I never dreamt about video..

but I started to see the potential in a portable small computing device and got myself a Palm T3, installed developer kits etc. etc.

No wi-fi, so I bought a wi-fi card. Thus occupying the single SD slot (made it a bit tricky to download anything to the card..). Even with the developer kit it was a bit tedious. Closed-source problems: phonelink application didn't support my carrier. Didn't support latin-1 characters. Vendor didn't bother updating the software, no way to fix it myself. More closed-source problems (no way to fix other drivers).

Then the Palm lifedrive came along: One SD slot, internal harddisk (4GB). Looked at it. No way to upgrade the internal storage (except through major surgery). People told me the HD introduced latency problems (spin up/spin down) etc.

An image started to appear in my mind: An open-source based device with built-in wi-fi and bluetooth, and instead of built-in harddisk it should simply have an extra internal SD slot which made for instant upgradable internal storage and no moving parts. The outside SD slot would then be freely available for the things I used the SD slot on my T3 for. As for the open-source system it would preferrably be Linux, as I've been using it for years and have lots of development experience.

I bought a second-hand old version of the Sharp Zaurus just to get a feel for a Linux-based PDA, even with its limitations.

As for my wishes for the 2-slot PDA I expressed my wish design over on Brighthand in the Lifedrive discussion forum.

Then suddenly the Nokia 770 appeared out of nowhere. Linux-based, almost what I wanted. But it had a single slot and used the rubbish RS-MMC card, and it had just half of the memory I felt it should have. I outlined what I would want on one of the Nokia blogs: 2 SD slots, 128MB RAM etc.

Then the N800 came out, pretty much exactly to my specifications - I'm not making this up! I naturally ordered one the same day as it was announced.

(Since then it's gone downhill though as Nokia seems to have abandoned the direction the N800 was taking).