I guess they are called Vivaldi now (formerly called a Spark). Anyhow, I pre-ordered one.
I am about to post my Galaxy Tab on craigslist. I have become more and more disappointed with it. First of all, Samsung locked it in at Android 2.2 (“Froyo”). My phones keep pulling ahead, but that device is stuck. It probably wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t have another device to directly compare it to.
The larger matter is, however, the fact that Android kinda sucks. It is a really nice OS for simple devices, but we don’t have any simple devices anymore. We have light, highly mobile, and sometimes wearable computers. I use a GNU OS. I want the power that affords, and Android isn’t it.
There are a few things I want, nay, require from a tablet: an encrypted filesystem and secure communications. Currently the offerings on Android are focused so much around using some company’s cloud offerings (primarily Google, but there are others), the scene is really lame on those ends. Folks don’t seem to understand that they are putting all their eggs into one big unprotected basket, and there is only so much the Guardian Project can do (though I am really happy they are!).
As for the Vivaldi, I am not sure if it will meet my expectations, but I am willing to try it out. For the cost (approximately $260), it could turn out to be pretty awesome! If I can get Pidgin (with OTR) on it, an e-mail client that can use GnuPG, and an encrypted partition to wrap them in, I will be frickin’ jazzed!
Then I just need to replace my Nexus S with a Mozilla phone…