chuma.org

A few weeks ago I caught wind of a new portable computer, called the Pepper Pad. Obligatory product feature photo:

Link to actual photo I was immediately drawn to it for a number of reasons:

• It’s very much like a Newton on steroids: an 800×600 touch-sensitive screen, in the middle of a split QWERTY layout thumb keyboard as well as a D-Pad and scroll wheel for input. No HWR input though, but that’s not the focus of the OS…
• A whack of standard I/O possibilities: USB, Bluetooth, IR, SD/MMC slot, 802.11b, sound in/out, composite video out
• 20GB hard drive, 256MB of RAM, powered by Linux 2.4 and a 600MHz Intel XScale CPU
• Software that sounds really darn nice… the focus of the OS is as an information tablet, sort of what I’m trying to accomplish passively with my info board, but with a built-in Mozilla based browser, e-mail, AIM, music/photo/video libraries (supporting MP3/MPEG1/MPEG2/MPEG4 at least), and a journal.

Now, lots of people will say “screw this, for my $850 I’m buying a laptop.” Sure, a laptop is nice, and you can run Windows/Linux/OS X and do whatever the heck you want on it, but I don’t want or need that kind of horsepower on my lap. It’s in my office. What I do want to do is surf easily from the couch, and not have to worry about defragmenting my C: drive or that my CPU temperature alarm is going off. I want it to work. The Newton delivered on this, and if these Pepper guys can hit the same mark, I want in.