I was looking at buying a Nokia N900, as I like the Nokia telephones very much and have been a user of the Nokia Communicator 9300 and currently use an E71. The N900 could have been a great platform as it promises full userland programmatical access to all APIs. Except that the Maemo 5 platform is basically dead with the announcement of the MeeGo joint venture between Nokia and Intel. As MeeGo uses RPM instead of the Debian packaging format, it's highly unlikely that backports of applications or OS fixes will be available for any time longer than 1 year or so. And the software is a big part…

No, this is not a post about the iPad. I don't own one.

I recently acquired an ASUS EEE Top 1602, a nice touch-screen all-in-one PC. I bought it to serve as a music player for my stereo. So far, Ubuntu Netbook Remix works almost completely out of the box. Almost completely, except for the nice "brightness", "volume", "webcam" buttons, and the blue LED that brightly lights up the bottom of the machine, somewhat undermining its intended use as an auditory appliance instead of Center of Digital Media Attention. Under the preinstalled Windows, there is an application which can convenientl…