Ok, maybe this device is not an iPad killer - the iPad is an impressive piece of technology with an impressive price tag. What we have here is the sub $100 China version: A 7" Wifi enabled touch screen running Android 1.6 for the price a digital picture frame was a year ago.

I had my unit for a few weeks now and in spite of some shortcomings, the unit was worth the money. The processor, running at 350Mhz, is not the fastest and makes the pad a bit unresponsive at times. Also, a hardware video decoder would be nice, since currently the pad only plays iPod style mp4s.

So what are the specs? It took a bit to be actually sure about this, but based on forum posts and data sheets, the following seems to be true:

- VIA/WonderMedia WM8505 at 350Mhz (yes, even plenty of sites claim 600Mhz.
- 7" TFT LCD 800x480 with resistive touch screen (no multi-touch)
- 128MB DDR2 SDRAM (running at 600Mhz?)
- 2GB Internal flash for OS and preinstalled apps (1.5GB or so available)
- Wifi (internal) b,g
- Internal LiPo battery, lasts 2-4 hours depending on use (Wifi: 2.5 hours max).
- USB, headphone plug, microphone, G sensor

The unit comes usually with Android 1.6 - the ARM core in the WM8505 is to old to run Android 2.1, so there is not going to be a newer Android version for this device, but Windows CE is also available as a firmware choice.

While this device has some shortcomings, for the price point of just over $100 it is hard to not recommend it regardless.

It is available on DealExtreme.

This is another recent piece of woot-loot I got. For $20 bucks I was able to pick up this Internet-enabled talking weather station plus external wireless sensor. The pitch was to have Internet updated weather forecasts for my location, plus my choice of news feeds, all spoken at the push of a button. On top of that, the unit makes the reading of the local wireless sensor available on the Internet.

When the unit arrived, first impressions were not that great: the unit came in the blister pack from hell. Honestly the worst packaging I have ever encountered. Beyond that, the weather station feels a bit cheap, with one of the volume buttons working but lacking the "click" feel of the other buttons. Included was also a small dongle with an Ethernet port and the wireless external sensor.

The setup of the unit was pretty easy, although the setup is a bit odd - the unit uses an Ethernet dongle to connect via a proprietary 915Mhz signal to the station. Notable was the huge selection forcast location, including local landmarks which enabled me to set the location within a few blocks of my residence. Once done with the setup, the unit set the time correctly, downloaded the forecast and connected to the external sensor. Getting the unit registered with the Weather Club, aka the site were you can see your sensors temperature on the 'net, was a bit more of a hassle, but multiple tries were eventually successful.

The unit does mostly everything that was advertised - the forecast is spoken with computer text-to-speech in an alternating male and female voice, same for the 3 news feeds selectable. While the forecast is pretty useful, the selection of the "news" feeds is more then limited. As a matter of fact, the selection lacks any real "news" and has barely more then a few cnet and zdnet feeds available - the option of custom RSS feeds would be really nice here.
The feature of the station to make your local temperature available over the Internet generally works, but requires the use of the somewhat poor knock-off of My Yahoo! including empty (thanks to adblock) advertisement window - the temperature in anything more usable, like a feed or widget for my site, is missing.

On the good side, a call to Weather Direct's customer service number was handled promptly and was followed thru with an email - compliments to a good US based customer service department.

After a few days I wanted to find out more about the unit, partially motivated by the lack of custom RSS feeds. I look inside the station did not yield much - custom chips all around. I was curious if the unit actually contained a text to speech engine or just downloads compressed audio over the 'net.

I tried to find out more about the Ethernet wireless dongle and came across this site exploring a different Weather Direct model. Based on the info on that page, I hooked my dongle via an old hub to WireShark and started taking a closer look.



The result was unfortunately not what I had hoped - instead of a build in TTS engine the unit just seems to play really low quality mp3 files. I didn't really go much further at that point, since I was hoping for a talking RSS reader and not an wireless low-fi mp3 player.

Beyond the set-back on the TSS engine, the unit is ok. It does what is advertised, although the crappy selection of "news" really hurts the unit in my book. If you like an instant weather forecast and can live with the cheap feel of the unit, for the right price I would go for it again.

The future has arrived in form of the Spykee Wifi robot. While the product is clearly aimed at a young audience, I stumbled across it during a recent Woot-Off and for $100 it became mine, because once you look beyond the toy appearance you will find some interesting stats:

• 200 MHz ARM9
• 32Mb SDRAM
• 4Mb NOR Flash
• WiFi client 802.11b/g
• USB host
• 8-bits VC to control the dual DC motor and control the charge
• 4 status LEDs
• Infrared receiver
• Charge control for the 9.6V NiMH battery
• JTAG / Serial / port i2c port available
• Loudspeaker 8 Ohm 2W
• Audio sampler microphone 16bits / 16 kHz
• Sampler speaker 16bits / 8 to 48 kHz

Yes, you will find all this inside the base of this toy, plus it comes with a web cam with build in microphone and white LED. As the final touch, the unit can self dock and charge.

Since I left most of the plastic junk off the unit (only the webcam actually does anything, everything else is in the base.), I quickly turned this toy into a webcam I can drive around my house from work! My cats are not quite as excited by this:



The unit is controlled via a proprietary software available for Windows and Macs, but the protocol has been deciphered and alternative software is in the early stages of development. The unit can be used in ad-hoc mode or with an access point - and if you know how to open up a few ports, it can then be controlled from anywhere in the world with Internet!

The track drive on the unit works great when it has to overcome an occasional sock or cord, but cannot handle any stairs or otherwise non-flat surfaces. The camera produces good video at 320x240 and the internal speaker and microphone on the unit do their job just fine. Only bad point so far is the battery run time, only around 15-20 mins of driving around time until the unit want to dock again.

In regards to hacking not too much done has been done with this robot, but firmware with USB and NFS mounting capabilities and telnetd running are available. One hardware modification was to add the ability to move the camera up and down to be able to see more - although I found that a $2.58 Wide-Angle "Jelly Lens" works even better to improve the viewing angle.

But even with those shortcomings, this is a great product. I wish it was less aimed at kids and that Meccano would take their developers more seriously, but it is a blast either way.

While the WANSER-R was a great device, a recent upgrades to my storage space finally forced me to move away from FAT32 and in turn away from the WANSER-R.

As a replacement, I picked up the WLX-652 USB NAS from DealExtreme, my preferred Hong Kong seller. Equipped with two USB 2.0 ports and a build in BitTorrent client, plus support for NTFS and EXT2/3 it seemed like a good choice. A few weeks later the unit arrives and first impressions are good as well - the unit feels solid, is well made and seemed to initially work just fine.

However, after using the unit for a few days I quickly noticed some major drawbacks:

- Mounting of NTFS partitions is unreliable and access is quite slow
- The BitTorrent client requires all the units resources, making the SMB server unresponsive
- Worst Part: The unit would crash frequently, especially under high load.

After initially suspecting an overheating problem, I found out that the crashing issue seems to be fairly widespread with this units and even a firmware update did not resolve it. It seems to be a case of sloppy programing of the firmware.

Luckily, it turns out that this sloppy programing had some other side effects: It permits easy access to the units file system and in turn interested a group of users into hacking this device. The unit seems to be running on a Star 8132 system-on-a-chip, has 32MB memory and 4MB flash.

The result, the so called SNAKE OS Linux is not only stable, but has also been updated to contain the latest Transmission BT daemon, SSH support and an improved file system. I am currently running the SNAKE OS Beta 2r1 (and will soon be upgrading to the Beta 3) and I had up times of 10 days and more. You can find SNAKE OS firmware here:

DealExtreme NAS Google Group

Keep in mind that this firmware is beta and installing it may void your warranty, etc. I also want to mention that while this unit still supports NTFS, this support requires a lot of system resources and it is recommended that ext3 or ext2 is used instead, especially when using Transmission.

Update: DealExtreme started shipping a new version of this unit, marked as WLX 652R. The WLX 652R is NOT COMPATIBLE with the Smake OS!