Nice to see that the #Vivaldi tablet will also build upon open hardware. An upgradeable tablet. Can this work? Every other producer is going to the opposite direction.
Can't wait to hold it in my hands. It should ship with Plasma Active 4.

Elinux: Embedded Open Modular Architecture/EOMA-68 - eLinux.org

This page describes the specification of EOMA-68. The number of pins on the interface is 68; the physical form-factor is the legacy PCMCIA. Re-purposing of the PCMCIA interface and form-factor has been chosen to create portable mass-volume (100 million units and above) Embedded Computing Modules (Computer on Module). Mass-volume "Lowest Common Deno...

Looking forward to hear some news about #Vivaldi.
Friday, 12. April 2013 20:00UTC

Aseigo: aseigo: The Luminosity of Free Software, episode 10

Vivaldi's open hardware: I'll share some photos of the silicon we've developed for the upcoming Vivaldi that is just now coming out of the factories along with some descriptions of the technologies we've decided to use, including how we've created what will probably be the first upgradable tablet to hit the market.

Some news about the #Vivaldi tablet. Looking forward to the official announcement and hopefully they will ship it soon. Really waiting for this tablet and Plasma Active.

YouTube: The Luminosity of Free Software E2 (Aaron Seigo)

At around 30minutes Aaron also mentions ~friendica and Red, but not talking more about it.

Finally there was something new today from the #Vivaldi on Aaron's blog. Looking forward to the Plasma Active 3 release soon and then I really need to get a device!

Aseigo: aseigo: a small update on Vivaldi

What a crazy year it's been for our little Vivaldi tablet project. Lots of ups with Plasma Active developing by leaps and bounds, with version 3 coming out this month and many of our efforts starting to improve our other form factors such as Desktop, and so much learning with regards to the state of the hardware world in Asia.

Expected a somewhat different presentation, but interesting about Plasma in generell. Not much new about the #Vivaldi. Maybe there will be completely new hardware? Before the end of the year.

Aaron Seigo at #Akademy 2012 about the problems to get open devices. Very interesting talk and also the explanation to the delays again for the #Vivaldi.

http://files.kde.org/akademy/2012/videos/A_New_Hope_Open_KDE_Devices_-_Aaron_Seigo.m4v

Which mail client do you use on your #Android? It must handle two #IMAP servers and should handle offline mail somehow because I don't have WLAN connection all the time, but want to read and write mails also without connection. I tried K-9 Mail for some weeks now, but I have already lost so many mails. Sometimes drafts are not stored, sometimes sent messages do not appear anywhere. They get delivered, but will not appear anywhere in my folders. The bad thing about it is that it is totally unreliable. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.
Looking forward to the mail client on the #Vivaldi.

RAM and storage have doubled since the pre-order.
#vivaldi #tablet

♲ aseigo
more good news: Vivaldi will ship with 8GB of internal storage. updating the website now!

Encrypted and password protected activities will be a really amazing feature. #vivaldi #kde #tablet

♲ Aaron J. Seigo
vivaldi ordering delay
We had expected to be able to pull the lever on orders for Vivaldi by a couple of days ago. Last month there were some developments that have consequently pushed back the project by about a month. I'll be sending out emails tomorrow to individuals catching them up with this, but thought I'd let people know via my blog as well.

We are still on track to deliver, however a number of things in our supply chain through to retail have ended up taking longer than expected. When I look back at the delays I can see a good reason and ways we will have benefited in the near term from each of them, but that does not make them any more fun to endure.

In more happy news, development of the Plasma Active Mer OS that will appear on the device is progressing nicely with things like hardware buttons, file management and more starting to really slot in. Thanks to the extended timeline to delivery, we will also likely be shipping from day one with the ability to set activities as private and have them locked with encryption behind a password.

Can't wait to get my #Vivaldi tablet. Everything around this just sounds to be right.

♲ Aaron J. Seigo
forums, bodega client code, partners :)
So this is becoming a one-a-week blog, which is certainly a sign of how busy things have been for us. Among other things, here's what we've been up to:

Forums

We were contacted by Matthias Lee, owner of opentablets.org, a couple weeks back. Since then, they have put together forums for Vivaldi and have started posting news and information about our efforts.

I know some of you will ask "What about forums.kde.org?" Plasma Active forums and related KDE discussions will continue there, while opentablets.org will focus on our specific tablet (and other) future products. This is the beauty of open participation: everyone gets to add their own flavour.

We're really excited about opentablets.org as it is one more piece of the community support and interaction puzzle being filled in by the community itself.

Device Image and Mer Progress

We've been working with new OS images this week at a somewhat frantic pace. Mer now has NetworkManager packages, allowing us to use that instead of connman where it makes sense. This really shows the progress of Meego as a community project in my opinion. Kudos to the people who have made that happen, including our own Lamarque who has worked on all sorts of KDE and NetworkManager bits.

We've updated KDE PIM and other relevant packages as well to catch up with various fixes and improvements to improve performance and reliability. This comes along with updates from Plasma Active itself such as the new file manager and encrypted activities.

With newer images, I'm now getting ~7 hours of continuous usage on the device. Again, this depends on what I'm doing, but while flipping between activities, launching apps, doing some web browsing .. you know, the usual stuff .. the battery is serving us well. It is still possible to kill it quicker with more aggressive usage (true on all devices in my experience), this is quite reasonable. I'm hoping we can deliver with these kinds of lifetimes on the battery.

Image creation has started to creep into the publicly visible area as can be see on the Vivaldi page on the Mer wiki. Our collaboration with Mer, both on the technical as well as organizational level, continues to be excellent with Mer being put on ever more solid ground. And a non-profit organization is not far away, it seems, so we can help provide for the technical needs of the community. :)

Add On App

I've talked about the Add On app previously as said we were getting close to releasing code. We have been working in a private git repository trying various things, not all of which were successes along the way, looking for what we could utilize well as our add-ons delivery application. We still have a fair amount of work to do on the client side, but today I put together a git repository containing the current client side work and put it up on git.kde.org. You can grab it with a `git clone kde:scratch/aseigo/bodega-client`. Eventually, assuming all works out as planned, this will move through the usual review process and find a home alongside the other Plasma Active repos. This repository is where we will be working from this point forward on the client side, and we welcome others to join in.

Right now there are two parts in the repository: the library which is a Qt-only C++ wrapper around the json API which makes it easy to use in an async way, and a QML application which integrated nicely with the KDE Platform by using Plasma QML Components and things like KWallet.

On the non-technical side, one of the really exciting things we're doing is what amounts to profit sharing with app developers, via the points give away experiment we're doing with pre-orders. I really need to write some more publicly about this, but the concept is pretty straight-forward: we take some of the proceeds, turn them into points in the store, give those to people who purchase devices and they pick which content (apps, etc) should be awarded those points which results in the content creators being rewarded financially based on those user choices. What's intriguing to me is that this all happens really without anyone knowing that they are part of that process: to the device owner as well as the content creator is looks like business as usual .. except the device owner may perceive it as having received some free value in the store.

In Other News

Work continues on our corporate partner network (which I wish to make a little more generic as we work on this side of it to include non-corporate members more seamlessly) and we're in the "letter of understanding" signing phase. I'm really excited to be able to share this with the world as it will demonstrate nicely the dynamic nature of the ecosystem that is developing around the Make Play Live devices.

Oh .. and we've also chosen our 10" hardware for release later in the year. But more on that another time. ;)