@(Unverified) Ummm, that'd be great, except EDGE on a good day is maybe 1/4 the speed of EVDO on bad day. You must not understand the technologies involved to even suggest comparing the two.

You don't need a phone that can be used in multiple countries on multiple carriers in the US like you do in Europe. In Europe, if you drive an hour from your house, you'll probably be in a completely different country on a completely different carrier. In the US, you can drive for DAYS and still be in the same country and on the same carrier. The only time an average American needs an unlocked GSM phone is when they leave the country, which is much less frequent than an average European simply due to geography. Every time I leave the US, I do just what brian suggests - bring a cheap unlocked GSM phone and pick up a SIM card when I arrive. Why would I want to use a crap service everyday so I can use my phone when I'm on vacation once a year?

Yeah the processor is definitely a downgrade. It's like comparing a 3.0GHz P4 to a 2.8GHz i7 Not only is the CPU an older and slower architecture, it also lacks the GPU and DSP of the OMAP3. I'm guessing this is more of a feature-smart phone.

It's not really that simple. Your example devices deal with very finite set of encoding formats allowing the use of FPGAs or ASICs. For a media player that you expect to be able to play any format you throw at it, hardware codecs won't work. The solution is to use a special purpose CPU that can perform software decoding at a lower CPI than a general purpose CPU. This is what the NVidia GPU and the TI DSP does.

Just to clarify, the Beagle board CAN both decode and encode 720p in real-time because of the DSP in the OMAP3 processor. My guess is they haven't gotten the DSP stuff worked out and are using software codecs that take advantage of the Cortex A8 NEON extensions. TI has done a lot of work with the open source community to get this stuff working and I'm pretty sure there are open source gstreamer plugins that can move this decoding off to the DSP - it's just a matter of them getting it integrated in XBMC.

Oh, and the OMAP4s can do 1080p but TI has yet to release an open source version of the device.

And if you can't understand why you'd want to be able do this on a single 1/2" square chip that contains a CPU, GPU, DSP, memory controller, RAM, and FLASH vs an entire PC that's several orders of magnitude larger and consumes an order of magnitude more power, then I'm afraid you are a lost soul here in 2009. The Beagle Board is only as big as it is because it is an evaluation board and breaks out a lot of unneeded functionality - someone could easily come up with a HDMI dongle to do the same thing.

You have no idea what you are talking about. Most of Freescale's business is in the automotive industry, and has nothing to do with Motorola or mobile phones. Their major products are based around the m68k/Coldfire architecture, and I can't think of a single phone, from Motorola or otherwise, that uses this architecture. Crack open your car's ECU though, and you may very well see a Coldfire chip in there.

Freescale has also been producing POWER based SoC's that are serious overkill for mobile phones, but fit right in the netbook/smartbook market.

If you install the Homebrew channel, there is a Duck Hunt available that uses the regular Wiimote. Maybe not as cool as the classic NES gun, but it works well.

Yeah and Sweden also has something like twice the income tax of the US - i think I'll spend the extra $50 and keep the thousands more I'll be saving on taxes, thanks

power consumption - 802.11 radios suck down power like it's going out of style, while Bluetooth is very low power. The Bluetooth radio manages the connection, allowing the 802.11 radio to be on only when higher throughput is needed. Pretty good idea actually.

I just hope you can turn off the 802.11 as I find myself relying on BT more for power consumption than anything else.

I just want to point out that these drives are SLOW - 34 MB/s read, 28 MB/s write.

If you want to upgrade the SSD in your Eee, I HIGHLY recommend checking out one of RunCore's *SATA* PCIe SSD offerings. They are by far the fastest I've seen - 125 MB/s read, 95 MB/s write - and are relatively cheap too. They have 16, 32, 64, and 128 GB models. I recently got one for my 900A and it is honestly worth every penny for the performance and storage boost.