The unit has two batteries.. one in the display good for 3-5 hours, the keyboard has a second battery. It's on their FAQ. So for use as a tablet it's gonna get 3-5 ( or less depending on how they are testing )

the radio components and such probably need certification for the canadian market. that is, unless your willing and able to accept FCC approvals.

for europe there is similarly a CE mark:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE_mark

[Emphasis mine]

That's exactly his point, we're not sure how well implemented the powersaving is on the OS they tested with. If Maemo 5 were to be installed onto the device it may very well get better battery life than what they quote in the specs. . . .

How do we go about convincing the Mer team to support it? :-)

It's a Beagle Board in a case (which is why I mentioned Maemo 5 initially). What's to convince or support?

Contact the core developers by email or PM to ask to what address you should ship the Touch Books you're buying them.

Once they're available, I'd be happy to donate one to the Mer project.

Here is a little snap of the insides in case somebody missed it. Not sure if the battery/layout seen here is anywhere near final, but sure seems... configurable. So, powerwise, this will be very nice.

My only (?) concern (if they actually get to a non-limited production run) is that people will not understand what a lightweight ARM based is good for. I checked out a few links and almost literally ZERO people figured it out (or left meningful comments ). All they see is a detachable-keyboard netbook that somehow didn't get to be a 1.6 GHz Atom with 1gig ram, 160gig hdd and windows 7.

It just needs a few things:
OLED: Have you seen the size of the screen/tablet part? It's really thick. This thing has some serious potentional to be unstable when sitting on the keyboard/dock. The OLED would also extend that huge display's battery lifetime significantly, while decreasing the thickness.

OMAP 4: Multiple processors, better power management/ consumption, especially when using optimized software (which should become more common when these things really take off). Even without optimized software, they should be far better than x86. Also, the processers themselves will be faster while using less energy.

Optimized software: Mer is a good start.

Wimax, 3G, 4G, etc: One of these might drain the battery a bit more, but think about how much more useful it might be, especially if it had good management of those internet connection device power consumption.

Time: These things probably won't all fall into place for another couple years. The OLED is possible, but the technology is still crazy expensive for a screen this size and suffers from problems with the blue pixels. OMAP 4 is still a ways off. Mer should be the first to be ready, but even it isn't optimized for multiple processor ARM.

just a note - balance is more a question of the distribution of weight rather than size/volume. As can be seen from the image, the upper/tablet section is largely empty, and this is likely why the lower part, even if thinner, has roughly the same weight as the upper one. So, unless the lower part's center of gravity is close to the hinge, it can be quite stable.

mer - apparently the guys who make this welcome all OS-es, it's really close to the beagleboard, so mer is plausible

3g - with the internal slots, this not really a question, you can stick in any usb 3g dongle with linux support. same for additional bt/wifi/gps stuff. these internal slots are in a sense a poor man's cardbus slot