[jalandar]

I dont know, pphilipp. The Mirrorfox video doesn't address things like 3rd party software issues that are widelly reported. And with it going for $125-$175 depending on where you get it and shipping, and with many other sub-$200 devices that are days or weeks from release (such as the Archos 7, which I found out today will ship to me on May 17th), the shortcomings on the Eken M001 really go to the heart of what people expect from a tablet.

Battery life, support for hugely popular 3rd party applications (so popular they should have tested for issues with many of them before they ever thought about shipping), using a buggy release of Android 1.6 that had known issues (the screen orientation issue was known and fixed). I'm not inclined to give it many points.

The best purpose I can see for the Eken myself it for an around the house type device. The battery life alone makes it less than useful for much else.

That said, I did pick one up in a late night ebay auction for under $100 inc shipping, and expect to have it by Monday.

There are enough of them out there that it may develop some hacker interest in seeing what modifications can be made by mod enthusiasts. And hopefully someone will root it and thus enable an updated version of Android to be run on it without having to wait for Eken to do it.

I am curious to see what you come up with it for it. Easily hackable devices can often make for some real interesting applications.

Edit: literally minutes after writing this DHL delivered my EKen. I'll write up more about my initial experiences later.