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Britain has just launched the HMS Daring, a 600 million pound-sterling (umm ... roughly US$ 1 Billion) battleship complete with iPod docks.

That single ship effectively doubles the total market for "iPod Accessories."

The problem I find with all these players is that it seems you get to choose between somewhat bulky, fragile hard drive units with a lot of storage but poor battery life, or small flash based players with at most 1gig of space. My own player, a Panasonic SV-SD80, is about the size of US quarter, but squared off. It weighs about an ounce and a half and I never go anywhere without it, as it is so small you can drop it in your pocket and almost mistake it for loose change. I've dropped it several feet onto hard pavement at least 10 times with no ill effects. Plus, running on its internal battery it gets 16-20 hours of run time, and with the water resistant case it comes with (which has an extra AAA battery inside) you get around 50 hours. Try that with an iPod... That being said, even with a 1Gb SD card installed (sidenote: why would anyone buy a non expandable flash player??) I only get perhaps 200-250 songs on it, which means I'm bored of the rotation in about a week.

What I would like to buy is a player that comes packaged something like an ipod, but where the top 1/4 of it is a micro size flash based player (with an SD slot!) that contains a 1 or 2 line display, basic controls, and a small battery, and would afford the ultra-portable benefits of the SV-SD80 or similar player. For those times when you want access to your whole library, you would attach the bottom 3/4 would as 'dumb' modular add-on that simply holds a 20-60gb hard drive and a bigger battery to support it all, and the ability to shuttle songs to the flash unit as needed. Maybe even a larger (color?) display. It wouldnt need the player circuitry or controls, headphone jack etc, as that would all be contained in the flash head unit.

I read T3, the playboy for gadget lovers. They have a girl every month just like playboy except she's not naked and not all that hot. But when I read other magazines (Popular Science, Wired, etc), my favorite part is the new gadgets section anyway. T3 is one big gadgets section every month.

T3 has a lot of tech-stuff, besides everything else a man could need (check out the cover girls).

Top notch mag!

Check this out.

While the manufacturer's page doesn't mention it at all, the keyboard and trackpad of this little powerhouse are detachable and use Bluethooth. I'm sure you need more than a laptop can provide as an HTPC, but maybe you can get one of the keyboards as a spare part.

I assume it has batteries that need to be charged, and I don't know how that would happen without the laptop to chrage it.

Somehow I don't think that babes in bikinis dripping over the latest PC system will sell magazines(I could be wrong).

It certainly does.

Basically the webpad reference designs and all the clones thereof require:

• a CPU, RAM and flash that can support a decent web browser (HTML 3.2, frames, Javascript? SSL?). Flash memory at the moment is apparently very pricey.
• a reasonably-sized color LCD screen
• rechargeable battery power
• short-range networking using the DECT cordless-phone technology, at the moment

Also, another factor is that the Linux HTML4 browsers don't exist in a form factor that'll fit on embedded devices -- don't forget, these things don't have swap space at all. How big's your netscape running at the moment? Mine's at 35 megs. Ouch. And that's NS4.7, you should see what Mozilla does! ;)

Having said all that... maybe there is a market for it in the T3 readership... but would it provide a big enough market to keep a company running?

(BTW this is all my opinion, not employer stuff)