Well I have design ideas out the wazoo, and I even know a certain expert in photoshop and illustrator… but, don’t forget that I flunked Electronic Engineering. I do have a passing acquaintance with some of the smart people in the Open Embedded forums though, so maybe I could rustle up the expertise if necessary?

I think using the same cpu class as the Neo1973 so it would run OpenMoko would be the prudent way to get a development effort around the device… As to costings, I have no clue how much investment would be needed to get this thing in the air :-/

Cheers, Gary

well, Google has a VC department these days:-P So, how about we go and try to find some money for the travel gadget:)

-Frank

Yeah, OpenMoko rocks. I didn’t know about the new revision… I was sorely tempted by the last model, so I may very well pick up the new one. Are they putting a GPS unit in the new revision? That would be über cool. Most cell phone navigation software uses triangulation data from the network masts to figure out location, and (at least when I last paid attention a few years back when I worked in telecomms) it was pretty crappy in comparison to a true sat nav.

With my macbook, I’m already on the second motherboard and dvd, and my original intermittent reboot problem has turned into an occasional hard OS lockup, with the ‘please hold down the power key to reboot the machine’ message :-( Also I’m developing a second split in the case near my left wrist, the eject mechanism on the new optical drive is still too weak to push a disc out more than 5mm or so before sucking it back in again, my TAB key only works about 80% of the time, often my battery life meter get down to about 13% and the machine just shuts off until I plug in the charger, and occasionally when I hold the command key down the machine goes to sleep. Frankly, it’s a mess! As soon as I get back to England, I’ll be transferring my data to my iMac, and then sending the macbook back for more repairs. :-( I’m hoping they might decide to replace the guts with a newer revision…

On the bright side, apart from the command-key-induced-sleep, and please-reboot-error-message problems that might be software related, I haven’t had any problems with the OS. Oh, except dropping the wireless connection a lot when I was running 10.4.9. Having said that, I do have a gig of memory, which might help.

I still really want to like linux, but it is still just too damn hard to make it work nicely with new hardware. I’ve been spoiled by being able to buy printers, cameras, phones etc, plug them in and have them “just work”, and don’t want to go back to the 2 days of reading out of date HOWTO documents just to get CD burning to work class of problems :-D

Yep, pen & paper still takes some beating at a lot of things. Kinda sucks for browsing the internet and collecting my email though ;-)

Cheers, Gary

I think the OpenMoko phone has the potential to be a great convergence device. With the new revision of the phone (comming in October i think), you could quite easily consolidate your GSM, Bluetooth, GPS and WIFI (for internet calls or web browsing) into a single device. Plus it’s got an open development platform, so anything that’s missing you could just implement yourself. Maybe you could even fit a C compiler on there. Though of course if you were insane enough to try and code on it’s tiny 640×480 screen, you’d better bring a bluetooth keyboard with you. :)

Sadly though it doesn’t quite go as far as your hypothetical “convergence device”, but IMO its a step in the right direction.

With regards to the Laptop, my rev.a Macbook is holding up quite well. My only big issue with it is OS X – whenever i am logged in for more than a few hours, things start to get notably slow and unbearable. And then i get safari 3 crashing every once in a while.

I did install the latest preview of Ubuntu Linux on it though, which by comparison seemed much more stable. Though the sound didn’t work properly, and i suspect the 3D acceleration wasn’t working either, and then i kept noticing the trackpad had funky behaviour. Still, it was a refreshingly different experience – but not quite for me yet.

Y’know, maybe next time i’ll buy one of those tablet laptops. Then i can probably consolidate all those bits of paper i keep using for random notes into a single device.

Although in the big scheme of things, i still think good old pen & paper is the best. :D

• James