That might not be cheap enough if you ask us. $500 is not far short of what you’d probably pay for 500 Amtek T700’s with Windows licenses. Those UMPCs retail for anything up to $1000. The Pepper Pad 3 retails for $630 so I imagine if you buy 500 of those you’ll get them for well under $500.
The H9 ultra mobile PC is a Linux based device which isn’t a major problem in itself but it creates a few marketing hurdles and as its RISC-based there will be even more hurdles – software development could remain fairly static unless a community of developers is built. Only Nokia and Pepper Computer have succeeded in creating communities based around RISC-based Linux distros and even Pepper pulled out of that market when they introduced a much more sensible x86 version of their Pepper Pad. Nokia/Maemo still has a very active development community for its RISC platform and we guess that’s largely due to the Internet Tablets unchallenged market positioning and the Nokia brand. If someone dropped an x86 version of the N800 then you’d probably see a speedy gathering of Linux fans and developers following shortly after. Luckily for Nokia, that’s probably not so likely at the moment. x86 brings a lot of size, heat and power requirements. Only the CoreFusion System On Chip and the low-end AMD Geode processors could enable a Nokia Tablet sized Linux UMPC.
So in a nutshell, unless they’ve done a superb job on developing the software interface, we don’t think this one has got what it takes.
Via Pocketables.
