LIVEdigitally

When I think pepper the first thing that comes to mind is salt. I asked Jon Melamut, VP of sales & business development for Pepper where they got their name from as my first question. “Peppers are hotter than apples”, he replied with a joking smile. Jon admitted immediately that he was an Apple lover, but couldn’t resist when I set him up so good. “Pepper is just an easy name to remember, it sticks” he then told me with a bit more sincerity. Pepper’s aim is to make something that’s easy, simple, and fun, their name definitely reflects that.


What is the Pepper Pad? In this gadget geek’s opinion, it’s somewhere in that middle haze between laptops and PDA’s. The Pad is designed for recreational use only, this is not a work related device! AIM, email, internet browsing, and digital media are the focuses that Pepper put into it’s Pad. Linux runs this bad boy, which keeps viruses and spyware to a minimum yet stability at a maximum. The browser is powered by the Gecko engine, which not coincidentally powers our favorite friend Mozilla’s Firefox. POP3, IMAP4, and AOL mail can be accessed on these 2 lbs of fun. The screen is a touch screen and the icons are very self explanatory. Tabs are incorporated into each app making it easy to switch between areas of a program. Bluetooth, WiFi, USB 1.1, and SD/MMC expansion card slots are built in to Pepper. It can act as a remote control for pretty much everything but the kitchen sink (unless you have a IR port on your sink, which I would actually like to see for kicks).
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Macrocomm has what looks like the biggest and best fax machine ever. This is not just a fax machine, scratch that, it’s not a fax machine. This prototype model will be released in Europe come this July 2005. I was lucky enough to sit next to Dave, the Managing Director, for lunch and inquired what it was he had to bring to the Connections Conference. Before I knew it, during a 30 min break and he pulled a box from his hotel room and met us a the terrace. His prototype do-it-all machine wasn’t at a booth for this conference, yet I managed to grab an exclusive look at this baby.

Touch screen, VoIP, IPTV, HDTV, dual boot Linux and Windows, DVD player, 5.1 Dolby Sound, USB 2.0, and starting at $850.00. This device is destined to end up in hotels, hospitals, conference rooms, dormitories, airports, and consumer homes. Combine it all and here you have it: the all-in-one for the budget consumer. Still, I say it looks a bit like a big screen fax machine.

I’m not a fan of the PPA Metal Gear Box USB 2.0 Hard Drive enclosure. I purchased one, lost thousands of songs due to corrupted data, and now have been hard drive enclosure less for over a week. I sent it back to PPA with hopes of fixing the problem which they seemed far too familiar with when I explained what happened me and a friend of mine who also got screwed by a Metal Gear Box. Why have I been subjected to such torment? Because Netgear hadn’t released this product until now.
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