For $50, you could instead get the Zipit Z2.<p><a href="http://www.zipitwireless.com/default.aspx?skinid=1" rel="nofollow">http://www.zipitwireless.com/default.aspx?skinid=1</a><p>It includes wireless b/g, has more internal flash, and installing Linux is well supported by the company:<p><a href="http://linux.zipitwireless.com/" rel="nofollow">http://linux.zipitwireless.com/</a><p>Seems to have a reasonably active community around it.
I'm torn. I've been waiting for a $100 "netbook" for a long time, but I wasn't expecting them to be quite so small. I seriously doubt that I could touch-type on that keyboard.<p>EDIT: Yes, I know that it's not meant for "normal use", but that keyboard has to be for something...
This project is very cool. But I wish that the person who wrote this article would have done a bit more research before writing this article<p>"Copyleft hardware is not nearly as widespread as copyleft software; the Qi Hardware cites just four other projects that follow the same approach: the Elphel digital camera, Pandora game console, the Milkymist One visual-effects video synthesizer, and the Arduino microcontroller. The Arduino's success in particular is an example of what the team behind the Ben hopes to see develop around its NanoNote project."<p>Make has a yearly open source hardware list that has -dozens- of true open source hardware projects.<p><a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/12/open_source_hardware_2009_-_the_def.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/12/open_source_hardwar...</a><p>There's a lot of us! Really! :)
This NanoNote is good as a concept of open source hardware.<p>However, as a product it falls in the middle between a decent mobile phone(which have better screens) and a netbook, this middle seems like a very tiny niche, which I am yet to find anyone interested in.<p>Granted, it is not meant to be an end-user product, but it has to appeal to enough people to make the whole project a success. In fact, the creators wish for people to tinker with it and produce something useful. Ok, porting Debian to this has been done, but what then?<p>Still, even if this project is a failure(too early to tell), some good may come from it, if the open source designs are used to create something bigger/better.
I think the $99 price is a big threshold. It's the point where you can start thinking of general-purpose computing as something that gets sold in a convenience store, just like storage media, MP3 players, and digital cameras. As a product, I don't think this one hits the spot, though.<p>The specs are hardly impressive, but they're also probably overpowered for most conceivable tasks; it doesn't have the controls to do gaming well, the screen real-estate is too tiny for most other graphic-intensive stuff, it doesn't have the connectivity to be a server, and it's probably too cramped for long-term typing.<p>This thing really is _too_ small.
A 320x240 screen? This would be great for playing old DOS games. You'd need to use something like Qemu to get them to play on the MIPS processor at a decent speed, though. You <i>might</i> be able to get DOSBox to run at a semi-reasonable speed, but I wouldn't bet on it.
For some reason I see the image of the laptop on a person's hand, and imagine somebody saying to him:<p>"What a weird looking phone!"<p>I won't get one of these. An EeePC-like laptop, perhaps, but the NanoNote is so small it's ridiculous. What can one possibly do with it?<p>(Caveat: I'd like the EeePC to do programming, in Vim, and so I may not in the target audience for the NanoNote ... though I <i>still</i> can't figure out what computing tasks it'll be good for)
Needs a better display to be very interesting. I can't believe that 640x480 LCDs are that much more expensive than 320x240 ones.<p>The Chumby lineup (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby</a>) is also worth looking at, if you're in this particular market.