Custom 2.6.x linux kernel running a hardware accelerated kdrive, with a GMenu2x-like, scriptable menu for launching apps.

The beagle-board boots ubuntu, and there's some discussion as to whether ubuntu should be available as an alternate purchasing option.

The developers ran a poll on whether the community wanted them to focus their development resources towards a more advanced gui, games, or something else I can't recall. The GUI option won, by a huge margin. They're currently putting most of their resources into this simpler kdrive setup to release with the system, and they then plan on working on something "more advanced".

It's all a little vague, right now, but pre-orders begin at the end of the month. They've promised videos of the device in action, before then. Look for something to show up on the blog, before October.

As for battery life, 10 hours is the official figure.

no i expect the Pandora to draw more but 1500mah vs 4000mah is quite a difference. As stated on the Pandora site about 10 hours of gaming or 100 hours of music playback sounds good to me.

OMG ! And does that hurt ?... :-)

Actually, they should be in a similar ballpark. The Pandora will likely have a higher peak consumption (due to more of the OMAP cores being in use), but overall, the OMAP3 is in the same consumption range as the OMAP2 and most of the peripherals are very similar.

The only other factor is the Pandora's use-case, which is as an emulator machine. This, of course, means much higher consumption on average.

if i get my hands on one of these I would want to do more than emulating

Its just wasted potential to buy the newest fastest greatest and insult it by running it at an apparent fraction of its capabilities.

If you think it goes fast when emulating, imagine how fast its gonna go natively.

Just make sure you get yourself a discount code.

I'd expect the power drain in the music-playing case, though, to be at least as low for the Pandora; same amount of work, on a processor twice as fast, means the clock will be running about half the time; that should cover for any residual power draw from hungrier peripherals. This jives well with the ratio of game hours to music hours; 10:1 for Pandora, and (estimated) 4:1 for N800.