I, for one, can relate to the benefit of taking one's whole system home to catch up on work after business hours. At the very least it does away with having to transfer data from a stationary system to a portable unit and, as a direct result, removes the burden of having to pick and choose what files to transfer.

The hardware components themselves are somewhat lagging in terms of current desktop technology, a difference slightly less dramatic compared to notebooks, barely behind Tablet PC standards, and right in the mix with current handheld specs.

The unit's main processor is a 1GHz Transmeta Crusoe, that although sluggish when directly compared to a Pentium M, the chip is quite adequate for most business application demands and was presumably selected with maximum battery life between charging sessions in mind.

The Model 01 also comes equipped with a 20 Gigabyte internal hard drive and operates with 256 megabytes DDR DRAM. Interestingly enough, the pint-sized package uses 3D acceleration in the form of the Silicon motion Lynx 3DM+ with 8 MB of dedicated video RAM and output to external displays up to 1280x1024.

Professionals should have little to gripe about in regard to connectivity options as well. Aside from the cable included Ethernet port, the actual hardware comes equipped with both Bluetooth and WiFi capabilities. The hardware functions efficiently as a stand alone unit and as a networked device as well.

In fact Windows XP (Home or Professional) provides the ideal platform to make efficient use of the included wireless feature set (although, again, the Tablet PC extensions might have added some value).

The OQO isn't without a few fairly impressive non-standardized goodies. One very cool feature is active hard drive protection that claims to have the ability to detect free fall in case of an accidental drop and parks the HDD head before impact with the ground. In addition, there's an ambient light sensor that automatically adjusts the screen's back light to optimal viewing level. This feature was quite impressive, resulting in an easy to read screen at all times during our testing session (which included indoor, outdoor, and just about all hours of the day/night lighting conditions).

However, although the included internal microphone is a nice touch, it is slightly nullified by the Model 01's lack of a speaker. There is a headphone jack included but at times it seems more practical to have included a built in speaker and a jack for the microphone; especially when considering the fact that unlike the mobile specific operating systems, Windows XP isn't quite as microphone friendly.

In addition, the removable 4000 mAh Lithium polymer rechargeable battery's performance was only mediocre at best. We repeatedly experienced a little over 2 hours of fairly non-demanding (Microsoft Word document) editing before the battery's fuel gauge indicated it was time for a recharge (a few moments before the unit kicked into hibernation).

Conclusions
Based upon all of the research I had conducted and assembled before sitting down with the actual unit, I believe it's safe to report that the OQO Model 01 is a misunderstood piece of hardware that is going to struggle until it firmly establishes its market in the hierarchy of mobile computing technology.