Tablets I can use for orbiters

[tschak909]

Where are some good tablets roughly the size of the ones I keep seeing in the Pluto and LinuxMCE demonstrations, that I can use? I'm sure even those models are a few years old now and are cheaply available? doesn't matter....

I'm also looking at the Asus R2H and a few other UMPC devices as well as orbiters....

-Thom

[darrenmason]

Thom,

Nokia 770 or the N800 have got to be the best value for money for that sort or device.
The Nokia 770 were selling for under $140  from some US internet sites.

I have connection problems with my 770 which apparently do not occur with the N800 so that would be the suggestion.

UMPC's still seem to be quite expensive to me and are probably overkill as it is only going to be acting as an orbiter so it doesn't need to have too much processing power.

Nite_man (who frequents these forums) has done an excellent job of compiling the Orbiter for the Nokia web tablets and according to a recent post he has now uploaded all the dependent libraries into the maemo repository so installing should be as simple as any other Nokia 770 application.

Regards
Darren

[tschak909]

Yeah, I'm using a Nokia 770 at present, and while it does work, the bugs are a bit maddening.. I do understand that the N800 works better..and I might sell my 770 later and get an N800 or an N810.

I was looking for something larger, tablet sized, and a couple of years old, so that I could experiment with larger form factor devices as orbiters.. I see those tablets on Plutohome's site...but what the hell are they?

-Thom

[1audio]

The Samsung Q1 is the one on the demo and it works well. Better really as an orbiter than as a PC. Its been replaced so the price will drop. They were $800 and they still seem to be. However there is one on eBay for 400 but it will go up. It should work on almost and tablet PC, but the early ones required a stulus to work.

[Zaerc]

see also: http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Category:WebPads

[diamondcobra]

I have 10 Toshiba m200 tablets that we used for a project a couple years ago and collecting dust now.  They boot from the network simple enough, since thats how you restore them if you screw them up.  They have s-video out, bluetooth, etc built in too.  You can get them for <$500 now online.

Drawback is that touchscreen requires a special stylus.

Has anyone used these as a media director/orbiter?

[tschak909]

diamondcobra: try it.. download the orbiter from the web admin and install it directly onto the tablet.

-Thom

[RDAC]

I use a compaq tablet pc with a 1ghz transmeta processor. If you can find those things, they work great and have the rotate-out keyboard if you need it.

[SlipStreamElectronics]

R2Hv here. had a couple problems getting it going but overall works good.

[jeangot]

Hello,

I use a Fujitsu C500 which has a nice size 8.4'' screen and can be had used on Ebay for around $150, so it's a great value too.
The wifi connection works via a PCMCIA card that some sellers include on Ebay. I had no problems running the binary orbiter on it under widnows (it uses 98 or 2000 or something).
I did not try network booting it as an orbiter (to try and play music and see if it would do video). Since you can't do this via wifi, you would need a craddle and could perhaps do it with wired ethernet.

It could be nice if someone could find a way to network boot via wired, then have the wireless interface take over so that you can undock the tablet and walk around in the house :-)
Some people have sucessfully installed Ubuntu on it, so if/when disked MDs return, that could be an option too...

Jean

EDIT: an important thing I forgot to mention is that the screen only works decently when using the stylus. If you try to use your fingers, you have to press very hard and it's not comfortable. I didn't find how to change this via driver or settings so far