Not Just Another Netbook

Rather, a home-grown one with some nice touches:

The webbook is manufactured by the UK electronics company Elonex and is being sold exclusively by The Carphone Warehouse.

The webbook is a high specification UMPC that has a 1.6Ghz Via C7 processor (x86), 512Mb of RAM and [currently] an 80G HDD. The screen has a very usable 1024×600 resolution and it has the usual assortment of USB, LAN and an SD socket, plus built in WiFi too. We have setup a blog specifically for the webbook here so users can get access to all the latest news, tips and advice. Be sure to add it to your feed reader.

The really cool thing about the webbook is the software. The webbok comes pre-loaded with Ubuntu 8.04.1 and some new software written especially for this application that delivers broadband connectivity over 3G Mobile networks.

Boingo Goes Open Source

Wow.

Here's Boingo, which

provides software technology and roaming services that help bring the wireless Internet to the masses. The company has assembled a large and rapidly growing roaming system with tens of thousands of hot spot locations under contract around the world. Boingo also invented the world's most powerful software for discovering and connecting to hot spots and 3G wireless networks.

And here's Boingo going open source:

Boingo Wireless today announced the Boingo Embedded Wi-Fi Toolkit, an open source software package that enables developers to integrate Wi-Fi connection management to any Wi-Fi hot spot – including the more than 45,000 public hot spots that are part of the Boingo Roaming System – into small form factor devices such as dual-mode phones, VoIP handsets, mobile gaming consoles and other portable devices.

There's a great analysis at Wi-Fi Networking News on what this all means:

This open-source effort for detection and connection coupled with Devicescape’s similarly focused open-source release of its Wi-Fi authentication and encryption package could produce enormously better hotspot support in completely open projects with no connection to for-fee hotspots and in commercial projects that currently lack the finesse, exhaustiveness, or ease of either Boingo or Devicescape’s packages.

What's happening is that all the pieces are starting to fall into place for true, open wireless connectivity, as the open mantra takes over yet another conceptual domain. But more of that anon....

For now, let's just say "wow".