real life usage...

So, I took it on holiday, loaded up with video.

Battery life was good, I think about 3 maybe close to 4 hours in total, enough for 2 feature films on a rather slow cross-channel ferry to France (and back).

Brightness control is something I need to investigate I think, mostly for battery life implications, but also because it's not automatically set so on some occasions (in near-dark, or very bright / daylight), it needs a tweak.

Video playback was an interesting one. VLC handles my mp4 files quite happily, no problems. I saw some artefacting, but i'm putting that down to a corrupt rips (from a no-doubt ruined kids' dvd) - i'll recheck playback on another PC. Opening DVD files was another beast; the VLC gui to open a dvd disk (that's actually video_ts files on disk) is painful.. something to investigate. (I also need to buy a 3.5mm earphone splitter, one ear each was painful, literally...)

The other thing I missed was a decent internet browser, I was using my phone (windows mobile, pocket IE and/or google maps mobile) for most quick things, but for more complex things (like, er, search), mobile browsers don't quite cut it. So, i'll be exploring how to get my PCMCIA data card working - and i'm expecting pain, it's bad enough on Windows XP.

And after that, well, maybe bluetooth dongle via GPS. But that's for the future.

Next steps, hardware buttons I think.

screen rotation

It seems xrandr works, specifically with the -o flag.

Quite quickly too. I'll create a script to toggle it, for now, i've got two buttons; one for landscape and one for portrait, with a little widget on screen (in the panel).

I'll link that script to the hardware button.

For now, I use it in landscape mode 99% of the time, so nothing significant.