly more functionality for less if you compare it to any other company that exists.

This one looks promising imho.

But it has not updated the content, you have to wait for it to do it. After reading the page you wait for it download e-mail.

I don't understand what you're getting at... why would switching back to Safari require waiting to download e-mail?

I suspect you really mean that if I start a page load in Safari, then switch away, that the load stops. This is true. However, most people will likely be using wifi, and there's no flash or Java support, so page loads are going to proceed relatively quickly for just about whatever page you're visiting.

In other words, I don't see that as a problem for most use cases. Even when I'm on a desktop I only rarely switch to another application while a page loads.

This certainly is not competing with e-book readers as the screen is hugely worse (and 10 hours is not enough).

I haven't tried either the Kindle or the iPad myself, but I've read widely varied opinions on the subject; some people find the Kindle's screen too slow, while others don't mind. Some find the lack of color sucky, while others don't mind. Some find the web browsing on the Kindle to be less than optimal, while others don't mind.

"Hugely worse" is a function of what you're talking about. Power usage? Sure, the iPad's screen is comparatively worse. Color? The iPad's screen wins hands-down. Viewing angle? Probably a tie. UI? The iPad easily wins. Web browsing? Again, the iPad wins easily (at least versus the Kindle).

As for whether the iPad's screen is actually better for reading a book for long periods of time, I don't know; I'd have to try it, but I suspect you don't know either ;) What I do know is that I don't mind reading web pages on my iPhone at all, even for an hour or more, so I have no reason to suspect I'll dislike reading on the iPad.

As for battery life, how is 10 hours not enough? Just plug it in when you go to bed, and it'll be ready when you get up in the morning. After all, it's not "10 hours idling", it's "10 hours of use". Chances are you're not going to actually be using the iPad more than 10 hours a day. How many people who own a Kindle actually use their Kindle for 10 hours in a single day?

Wouldn't "toying" be much easier on a normal tablet with IDE?

Why would I want to run an IDE right on the tablet? A 10" touchscreen is a terrible interface for an IDE; first of all, it's way too small. Second of all, if I'm going to be compiling something, I want to be doing it on my quad core Core i7 desktop with 12GB of RAM, not on my tiny ARM-based tablet.

So that's a silly argument for choosing a "normal" (read: non-Apple) tablet.

After all, it is cheaper and has "interactive display".

Sure, if "cheaper" were my only concern. But if I'm going to buy a device so I can toy with multitouch interfaces, I'm not going to choose based on price alone. (And perhaps I shouldn't have said the only reason I'd buy one is to toy with the interface, though it's true from a personal standpoint. From a professional standpoint, I have contacts who want to pay me to write some iPad apps for them.)

See, my wife will want to use the device, whatever I buy, and to be quite frank, neither Windows nor Linux is really... intuitive... on a touchscreen. Apple has put a lot of work into the UI on the iPad (as well as the iPod Touch and iPhone) and it really shows. That's useful even from the perspective of someone developing for the device.

Besides, we're talking a price difference of maybe $200, and you're going to have a hard time convincing me a $300 Windows- or Linux-based touchscreen tablet compares favorably to the iPad. It's silly to quibble over $200 using ridiculously flimsy arguments like "but the other one can run an IDE!"

Let's take, for example, the TouchBook by Always Innovating, w

It runs Linux. I think it's been shipping since last summer.

http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/

Always Innovating has something very similar shipping already. ARM-based with 10 hours of battery life when you include the keyboard section -- plus it's open source.

Interesting. Thank you.

Always Innovating has something very similar shipping already. ARM-based with 10 hours of battery life when you include the keyboard section -- plus it's open source.

http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/home/index.htm detachable touchscreen, 10 hr battery life, extensible as all hell, and all for $400...

You want choice, you can always go for one of these. I find it weird that I don't see as much coverage for this nice little product from a small company as I see for speculative, unfinished and proprietary products like this.

Or, put differently, if YouTube and Hulu gave users a choice between h.264 and Theora, everyone (except the freetards {...}) would choose h.264.

Yes, and ? Your point being ?
At least, we freetards would get something to run on opensource such as Firefox, on other Theora-browsers such as Opera, and on our hobbyist and community projects. One bad solution (even more if it is only bad in 10% of situations in fact) is better than no solution at all.

Freetards running Firefox, Opera or other Theora supporting web-browser (F/LOSS version of Chromium) will have something, in a dual H.264/Theora world. In a h264-only world, they would be forced to switch to the binary Google Chrome and Internet Explorer, or go back to using BLOBs such as Flash or system codecs.

Say, I'm a freetard. Say that I happen to work on a community project. Like developing the OpenPandora, the TouchBook, or the Beagleboard - well just about anything which is not a x86 device.
Such project use rather custom hardware for which no software exist. Using open-source solution is the only way to go. (these examples use derivative of Angstrom Linux).

In a world were h264 is the only solution, users in jurisdictions where MPEG-LA's patent can be enforced are left in the mud.
Using ffmpeg would be considered illegal (and a community project might be big enough to attract the wrath of a patent troll). Packing Flash or some other binary software is not an option, for lack of support from vendors.

In a world were Theora is also available, the users of such device would be happy to at least have this, even if in 10% of situation the quality is worse.

By luck, the 3 devices I mentioned have hardware for decoding h264 inside their OMAPs, so they won't probably suffer from this problem (is there a VA-API or whatever released to that chip ?).
Other community project might not have this chance.

The Touch Book is getting close. Nine-inch touch screen, three pounds, 10 hour battery life fully assembled. Screen is removable and can be used as a tablet (more limited battery life in that mode). Runs multiple distros. Shipped load includes: Firefox, OpenOffice, evince and fbreader, some sort of video and audio playback app, and bunch of other stuff. I'd be seriously tempted by one, but I'm dependent on a piece of my own software written for Perl/Tkx, and AFAICT, no one's put the combination of Perl/Tcl/Tk on it yet.

That being said, I'm not paying $500 or more for a locked down device with no expansion, no external ports, and no multitasking. I'll just wait for some other similarly priced (or cheaper!) tablet that doesn't require permission from the company that built it just so I can use whatever program I want.

Like me, you seem to be in the exact opposite demographics as the one targetted by Apple.

So let me just drop a link about Always Innovating's Touch Book that I've found the other day on the web.
It's a (non-capacitative) touchscreen tablet which can be docked into a keyboard to form a netbook.
It's got plenty of USB ports, both outside (2 free) and inside (3 free) to be used the for modules (the things comes with an USB and a Wifi dongles you can put on 2 inside ports). It's powered by an ARM (the same as the beagle board) so it has a good battery life. And it's running Linux (their own distro, but compatible with Ubuntu, Android, etc.)
On the down side : no built-in VGA out, nor webcam, nor GPS, though the USB ports are here for a reason.
The price is acceptable given the openness of the device.

It's not what I would buy for a Grandma, but if you want something hackable - this is hackable by design. It's the exact anti-iPad ("anti" in the meaning "opposite of")

Perhaps the Always Innovating Touch Book fits your bill of requirements the best? http://alwaysinnovating.com/ It's founded on open source, uses an ARM processor for very long battery life and there are a few demo videos showing it doing some cool stuff.

As someone mentioned in one of the other comments, the Touch Book by Always Innovating is basically that. The keyboard is detachable and contains extra battery power, but the tablet portion is still usable. And it's on the fly dock/undock while working on it.

http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/

It doesn't matter what the marketroids think the product is mean to compete with.

I only want to carry one device of that size. So far this seems to be the right approach: http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/

In fact the less devices and longer battery life, the better.

I remember reading about this about a year ago. Does anyone actually have one? Similar idea with a bigger screen but a little more expensive.

http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/

Always Innovating arm based netbook, based on the beagleboard.

I'd love to see something like Beagleboard that I could mount on the back of an LCD.

Et voila!

http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/
Meets all requirements.
It also have about a quarter the cpu performance of a typical netbook for the same price range.

There is this little guy, it doesn't seem to be vaporware but they are still in their beta phase, which means what you would get right now will not be as good as whatever they release next year. They seem to be on top of orders right now, but again it's not a completely polished product.

It sure looks slick though, I've been thinking of getting one myself.

You could say the same thing about the home computer before 1980, the acorn atom and sinclair zx80 were only available in kit form. And before that, much more self fabrication was required.

Right now, you can:

A: build it yourself with hobby parts.
B: wait till someone makes a big enough investment to get mass production off the ground.
C: try to scrounge up enough capital to get it going yourself. These guys are doing just that http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/home/index.htm

Well, you can't buy this one in BestBuy, but you can buy it in the US. I'm planning to order one after I recover monetarily from christmas. It's an ARM based notebook running Linux, and it converts in to a tablet. http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/

Here's another: Touch Book

You mean like the Touch Book? I'll be excited about that thing if it lives long enough to spawn another hardware generation.

I'd rather spend $400 for similar functionality.

http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/

I say similar, because it fits the same usage scenarios, but with a different approach. (Not so much a web based one)

http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/
http://promos.asus.com/US/1000HE/ASUS/index.html

Two netbooks with long battery lives.

There are smaller devices available, which might be nice for lugging around - but keep in mind that the screen and Wifi are still big power draws, so the bigger the batteries the better.

No mention of the Touchbook? http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/

It's already been released as of last month.... of course it doesn't involve Intel in any way, so is can't be mentioned. It's only an ARM netbook with some sweet features such as the ability to separate the keyboard and use the screen like a 1lb tablet... also great battery life.

It's actually some of the people in their testing group use Linux 70% of the time, not 70% only use Linux. And it doesn't clarify whether that "some" was most or a few people, etc.

This one looks promising, but I really want a larger keyboard. (The fact that the keyboard has an integrated backup battery is nice, but I don't want a child-sized keyboard.)
https://www.alwaysinnovating.com/store/home.php

Grab it straight from their site: http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/

If you want a ARM-based notebook, you could get a Touchbook. It contains a Cortex A8-based ARM CPU: http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/

I agree. I don't know why no company is designing an ultimate traveller's netbook.

The closest I've found is the Touchbook, which gets about 10 hours battery life while in use with screen brightness ramped up. The Pandora apparently gets between 9 and 15 hours depending on what you're doing, and whether you're willing to lower screen brightness at all.

Both of these are OMAP3 devices. Couldn't they just stick the same SoC in a netbook frame with a huge battery for awesome battery life?

I guess for now the only option is a Pandora with a bunch of extra $20 batteries.

Whether the ARM chip performance is even adequate for normal netbook applications (e.g. watching youtube) is an open question until somebody tries it. Sure, ARM threw out this number of 5x, which is a meaningless number until we get a better overall idea of how fast and slow it is on different tasks.

One already out based on the beagle board:
http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/home/index.htm

You may be interested in this:

http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/home/index.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srLm8vrddac
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Snlp1yTmeyM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZm6qM0KPpg

http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/

Thanks, but that doesn't seem very netbook-ish. The convertible/tablet/slate PCs that are out there miss the mark when considering the netbook. Particularly when it comes to the all-day battery. Perhaps it's just me, but the netbook fills a different niche than just a smaller or lower-power laptop.

I'm thinking something along the lines of the Touch Book or the announced Asus EEE T91 convertible (which is a compromise...I don't always want yer stinkin' keyboard, yo!). They offer a keyboardless option, but half the battery life goes with it..

Once upon a time I had a (working...still have it, technically) Sharp TriPad, which was kind of like a flip-top notebook format, but it ran Windows CE, instead of a full-blown OS/OE like the netbooks do, and had small memory and storage.

Gimme a GB of RAM, GHz of CPU, touch display, and USB ports...is that too much?

Alternatively, there are these devices: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skytone_Alpha-400. These are MIPS-based (still a nice ISA), can run Linux and are the cheapest netbooks you can get. The best bet for getting one is to try an online auction site such as eBay and try searching for "MIPS", or the names that these cheapo devices go under.

http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/home/index.htm

Needless to say, it's linux based. I only wish it had higher res than 1024x600... but that is par for the course in current netbooks (though some have ~1300x768 now). On the plus side, it's also a tablet as you can remove the entire bottom half in seconds.

most users still want to run MS-Windows

Most users just want to use the Internet and many of them still don't know or care what an OS is. Even if they know they're running Windows they often can't tell you which version.

hardly any mainstream Linux distributions

They only need one. Besides, most of the Linux netbooks have used heavily customized distros instead of providing off the shelf mainstream distros.

an ARM netbook from Nokia

I'd like an ARM netbook too but not from Nokia. Always Innovating looks more promising http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/

Linux friendly hardware is on it's way -- I have pre-ordered an ARM based Touch Book from Always Innovating that will never run Windows, it runs Linux and has a 8.9 inches 1024x600 A+ ressure sensitive touch screen

The Touch Book from Always Innovating has a detachable keyboard and a touchscreen. I've pre-ordered one, and expect to have it by September. Looks like it may be part of the future you speak of -- though it won't play Planetscape Torment on it's ARM processor... :-)