The Fedex man just delivered my new Project Blackdog portable Linux server.  I'm excited to see what I can do with this bad boy, and although I don't have time to really dig into it yet, here are my first impressions:

• GREAT feature set.  This thing has a 400mhz Power PC processor, 64MB of RAM, and 256MB of flash memory (I bought the flash chip that goes with it, bringing the grand total to 512MB of flash memory).
• It has an MMC expansion slot.  Nice.
• Biometric scanner.  This is a fantastic choice of features for this little guy, and it works well.  After I trained it, it hasn't missed since.  This is going to be great for authenticating users and authorizing transactions.
• External LED.  I'm not sure what the different colors mean, but all the software's open source so I'm sure it's customizable.  That'll be handy for adding Blackberry-like functionality in the future.
• Installation.  There really is no installation since it lives in RAM, but when I first plugged it in it asked me to reboot Windows.  Boooooo.  I know that's Windows' fault, but that makes people uncomfortable and they need to avoid that if possible.
• Packaging.  They're apparently going for a "junkyard dawg" kind of thing, and they do a decent job with it.  It comes in a doggy bag, and when you take it out of the box it's wrapped in this little spiked collar deal.  However, their target market isn't 12 year old boys, and this is going to be taken a lot more seriously in the IT world if they change it.  They need to name it something that wouldn't make somebody in finance think twice when they see it on an expense report.

In fact, what they should really do is make a few different styles of this thing so that people can load their own software on it and resell it as a lifestyle accessory.  And then they need to add wifi and a rechargable power supply :)