The PepperPad cometh

DEMOmobile 2004 starts today, a bit of a geekfest down in Southern Cal. About thirty companies demonstrate their product live on stage, in six minute increments.

The idea is that this process provides an entertaining insight into "what's next". In some cases the products make it and in some cases they don't (remember Digital Sun?).

One thing I've heard of down there is PepperPad. This is interesting. It's basically a panel computer with the Mozilla browser built-in and using WiFi you can access news, your music file collection, etc. It has an interesting "split QWERTY" keyboard

It actually looks pretty robust - one of my concerns about anything like this is whether it would survive my kids playing with it, spilling something on it and dropping it (an inevitability). Not sure about the spill-proofing but as a computer to leave on the kitchen counter or wherever and pick up to check mail and stuff it seems like a good one.

One issue is the price -$800. For that I can buy two rockin' Dell PCs! My brother just bought a Viewsonic Airpanel re-furbished for about half that price on-line.

But it's no PepperPad. If I get one in my hands I'll let you know if and how it really fits into the Digital Dad lifestyle.

Comments

[Ingomar]

Well it came in third in PCMag's "the Worst Products of 2005". - http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1891472,00.asp