so what do you guys think???

Itouch 8gb

or

Pandigital Novel http://www.slatedroid.com/wiki/index.php?title=Pandigital_Novel

I would choose the itouch because it is an established platform, whereas the Pandigital Novel is just beginning.

A lot of this forum will go with the Pandigital just because it's against an Apple product. Both the iPod Touch and the Android OS are well established in today's society.

Personally, I vote iPod. And it's deeper than just "Apple." Apple controls their products (obviously) and as a result you get applications that will work seamlessly between their most recent hardware/software.

With Android, that OS is being stuffed onto any and every device. Meaning that applications may or may not work on any number of devices. Sure, a good majority of those devices are touch screen but most do have other buttons and where those buttons are, isn't consistant.

Also, I've found higher quality apps on iTunes than I've seen on the Android Market.

I vote you get the Pandigital. Because I don't recall there being a product called an "Itouch" out on the market that anyone actually wants.

Except that apple doesn't support independent app development the way the android does. Also, linux support ftw.

Pandigital for reasons stated above.

It's not just a gut reaction to it being an Apple product, although that helps. A lot of us (such as myself) reject the notion of having almost no control over the content of a device that we bought outright. I'll obviously opine that you go with the Pandigital device, since it runs Android and can even (apparently very poorly) run Ubuntu.

Well, tbh, Ubuntu always runs poorly.

If you do get a no-name prototype tablet, be aware that it may not work as well as you want it to. 8|

Yeah, and it sounds like the manufacturer all but fails to support it (besides having bad GPL manners and not releasing source), but it appeals to me as being nearly infinitely more hackable than the Apple products.

Arch-linux should run fine on that sucker...

Neither.

The Pandigital sucks big time. 256mb RAM, resistive single-touch screen, slow CPU, 600x800 screen. Decidedly crap specs.

So my question is wtf do you want to do with this device? And what is your budget?

What are you basing that on, some assumption that Arch is faster than Ubuntu? Either one can be configured to be maybe up to a few dozen percent faster than the other, but still nothing that I'd imagine would make either one speedy enough to be useable on a device with specs like this. I second Kllrnohj's question about what exactly you want to do with this.

If you were to speed up Ubuntu to be "a few dozen percent" faster than Arch it would be called Debian

I'd say that that's debatable. Everyone's always bandying about how distro X is so much faster than distro Z, and how distro Y is laughably slower than distro W. Is there some kind of objective benchmarking or comparison somewhere?

Yeah, here's my benchmarking.

Arch: Takes 14 hours a day to keep working. Slower than hell.
Debian: God-like speed unrivaled by anything else that has ever existed.
Ubuntu: Ehhhh. Still better than Arch...

Here's one I found comparing 3D performance between linux distros (albeit shoddily done): http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/2010/09/best-linux-distro-for-3d-performance.html

It's decent data, but look how skewed the graphs are. He put the baseline around 2500 instead of 0, so it makes it look like Ubuntu is 3-4x slower than other distros.

Psst, they all run the same software, meaning they all perform pretty much the exact same. Even if you run Gentoo and have it tweaked to your particular hardware, you *might* squeeze a few extra percent, but that's about it.