http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/13/1939231&from=rss
Its not that surprising to me that I am not the only person who wants a copy of Wikipedia in my pocket. The amount of time I am reading wikipedia has been going up each year. Its becoming a rare work day where I do not use it for reference at least once. The technical articles are getting better and better and its better then IMDB most of the time for information on a Movie.
Other things that are impressing me:
Foleo http://www.palm.com/us/products/mobilecompanion/foleo/index.html?creativeID=SP_M_foleo
I missed the point of this device when I first saw it. I thought "oh, bigger Treo, who cares...". Then I got to play with one. It clicked... its a solid state linux laptop. Weighs a little over two pounds and runs for 6+ hours. That is pretty awesome. Almost makes me want a Linux Laptop again. I doubt I will get one of these, but damn... makes me wonder how much closer we are to a world where laptops run for an entire day. Though... it can be hooked up to a projector so it might be awesome for conferences. I am not going to be running or developing MySQL on it, but I can certainly see it working as a client.
Sun T1000
It is not that I impressed per-say with the OS running on it (want to hear a long rant about Solaris?), but for the money, around $4K, it is a very cheap way to get access to a 32way machine. I would really like a second one to install Linux on. Right now every developer who has a performance based application should be looking for a platform to start testing with many CPU's. Anything above 2CPU systems has been the domain of performance gurus. Every developer ought to be looking at and understanding these problems. I ask Tim O'Reilly a month or so ago about the sales of their Pthreads book. It was at a steady sale, but not on an upward swing. This surprises me. Its the best book on the topic.
Which means to me that:
Open Moko http://openmoko.org/
At this point I have now played with three of these (I first got to see one at FooCamp). One of my big annoyances with the cell phone makers is that they are constantly scared of adding too many
features, or they do not have the developer resources to exploit the hardware they have. I'll look at chipsets for certain phones and find myself amazed at how little the vendor has exploited for their USB stacks. The current Open Moko phone, the Neo, lacks a camera. If the phone is to be mass marketed, it must have a camera. For a development model though, its pretty packed with features.