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By David Rothman

Pepper Pad and $100 machineUpdate, April 27, 2008: Do not install Pepper software on current OLPC laptops, which it will “brick.”- D.R.

As e-book reading machines, the Pepper Pad and OLPC‘s $100 laptop both have potential—for example, nice screens. Both are Linux-powered.Now, from the Carrypad UMPC Journal, we learn that Pepper software can run on the $100 OLPC machine. Might that include a Linux version of Mobipocket for the Pepper, so that the $100 machine could display even DRMed bestsellers?

In the other direction, could Pepper end up offering an authorized OLPC clone? Or at least pick up OLPC’s awesome screen technology? I agree with Carrypad’s observations:

There are a lot of parallels between OLPC and Pepper. Pepper have been working for a long time on a similar approach to computing products and interfaces. Their first Pepper Pad product was aimed at teens and the current incarnation, the Pepper Pad 3, uses similar AMD Geode hardware and the same open-source (an important OLPC project aim) approach to writing the software on the same Red Hat/Linux OS. It makes a whole lot of sense for them to be demonstrating their skills in this area…

I can’t help having a little selfish thought about a new Pepper Pad 4 with that awesome OLPC screen, LinuxBIOS, a flash drive with a suite of offline capable Google apps…

(Via the independent OLPC News.)

Related: TeleBlog review of older Pepper Pad.

 
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