@JForce

I got a MID from Ownta and other than requiring a speaker replacement at one point it's been fine, cost me £25 for shipping to the UK mind which is a bit over the top..

Also, you can send back hardware if it fails and they'll sort out the warranty replacement for you.

It was the SmartQ 5 I bought, small MID, runs ubuntu by default but you can put Android on it which nips along quite nicely on the hardware.

@Dapman02

Losing dammit!

Yes, go to voguemalls for only the finest chinese knockoffs!

that said, some of those places aren't bad, ownta.com is good for electronics, wouldn't trust anyone spamming here as far as I could throw my house though -.o

I'm pretty sure that plug wouldn't pass any safety tests and I don't see anywhere for a fuse to go

I've a DS adapter with pins that fold into the plug when not in use but it's flimsy as anything

The plug is a good design anyway, replacing a smaller round pin design that was still fairly common up until the early 1980s

Not had any issues with the current plugs (although people who make chubby plug in transformers that obstruct two other sockets on a 4 way strip should be locked up. or shot.)

Heh

I thought the buffalo speaker was kinda neat actually, my vote goes for the mickey webcam -.o

Grr, engadget ate most of my comment...

It is only $50 after all, if it keeps your kids quiet on a long car trip it's likely paid for itself already

Some of these can take MD/Genesis games too with an adapter (or n in 1 carts containing genesis games)

DX sell those too if you look through all their dodgy chinese handhelds

Actually this doesn't look bad for the money

It /is/

Hihi

At one time, around a third of all failed hard disks I had in for repair were Western Digital Caviar drives, most of them had the same failure mode too which involved the drive repeatedly smashing its heads off the stops at irregular intervals, fun -.o

Hihi

The curious thing is Apple weren't always like this

When they sold the Apple ][ computer, (a fairly revolutionary machine at the time) it came with a hardware reference manual containing a fold out schematic, they were pretty much begging you to use their technology in new and interesting ways, modify it and do whatever you wished really

Can you imagine buying a Commodore 64 computer and only being able to run Commodore software on it? would it have been the best selling 8 bit computer of all time if they had? I suspect it wouldn't have. Would the Apple ][ have made it into most US schools if it hadn't been possible for the schools to make whatever changes they needed? I don't think so...

Somewhere in the last 25 years, the manufacturers of consumer electronics have lost their way, they've forgotten who pays their wages, who they're here to serve

If I spend my hard earned cash on a piece of electronics it should be up to me and me alone how I use it, I have paid for it, it is my property. It is not up to a company who no longer owns this device to tell me how I can use it.

This isn't an isolated case either, if you've not heard of trusted computing it's well worth reading this article: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.html

The real question here is who is the master?, you or the company you bought your hardware from.

Hihi

This device has no directional pad or by the looks of it hardware buttons of any description

This means that despite the nice spec it'll be completely useless for gaming, emulation etc.

Shame really :(