On Tuesday I hosted the second San Francisco Ubuntu Hour. We had four people in attendance (thanks for dropping by James, Grant and Michelle!).
It ended up being quite an evening for gadgets. As is typical, I brought along my mini9 and Grant showed up with his ever popular OLPC laptop.
Then Michelle showed up with a couple awesome toys! She had her HP Compaq TC1100, a tablet PC from 2005 that she has a couple of. The one she brought along was running Ubuntu 10.04 and she showed us screen rotation, how well the stylus worked and the nice docking station that goes with it. She writes a great post comparing it to an iPad on her blog: Meet Paddy-Pad, the new tablet in town.
She also brought along a Pandigital Novel, a $169 Android touchscreen device that’s sold at Bed Bath & Beyond. It was hacked back to a default Android navigation screen, the default one on the Novel being a bit slow. It’s a really cute 7″ full color device, and a default 800 x 600 resolution. I have to admit, after seeing it I was very tempted to head down to the store and pick one up for myself! But I think I’ll hold off until more of these cheap touchscreen devices start hitting the market. My planned use for it? Perfect RSS (and pdfs, and maybe even an e-book or two?) reading device.
In all, a very fun Ubuntu Hour, and I wish it could have gone longer! The coffee shop I selected for this is only open until 7, which really makes it so that our hour can’t go beyond that. There are a few other coffee shops in the area so I’ll be scouting those over the next few weeks to see if I want to alter the monthly Hour location.
What’s this Ubuntu Hour thing anyway? Check out more info over on the Ubuntu wiki, including how to plan your own (hint: it’s very, very simple!)