It would be nice to read a news article (like the recent ones about the BP oil spill) and be able to see the slide show associated with it. I don't imagine that would have a crippling impact on battery life.

FYI, flash can be turned on or off, it's the *option* to use flash that I want.

Look, the DSi (Nintendo game portable) with Opera browser is acceptable speed for browing and web things. Maybe not Flash but all others it can do fairly well. In fact, better than any mobile phone to date except iPhone. That is selling for $149.
If one takes the DSiXL (or LL) put a bigger screen above, keep the smaller touchsceen below then put split keyboard keys on either side, it will make a decent PDA/School computer/game console.

your definition of "run" and the level of Flash you need. There is "Flash Lite" for mobile devices, that only plays an older subset of Flash content, so many flash based sites tell you to go away and download a newer version of the player. The N770 shipped with Flash 6, which had the same problem. With some hacking you could make it run the Flash 9 player, but video looked horrible and even simple animations looked jerky. You still had the problem of mouse over events and battery life.

Adobe's minimum spec for the Flash 10.1 player on Android is published. They say you need a Cortex A8 @550MHz with a hardware vector FPU just to handle a VGA sized screen.

if I can mount it to the wall and tie it into power and home automation, doesn't have to be fast and wifi is all you would need.

"Not a hope of it running flash (it's ARM11 CPU is below the minimum spec according to Adobe)"

Odd then that my old Nokia 770, based on the ARM9 architecture (TI OMAP1) would run Flash. Not the latest all singing all dancing Flash, obviously - this was back in 2005 - but Flash did run.

I could see installing rascal or spar and sending it off with the kids to school for use in their classes. I'm sure if the wifi is turned off, the battery life would double.

Agreed. It could make a good limited use device. The sub 100 is a selling point along with having an ANdiod device to play with. Sold!

Not a hope of it running flash (it's ARM11 CPU is below the minimum spec according to Adobe) and even if they found some way to run it your battery life would drop well short of 4 hours.

In it's current form Flash just isn't suitable for tablet machines, and much Flash code that uses mouse over events won't work either as there's no mouse to hover.

Yeah, the ARM9 (not ARM Cortex A9) CPU is an old design and not particularly fast.

Still, for a cheap, limited use tablet, it should be adequate. It won't be an iPad killer though, but more than a few could find themselves a long life as bedside alarm clocks / news / chat / browsing devices.

Keep in mind, a majority of iPad users, use their iPads for IM while they watch tv. A slow tablet could surely do that. :)

If the screen is 'ok' and the GUI/touch screen doesn't suck, I'd be interested as long as it runs flash. Even if it runs slow. I could even live with a 4-hour battery life, that basically means you need to plug it in every night, that's ok.

I have grown to like my kid's iPod, but would like a bigger screen and flash capability. I can live with slow and a second-rate screen as long as the touch screen doesn't suck.