Live From DemoMobile

I'm reporting in from San Diego and the DemoMobile show (which--full disclosure--is put on by a sister company of PC World). The "Demo" means the show is all about product demonstrations, the "Mobile" indicates that the products have some sort of on-the-go angle, and everything, in theory, is new.

The first product shown on this, the first morning of the event, was the Pepper Pad 2--an odd-but-interesting-looking tablet computer. The most obviously odd-but-interesting thing about it is its keyboard, which is split into two groups of keys on the sides of the screen. But it's at least as intriguing that its creators built it around a mixture of Linux and Java rather than Windows.

The Pepper folks say they're targeting consumers who want to manage music, photos, and other content. The device reminds me a bit of some of the Internet appliances that came and went in an instant a few years ago. Devices with weird keyboards don't have a great track record of success, and neither do consumery computing systems that don't run Windows or the Mac OS (at least ones that are PC-like rather than PDA- or phone-like). But it would be interesting to see if this product's unorthodox design choices actually result in the simpler computing experience that its creators are after. The Pepper Pad 2 sells for $800.

Another first-morning demo: EverNote, a note-taking application that can work with handwriting recognition but which doesn't require it. The app looks a little like Microsoft's OneNote, but instead of a notebook-like interface, it has a blog-like scrolling approach, so your notes appear as an infinitely long (but easily searched) list. EverNote is due for availability in October; looks like something that might appeal to folks who want to tame lots of unstructured information with a minimum of fuss (or simply organization-challenged folks like yours truly)...