Revamped Pepper Pad may be coming soon

[Bob Russell]

Internet tablets are consistently drawing early excitement, but never seem to live up to the hype. Most notably, we've seen the Pepper Pad and the Nokia 770 devices create a lot of interest, but they just don't appear to be wildly popular.

The makers of the Pepper Pad are hoping to change that situation with the upcoming release of Pepper Pad version 2 this summer. If you recall, the original Pepper Pad is a sturdy and easy to use Linux-based wireless device for web browsing, music and video, ebook reading. It has about 20gig storage, and is meant to handle these sorts of activities well, not to be a laptop or tablet PC replacement. It's most distinctive feature is the split keyboard the is thumb operated with a hand on each side of the display.

The new version was spotted by Mobile Tech Review, at the Connections show where they had the opportunity to meet with Pepper. The new model is going to be slightly smaller, and will sport a 7" display with 800 x 480 resolution. It will lose the SD card slot, but will gain 2 USB 2.0 ports, a faster processor, and will run "version 2.6 of the Linux Kernel with the Insyde BIOS (no more MontaVista embedded)."

It will also be cheaper than the original Pepper Pad, coming in at about $500 instead of the original model's $849 list price. This one might just be coming into the sweet spot for internet tablets, and with a large enough screen to be desireable for the general user.

But like the upcoming Origami devices, it probably still suffers from anemic battery life. The original version only got about 2 hrs for surfing or watching video. E-Book reading was better on that first device (with the display dimmed), and provided about 5hrs of activity. But that's marginal at best, and it's hard to imagine that it will have been doubled or tripled with the new device.

Unfortunately, as a result, this device may repeat the same old pattern... lot's of excitement generated, but not really something that people will want to buy and use.

So the suspense continues - who will be the first to not just climb partway up the mountain of user acceptance, but reach the peaks of a wildly popular internet tablet that sells well and is loved by users? Coming soon I hope!

[Snappy!]

Interesting isn't it? Pepper is actually delivering a $500 webpad without first promising anything. Whereas MS promised the $500 baseline but its OEM cronies are not delivering on it ... yet.