seems you have the same idea as i have, the reason i want to use freescale chips is that they seem at least semi-frindly to open source
I actually have an accelerometer from them sitting here right next to me and if used with the trakball you would have a very nice game console, Imagine that trackball with quake and vibration/rumble support (this is a phone after all)
also dont forget it has "OpenGL" support not "OpenGL ES", thats why it has a floating point unit, this along with the video decoding and post processing stuff would allow you to do some incredible things
i think its time to clean up what we have as i have sugested alot of stuff to get people thinking and to add it all will be hard and exspensive.
as for prices they dont list those and some chips dnot have much in the way of infomation, it looks like it will take me some time to type up a letter explaining what we are trying to do and request infomation from them, plus see if we can get small quantites of thier chips
found some info on phone consumtion, the chips consume 200mA when fully active (making a call) but idel at lower power levels, in an ideal world you wouldnt even need linux to recive a call (thats how i am going to try and implement it) but i think that we might need linux to act as a routor to the audio hardware, but thats fine scince the cpu will be idel when making a call most of the time
on the plus side i have found some REALLY juicey SDIO infomation on thier site whigh i plan to foward on to some people
what i would like is Distro devs and kernel devs input, they might want somthing uniqe that will make thier life easier, in fact i wish everyone would post on hear about what the want as the poll has too many limitations to be able to vote an all these features, so far we have seen some very nice stuff to the point that if i was not doing this project i would get one of those tracballs and put it in my Z right now i really like them (beats HP's hx4700 touch pad by a mile)
so i think my final short list comes to (in order of prefrence):
The trackball
iMX3 processor (thoght that would come first didnt you)
between 128MB and 256MB of mem (DDR )
Jtag and serial
Up to 2GB of Flash
Backlit Keyboard
USB 2.0 Host (as we can do video sound and nearly everything from here)
Video out (HDMI)
2x Jog Dials
Bluetooth
Accelerometer
GSM/GPRS
2 SD card slots
Microdrive ar CF mem on ATA port
fpga (for use in conjunction with the docking station)
Docking station (not backpacks but a small station for it to charge from with USB hobs and whatever (vga out?))
Back packs)
CF+ (a CF slot basically)
Wifi
Auxilary Display + buttons
3G
Camera
DVB-T/H
USB Client (I never use it and there are already better options above here to connect to a network like 10/100 usb adaptor)
UWB
Things i wont put on it:
GPS (in my opinion its better over bluetooth and more useful that way, eg can then be used with laptop and also has its own power supply)
Case wise i think aircraft grade aluminium but i would prefer black carbon fiber I personally think that the case will make or break the design, if its sexy to the point where if you pull it out on a bus people will look and drool and wont run away when you say it runs linux but instead ask "whats that" then i would say we have sucseeded
to sum it up i mant a case that puts the curves of HP 1900 series and the htc phone series to shame and i belive blak with a tiny amount of gold trim is the way to do it, plus lose the boxy look of our clamshells and go more like xda4 rounded/oval tablet style, it looks good in blak but would be awsome with a small gold trim
