There's absolutely nothing wrong with ARM for the target device here. "Just another ARM knockoff" is quite insulting to the amount of work that has gone into this... the value of this isn't necessarily in the CPU anyway but in everything else that's on that board. The FPGA, headers and just generally the incredibly geeky ideas that are realized here are fundamentally cool... and yes, I'll gladly put my money where my mouth is. I would love one of these!

So much freaking negativity on here about this. I for one think this is a really cool project... and oddly enough actually fits the tagline of "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters".

I have read several pages of comments and so far there have been only a very small handful of positive comments, while I think this is one of the coolest and most exciting things I've seen in a while. If this goes to a Kickstarter campaign then I for one am all over it. The very idea of building a laptop with everything I want and nothing I don't (including R-Pi headers and some really freaking cool ports on the board for getting down-and-dirty with the hardware) just excites me. I want one, and I will not be dissuaded from that opinion. Come on; an integrated FPGA that you can turn to any task you like? How many laptops have that? The PWM headers mean that you can take one of these motherboards and make it the brain of your own robot... an incredibly powerful one compared to most of the hobbyist kit that's out there.

I would ask what happened to the Slashdot that I used to love, but I think I already have a pretty good idea.

Bingo. I'd probably buy half a dozen of these to build out as really powerful and small firewall boxes (no screen, headless and so on) for some of my customers.

My experience is; not really. The contrast on my Kindle Keyboard (about two years old) is actually no worse to my eyes than a printed hardback book. Really; I can barely see much difference between them. I find the contrast perfectly acceptable for reading, and definitely less straining than trying to read on a backlit colour LCD. I honestly think Amazon made a very conscious decision to make the contrast and screen "colour" to match a printed paper book as close as possible. Most people liked it, but some like GP did not and preferred to have a screen with greater contrast. While the "paperwhite" is definitely better, it's not an upgrade I'm going to sink money into at the moment because I just don't care. My Kindle is definitely good enough, and I'll maybe upgrade when I either break or lose my current Kindle.

I think the people who complain about the contrast are those who think the paper in the average hardback or paperback is actually white... it isn't! :)

Great... except that the reflective qualities of the tablet screen means that you have to find just the right angle to stop seeing everything going on out in the sun behind you. That and the fact that you've got to sit in the shade in just such a position that you can somehow support the weight of the tablet held in both hands... and do that retarded skeuomorphic "swipe" to change to the next page... which really makes no sense on a tablet device or any electronic device.

I shall walk in the sun, and read in the sun like a human being. We've all got to die of something.

Exactly. The Kindle and Nook have both been on sale for several years; the have had a long time to gain the market penetration they have today. While I don't doubt that the tablets have impacted eReader sales, I think the fact is that as you said these are devices designed for a singular purpose and fulfill that singular purpose so well that there's no need to pitch and replace every year like people do with an iPad. Hell, I purchased my first Kindle at the same time as I got a first-gen iPad. While that original Kindle is still working great (though superseded by a newer model only because I dropped and broke the case on the original Kindle), that original iPad is now unsupported for upgrades, and its battery life is waning fast. That Kindle can still read the same books I read on my newer one and does it just as well... that old iPad can barely run some more recent apps, and even some older apps that I used to depend on have received updates that broke them on the iPad.

I have a newer iPad which truthfully is barely used except for checking my email and surfing the web when I'm eating breakfast at a hotel (more convenient than lugging my laptop downstairs). My Android phone in many ways is superior to the iPad... but the Kindle is still far superior to both of them when I'm on a plane or sitting on a beach in bright sunshine wanting to read a book.

Mmmhmm... Canon and Nikon are really hurting for people buying their newest cameras right now because of the OMGAWESOME camera in the iPhone 5...

That's very true... but as a general rule I'd say you're an exception. The vast majority of people who buy an eReader also use the store that it's tied to. Same with tablets; particularly with Android tablets it's relatively trivial to side-load free apps but the majority of people who buy them use the apps they can buy.

I have a lot of free content on my Kindle as well, but I also spend a decent amount at Amazon every month (including an Audible subscription) because sometimes I just get a hankering to read something specific while sitting at the gate at an airport.

+1

Last year I had my Kindle with me when I spent two weeks in Bavaria. I completely forgot to bring the charger with me for my Kindle so I just turned off wireless unless I really needed it (like twice during the entire trip) and still had enough battery left to read "Freedom, tm" by Daniel Suarez during the flight home.

My counterpoint to this is simply the bulk; I love my Kindle Keyboard that I've had for about two years now because I travel a lot... both personally and business. Carrying books around in a carry-on is a pain and as my girlfriend discovered when we returned from Ireland two years ago having a large number of books really confuses TSA agents. I wish I were kidding!

Now having said that, there is an argument here that a tablet would be even better still since it can do so much and is really small. I would agree with that except that I have an iPad and have had a few Android tablets. Honestly; the form factor sucks for reading anything but magazine-style stuff. Actual books; the Kindle is FAR superior. The iPad I have to hold in both hands and because of its weight have to hold it with something supporting my arm to be comfortable. The Kindle is so light and compact that I can hold it in one hand and still turn pages back and forth with my thumb. It's also dead-easy to bookmark ("dog-ear") a page at any point and even sync those bookmarks and your current read page to the "cloud" so when (if) you do fire up the Kindle app on your phone, iPad or whatever you can continue where you left off, or open a specific bookmark.

The Nexus 7 and iPad Mini are better form factors for reading, but you still have the issue of weight. Also, you can't turn the page with one hand... you have to use the rather retarded "page swipe" or call up an onscreen menu and click a button. This puts you back in a two-handed mode which is rather uncomfortable for long periods of time.

This year my vacation for myself and my son was to a beach. Having the Kindle to kick back on the sand and read a book while my son had a blast in the sand and sea was a godsend. I did try the iPad briefly on the first day and hated trying to ignore reflections, peer at the relatively dimly lit screen etc.

Have tablets impacted sales of eReaders? Yes... and they will continue to do so. Will they supplant them? Of that I am far less sure; my Kindle is also incredibly handy for technical documentation and a friend of mine uses his for carrying around maintenance documents for some of the steel cutting and bending machinery as well as CNC machines he works on. He tried an Android tablet and in that manufacturing environment the screen was broken in about three days. The Kindle... OK he's on his third because of breakage but with a good case they last one hell of a lot longer than the tablet. That and the battery life; you use an iPad as an eReader and the battery life is not great... the Kindle he just throws it on a charger occasionally. For him it's a huge improvement on the old way of going to find the maintenance books (which are huge!) before working on one of them. Maybe eReaders are a bit of a niche product... but they always were. But I don't think it's a niche that's going away.

I for one will buy another similar Kindle if/when I kill or lose the one I have.

I went through almost the same process as you, and pretty much settled on the exact configuration you had up until a couple of months ago.

While I was at VMworld I played with Zimbra in their hands-on labs and decided I wanted to check it out. When I found out that there's a free version available I figured that I would stand up a virtual machine and play with it. You know what? I liked it. It's a bit heavy being a Java app, but it integrates a really nice web interface with the same backend components I was running before; Procmail, Spamassassin and so on... and the web interface is a lot more capable than Roundcube, integrating calendar and contact stuff quite nicely. Once I discovered that I could also use "Z-Push" to create an unsupported but perfectly functional ActiveSync compatible front end... well I was sold right then. Sure, the Z-Push took a lot of trial and error, but once I got it working it just is slick as all get out. I have an iPhone, iPad and my Android phone all hooked up to it, as well as my son's aging Windows Mobile phone.

I will say as a caveat though that you do have to be a bit careful; make sure you're using a supported OS and don't jump ahead on patching unless you've taken a system snapshot first (I had it break on an early version with Ubuntu 10... once I moved to the latest Zimbra and 12.04 I have had no problems with other patches either, but I am still a bit more gun-shy than I was with my self-bakes email server). Zimbra does have a lot of dependencies and though most of them are baked into the package (MySQL, Postfix, Spamassassin etc) any one of the others does run the risk of breaking stuff. Still, that's what snapshots are for.

I must admit, I like the fact that I have this nice slick interface, my phone working and even database replication to a remote host thanks to using ZFS for my entire /opt filesystem and a script that replicates it nicely... plus I don't really have to do much to keep it running. I gave the box 2 cores and 4GB of ram, dialed down the swappiness and it just runs. With 10 average users it runs a load average of 0.25 or thereabouts most of the time... and as of right now has an uptime of 56 days. Oh, there's also a desktop client for Mac, Windows and Linux that basically works like an offline version of the web interface... it's not perfect but very usable for offline mail use.

And to feed into the original question; there's actually a very good local desktop app that works great. I know; I use it for my mail server. You can also with a bit of leg work get an unsupported but functional ActiveSync setup for your mobile devices that works awesome called z-push (I use version 2.0.2 because it just works pretty damned slick with both my Android and iPhone devices).

I will say though that I find the desktop client quite buggy when you add external accounts like GMail and the like. It never seems to finish sync until I've restarted it three or four times... so I just use Thunderbird for my GMail account with Zimbra for my own hosted account (which I'm trying to get people to use more).

For bonus points of course, it's all just Linux at the end of the day so you can get really creative with it. I installed it on Ubuntu 12.04 instead of using the appliance because I wanted to use ZFS as my data store and I have a script that replicates it to another server nightly in case of a server failure. On top of that for a time I had an IMAP client that ran on it connecting to GMail and then feeding all my mail back into a folder on the Zimbra server... but because I couldn't "reply as" it was useless... but is certainly doable if you want to just always reply from your Zimbra account.

Combine all this with a free StartCom certificate and you're golden... and despite being "heavy" (Java), it is a damned good mail system and the web interface is pretty damned slick.

Bumblebee. I use it, and it works.

Incorrect; Bumblebee allows you to boot into Intel and run Optimus stuff on the Nvidia with a simple command of "/usr/bin/optirun (application)". I use it all the time and it works great on a couple of different Optimus-equipped laptops I've tested it on. On my own Alienware M11xR2 I can get 4 and a half hours out the battery if I don't run 3D stuff... about 2 and a half when I do.

If you're into hardcore 3D gaming there's also the NVidia Optimus, which while I know is the solution that OP is complaining about is also supportable with Bumblebee (http://bumblebee-project.org/). It works fantastically well on my Alienware, and I've tested it on a Dell Latitude E6430 with great success (before I put Windows 8 on it for work). Power consumption is also great because I'm using Intel graphics most of the time for the desktop and only running the NVidia when I want to fire up Diaspora or FlightGear.