i guess it depends on who your trying to sell it to.

im not sure about suns solution, but this time it was simply cheap X86 laptops, sold to the consumer, with a custom linux distro running.

as a result, any knowledgable person could do anything with it, and so they did, for whatever good that did (netbooks are becoming more feature packed and expensive by the day)...

There is a lesson in there for just about every product developer.

I think Nintendo elevated serendipitous product success to a fine art.

Right Asus is basically selling cheaper scaled down laptops. Unlike Nokia and Apple, the Asus products didn't really contain any innovation. IOW, if you look at the products themselves and the date they were first sold, without knowing the sales volume, Asus did nothing special

They were highly succesful because they were competitively priced, used a cheap OS (no tax), and there was a demand while there was no direct competitor. There was no such thing as a low-end laptop of that size.

Being succesful with an innovation means doing the right thing at the right time. As you asserted elsewhere, multi-touch is very old technology, and even past years several projects used it. One certain corporation has been using it with a huge commercial success but that doesn't make them the inventors. Inventors, sadly, hardly ever receive the credit they deserve. People don't want change because its too much work; they rather stay the same. Ie. the story of Tesla.

Asus did the right thing at the right moment. This creates market leaders. Bill Gates did the same. SGI too, until NVidia, Windows NT, and Linux came around. Linux too. If BSD was not being rolled in a legal scandal, Linux as it exists now probably wouldn't even exist. Heck, even Nokia did this.

Speaking of which, Abit declared bankrupty end decembre 2008. Not many years ago they were a competitor of Asus, delivering competitive products.

It's a rather simple but effective lesson, but one we're discouraged to learn by the PHBs of the world.

It's this: A well designed product will eventually beat an overpaid marketing department almost every time.

That's what they want you to think...

Whatever Web 2.0 means (if it is defined as the internet showing up as the internet in full-blown fashion - then Sharp zaurus did it much before with the Qtopia and Opera browser built in into it.

Correct. The clamshell Zaurus models, which needed a CF wireless card, and the 6000-L, with built-in 802.11b, all provided a full web experience, but without java. Not necessarily a satisfactory web experience, but a full one.

Considering that Sharp's contribution didn't even earn them a place on this poll, my conclusion is that true innovators are likely to be forgotten. And whoever is ultimately consider the innovator of the portable internet device, it might well be someone who hasn't yet entered the game!