Drupalcon in Boston was fantastic, but it left me with a big case of iPhone envy. My old LineSight buddy John Jones (who’s now drupaling away at ESSDACK ) flaunted his slick new phone all over town — the GPS even saved us from my inability to quickly exit while driving in one of the cities damn underground highways.

But alas, while Aisle8’s new corporate digs in Delhi NY offer many things, iPhone cell reception is not to be. The prospect of picking one up just doesnt make sense. To quell my gadget fix I convinced our CFO that a little R&D (or was it marketing?) budget needed to be liberated. The result is a shiny new Nintendo DS Lite “Web Appliance”.

Until recently I thought the DS was an also ran in the handheld game market, something to get your 13 year old nephew for Christmas, but Jeroen (the King of Podcasting) over at AnyRate.com has been Skyping me incessantly about this little $125 wonder. He says that just ain’t so. I’m beginning to agree.

Lets see… Its got a split screen display, the bottom screen is can be written on with a stylus palm-style, stereo speakers, a microphone, and built in WIFI. Hmmm. (That sounds like VOIP to me. ) A little searching on Amazon.com turned up a the “Nintendo DS browser“-basically Opera on a chip, with a little split screen magic thrown it.

10 minutes out of the box I was on-line. Most of that time was spent trying to find the WEP key for our wireless router. Key in hand the DS connected with no problems.

This post was done through the DS while wandering around Aisle8 central.

This is a cool little hunk of hardware. It will even run linux. Who knew?

(Note: This was originally published on April 1, 2008 by me on the Aisle8, Inc blog. Head over to the Aisle8, Inc blog for my “corporate” musings on OpenBlueDragon, ColdFusion, Drupal, and all things business-y)