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No. About every semi-modern computer relies on standby to achieve instant-on. No modern OS initializes fast enough for instant-on without standby. You might get close if you find one with a very fast POST and an extremely stripped down Linux or DOS, it wouldn't be very useful to most people.

Even most cell-phones, palmtops, media players and also the Foleo also rely on standby.

no, the foleo relied on using flash ram, which didn't require power to keep memory, like most new pda's(and some cellphones, although their drain is attributed to network).

You might get close if you find one with a very fast POST and an extremely stripped down Linux or DOS, it wouldn't be very useful to most people.

It could be very useful to most people. I'm tired of waiting for computers to grind their way up to being ready. Not all of the services coming on need to be turned on right away; many could be turned on as needed if the OS were designed differently.

Unfortunately, making a risk of this nature succeed would require an investment of time and treasure that most companies are unwilling to undertake, including Palm. It's cheaper to churn out more epsilon increments, even if this constitutes overkill for the average user.

For our part, we users are amazingly reluctant as a whole to switch to better technologies. I wouldn't be willing to buy something of this sort if it meant learning a completely new paradigm and abandoning all my data of the last few years. The payoff doesn't make up for the cost. It's like QWERTY and Dvorak in that respect.

Depending on what functionality you want, one of the Nokia web pads might meet your needs. I have a pair of 770's at home, and they're extremely nice as lightweight network clients (web, news, rss, CIFS/Samba, VNC, mail).

I'm using three web browsers on them right now (Opera, Minimo, MicroB) to see which one I like the most. The latter two are Mozilla derivatives and seem fairly robust, but they're also a lot larger than the Opera port to Maemo that the 770 uses.

It was really cool to use the 770's VNC client the first time to control Firefox and slrn on my OS/2 box in the basement. Something about seeing a 4OS2 window showing on that little screen seemed really surreal. :-)

Edited 2007-09-05 15:24

actually, I'd love the nokia 770 - if it had a keyboard. I wanted the foleo for web, email, and instant messaging(which I would have settled for AJAX IM until a real messaging app was ported). While the nokia has those features, so does my treo, but what I wanted was that with a nice screen, keyboard, and no boot time, or(as the suggested alternative) battery punishment for standby.

may i ask how your doing CIFS?

I have a Nokia 770.

This year at the San Diego Comic Con I almost tossed the frelling thing in the harbor it caused me so much misery and frustration.

It gets it right in the areas of all day battery life, web browser, and nice screen, but the rest?

Okay, granted, I was trying to use it as an itty bitty wordprocessor -- something it was never designed to do -- but in between the 90 second boot time and the fact that I could get it to talk to the keyboard only 1 out of every 4 tries, or that it and the keyboard would stop talking to eachother without warning, it left me with tears of rage and frustration on several occasions and reduced me to longhanding my panel notes and interviews.

I realize that it's the flaky OSS driver for the bluetooth keyboard that's to blame, but if what a person needs is something small that they can connect to a touch type keyboard and use as an itty bitty wordprocessor that can surf the web, the Nokia 770 is NOT a good option.

(Because of a back injury, I cannot carry a laptop with me all day. They're too heavy once I get a battery that meets my 5-6 hours of uptime requirement.)

Psion Netbook

(search eBay and find your choice of old-school EPOC32 netbook/Series 7 or new-school WindowsCE/Pocket/Mini-or-whatever-TF-they're-calling-it-today Psion Teklogix netbook)