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You mean like the HTC Sensation?

And the majority of users had no antenna problems. It required holding it a very particular way which most people didn't.

Remember folks, fanboi-ism goes both ways.

You mean like the HTC Sensation?

And the majority of users had no antenna problems. It required holding it a very particular way which most people didn't.

The review links another as well: http://www.pocketables.net/2010/06/review-sharp-netwalker-pct1.html I'd say that is fairly accurate, and points something out that I had not yet realized: that people would try to write in roman(english) letters on the device. The handwritten input is mainly tuned for Japanese script and kanji, and while it is not perfect it works pretty well. When I am writing roman letters I use the on-screen keyboard but on days when I am writing code on the train I bring the Z1 and not the T1. The T1 is really great for documents and "office work" and it's a pleasure to be able to write with my hand. It's also true the interface is not finger friendly, but I'm not a fan of big clumsy interfaces and fingerprint smudged screens so for me that's a moot point.

As a FOSS geek I'm not interested in apple and have identified a bunch of really nice looking alternatives to the iPad. It's just a shame none of them seem to quite make it to market!

Eh, there were several `iPad alternatives' on the market before the iPad even existed.

Archos was selling their Android tablets 7 months before the iPad, and Archos first published an `actual Linux' firmware (using OpenEmbedded) and started contributing to upstream some 4 months before the iPad hit the market.

AlwaysInnovating started selling Touchbook beta units a month before Archos introduced their tablets--8 months before the iPad came to market.

And there were/are numerous others, too. I'm not sure whether it makes sense to compare the Nokia N-series tablets, since they're smaller, but they've been on the market for *years*, and they're not the end of the list.

Of course, that's not even counting the `iPad alternatives' that came to market *after* the iPad.

I'm having trouble understanding your "shame none of them seem to quite make it to market" comment--and even more trouble making sense out of others' comments to the effect of `if only there were any other tablet computers other than the iPad'....

That's not Google's tablet, that's a "Google Android Tablet" ("Google" as part of the OS name, not the physical tablet's branding.)

That's somebody else's tablet hardware running what looks like a seriously stock Android installation. (I mean, would Google go to all the trouble of designing a tablet with the same minimalist home screen as a mobile phone? Or a 600 MHz CPU when their phone sports a 1 GHz grinder?)

Waitasec, scam alert: here are some threads questioning whether this device actually even exists (commenters posting about unfulfilled orders for this very same "Google Android" tablet device.)

Here's a video for a "Smit MID-560" with a 5" *resistive* touch screen (rather than capacitive), speculated to be the hardware of this fakey "Google Android Tablet" that is not sold by Google.

Nice try buddy ... looks to be utterly bogus.

Instead of buying hardware (DS, iPod) from hostile manufactures and having to crack them simply to use your own devices, why don't you vote with your money and buy a SmartQ V5? It's small, cheap, waaay more powerful than a DS and it runs Ubuntu 9.10 and Android.

Or the V7 if you want a bigger screen (warning: don't confuse them with the older SmartQ 5 and SmartQ 7).

Or any of the many lesser known cheap Linux tablets/MIDs from small Chinese vendors. Many of them are just one apt-get away from being extremely useful pocketable computers.

i've been using zero weight keyboard using instructions from the pocketables forum with great success. it has issues overlaying over opengl stuff like google earth and plants vs zombies, but otherwise it is way better than the factory junk that would require some sort of alien fingers to use at a reasonable speed. on an unrelated note: you should also give stellarium a shot if your hammock is actually outside. http://forum.pocketables.net/showthread.php?t=2521

Source please? I can't find any benchmarks except this one crappy one with a few website page load tests, and it's a few seconds slower or equal on most sites, albeit the Atom is 800mhz and the Cortex is 600. http://www.pocketables.net/2008/10/mid-battle-aigo.html But Cortex A8 is supposed to scale up to 1ghz, so I think it could be very competitive. My impressions were based on videos of the Pandora device, which runs a (underclocked) Cortex A8 and seems to run Ubuntu fairly well, and I think the main problem with that is lack of RAM rather than processor speed. A 1ghz Cortex, which is probably what would be in a netbook style device, would be very close to Atom performance wise, and use 1/10th of the power, which is a huge benefit. I'm not sure if you've seen the videos of the ARM netbooks, but they are fanless and make ultraportables look fat.

If IBM doesn't make a trackpoint-based netbook, no one will.

Well, there is Sony's overpriced and underpowered Vaio P.

Of course Intel's specs are to be believed. If those TDP numbers weren't representative, nobody could do business with them; manufacturers who buy Intel parts have to design their systems with power dissipation in-mind. Nvidia has recently earned the ire of the industry with their new 9300/9400 chipsets for this very reason.

I wouldn't hold my breath on Intel's PowerVR graphics on-board Polubso (GMA500). According to this review, it scores 405 3D marks...in 3dmark 2003. For comparison, The Eee PC 701 scores 364 stock, and 457 with a slight overclock (at that speed, the CPUs are evenly-matched).

While it is an improvement in terms of power consumption, the performance is not improved, and you do sacrifice a few other things to reach such low power: Polubso can only handle 1GB ram, and the GMA500 has a maximum resolution of 1366x768.

example of it here