The Ben NanoNote, manufactured by Qi-Hardware, is now officially available. Qi Hardware is copyleft hardware. Copyleft hardware is hardware where all information needed for its production is free. You are left with physical goods on one side, and free information on the other side. The Ben NanoNote shows the versatility and strength of OpenWrt as embedded platform by combining limited system resources with a full color screen and keyboard, in a convenient pocket-size.   

Ben NanoNote: Technical specifications

* 336 MHz XBurst Jz4720 MIPS-compatible CPU
* display: 3.0” color TFT
* resolution: 320 x 240, 16.7M color
* dimension (mm): 99 x 75 x 17.5 (lid closed)
* weight: 126 g (incl. battery)
* DRAM: 32MB Synchronous DRAM
* headphone jack (3.5 mm)
* SDHC microSD
* 850mAh Li-ion battery
* 2GB NAND flash memory
* mini-USB: USB 2.0 High-Speed Device
* speaker and microphone
* full qwerty keyboard
* Fueled by OpenWrt

Further information can be found through the following links:

http://en.qi-hardware.com

http://sharism.cc/

A cool device, but only has 32MB RAM. For 99€ (plus shipping), I would probably buy something else, i.e. Asus RT-N16 Multi-Functional Gigabit Wireless N router, etc.

(Last edited by mazilo on 16 Mar 2010, 17:10)

Mazilo:  Agreed 32MB was, I think, a poor decision, but with 16.7m colour display, keyboard and battery I would say this is overall reasonable value for money.  It all depends what hardware you need I guess.

If only it had some kind of network conectivity....

105$ instead of 100$, but with ethernet would make sense. I think it is a physical size problem.

LOL ... You are right! I thought the device had some sort of network conectivity.

It's usb is not a host usb.

The company behind this product is working on something that "maybe" has host usb.

Ahh... I managed to miss this one!  I'm not sure the keyboard and screen make up for this.  USB host is a must for this money, even if it only supports full (not high) speed devices.

I am really tempted to buy one, but without host usb/network, there is no way to have any kind of connectivity

Well, that's not true.
It has an microSDIO-slot and therefore capabilities of expanding the functionality with SDIO-peripherals as e.g. WIFI-cards (yes, microSDIO WIFI cards _do_ exist )

Cheers

mirko

That's true; however, by the time you make this device WiFi-able, your investment on this device + its WiFi cards makes it too costly.