If you read through the recent /. discussion about MS Surface, many (myself included) like the concept of one device that functions as a tablet AND a netbook but aren't sold on MS' vision because of
(a) Complaints about the kickstand and robustness
(b) Heat and noise from using a Core i5 instead of an ARM/Atom
(c) Price
(d) Queasiness about Windows 8 and the metro interface.

If Google came out with a Asus Transformer clone in place of Chromebooks, these would sell arguably *better* than a neutered version of Gentoo that only runs Google services and lacks the app ecosystem of Android. This is not to say that Android is perfect for laptop use but Samsung were addressing the L&F aspect with their window manager concept.

Which is fine if you're a yank or a pom. Amazon is often more expensive than other book retailers since, last I checked, they charge for international shipping. Nor did they even process overseas orders for electronics.

Have they sanitized the bootloader yet?

I seem to remember reading that ChromeOS would load by default and that to boot into, say, Ubuntu one had to hold down some keys on startup and manually select an OS. i.e. it wasn't possible just to automatically load one's preferred OS on startup.

Purists might contend that lisp, ocaml or haskell are the only ways to grok functional programming. Nevertheless, a functional/OO hybrid that runs on the JVM might be a nice complement to the ubiquitous Java courses this kid may encounter. (Do they still use Java as a teaching language?!)

Combine that with the fact that Blackberry centralizes all emails and BBMs to go through its own centralized servers in Canada, the UK, the US, and Australia, even if you're just sending a BBM to a person sitting across from you in a non-Anglo country. And it's no wonder that several European countries believe that RIM (now Blackberry) is just a front for the US/UK/Canadian/Australian Echelon program.

I'm an Anglo residing in one of those countries. Should I be concerned about BigBrother-over-BlackBerry? Or should I just have faith that yankee doodle Uncle Sam hasn't partnered up with US companies? Android (Google), WP8 (Microsoft) or iOS (Apple) could all equally be infiltrated by 'them'.

Meh, I'll just get one of those cheap Huawei phones. :)

Well the reviews have the kickstand as an ergonomic failure. It's a novel design but functionally, other convertible designs seem to do the job better - e.g. Asus Transformer, Dell Inspiron Duo, HP envy x2.

Haskell has bindings for Gtk+ if you want a statically typed language without the bloat of a VM (Java/c#).

Virtualization?

Wouldn't it be less work to
      - get kvm/xen working on your phone or tablet? The ARM v7a architecture defines virtualization extensions, paving the way to run Android AND Gnu/Linux simultaneously with minimal performance overhead (relative to one's 2GB quad core smart phone)
      - run android-x86 in a window via virtualbox? Less mucking around than porting desktop Linux to Android or Dalvik to Xorg?

efforts were underway by KDE to port Calligra to Android.

http://blogs.kde.org/node/4521

Possibly the core libraries are GPL. So any linkage becomes a derivate work.

By contrast, gcc is GPL but the the gnu libc contains a linking exception so that the resulting binary is exempt. Similarly with openjdk.

OpenJDK under the GPL ain't free enough for you? You suggest Harmony was 'freer', with reference to some obscure website that rejects the Apache license as well. Hmmm.

Indeed, like any client GUI, an 'app' will only run faster to the extent that its logic is parallelized.

I thought a main benefit of multiple cores was potentially to achieve the same amount of work at lower clock speeds. i.e. by delegating background processes to the secondary/tertiary/quaternary cores, the OS can run with fewer battery-draining CPU spikes.

Agreed, 'revolutionary' makes me envisage Ernesto Guevara with a scruffy beard and a beret. Nevertheless...

To be honest, the hardware looks rather mundane - borrowing none of the sleek lines that Samsung "stole" from Apple. ;-)

But amongst OS aficionados, QNX is the business - a real-time embedded kernel that supposedly would leave Linux/XNU in the dust on phones (whoops, is such a statement considered blasphemy in these parts?!) A revolution? probably not but providing souped up multi-tasking of Android apps, continuing the Qt legacy of Meego/Symbian and providing enterprise services that made it the original BB a hit is at least a challenger to the bring-your-own-phone culture that has seen BB lose market share.

Yes, it has POSIX compatibility and uses netbsd's pkgsrc ports collection. Thus subject to compatible licensing and 'linuxisms', it should be possible to re-package software written for other Qt-based platforms (open webOS, Nemo, Plasma Active, Ubuntu Mobile).