Uhm, am I not already paying for bandwidth?

The only way I can see for them to enforce this is to build (another) walled garden. They would have to prevent us from installing anything outside of their market. They would also have to make the development process more than the 3-step youtube model. This $2 charge would have to be per customer per month which would mean recurring charges. Please oh please, don't let them turn this into another closed up tight thing, like the sidekick. I hope we will know in time to send it back, because I'm not doing the walled garden thing again.

They're still taking pre-orders, I finally gave in to my enthusiasm.

The battery holds about 16000 Watt-Hours and you'd be lucky to get 1000 Watt-hours from a days worth of an exercise bike.

Cuz the battery holds 16000 Watt-Hours and you'd be lucky to get 100 Watt-hours from a solar panel parked in bright sun all day. That's roughly enough to extend your range by a 1/4 mile. Why bother?

I was pretty bummed to hear about this cap. I calculated that it would be gone pretty quick if you were streaming a radio station. It would take about 12 hours or about 30 minutes a day. The only saving grace here is that most of us are probably around wi-fi most of the time. I wonder how the battery life is on wi-fi? I'm on AIM 24x7 (using sidekick now) and I'll be disappointed if I can't get through the whole day on one charge.

It might be interesting to note that when the sidekick originally came out, we were told that we would be charged for bandwidth after the first 15 megabytes per month. It never happened.

The MSI Wind barebones is about the same, maybe a bit bigger, for $150 at NewEgg. I added 2G of RAM for $50 and put a SATA drive in it that I already had. It's now running ubuntu-server and serving up my music to a Squeezebox. It's very close to silent and has cycles to burn even though it's just an Atom.

Is it safe to assume that the data describing the lanes on these high-end devices is just as out-of-date as the maps on my low-end garmin? When will they figure out a way to update in a timely manner? When will they figure out that the streets in my neck of the woods are important to me even if they're not important to anybody else? It sounds like TomTom is onto something with the community updates, but I hear it's not powerful enough.

I'm dying to know:

* How's the battery life
* How's the speaker
* How's the vibrate

These are the things that have varied between versions of the sidekick and I would be worried about them if I decide to get this.

I'd also like to know if there's an even better one just around the corner. I know this one's kind of a cost-reduced sidekick lx, so I'm wondering if I should hold out for one in, say, October?

Cool! They finally went with a USB charging port. My big question is the speaker and vibrate. I'd be coming from the SK3 which has a pretty wimpy speaker and just barely enough vibrate. The SK2 was much better in this regard. Does anybody know yet, how well this one will fare?

--Paul