Raspberry Pi Tablet OS

[InnovateAsterisk]

Hi guys, i'm busy working(starting) on a project to use a Raspberry Pi as the mainboard for a tablet - it's a homebrew type project, and probably quite similar to RasPad... so while I commend the guys at RasPad, there are a few things that I would like to approach quite differently.

The one thing that I just cant get over however... is the Operating System... ok, look I totally take my hat off here to the Raspbian OS guys.. but... im sorry... its really NOT a tablet OS. I'm thinking along the lines of iOS and Android.

So, since iOS is out of the question, I have looked into Android, and from about a days worth of googling and fiddling around, this seems to be the way things are:

RTAndroid - this seemed popular at first, with a lost of mentions from about 2017, and it seems like you could have gotten Android seven point something installed on a RP2/3/3+. It seems however that RTAndroid was abandoned - someone mentioned they are now Emteria.OS.

Emteria.OS - At first this seemed like the leading solution, but when I actually tried to boot the first time, it failed (just sat on the linux looking boot loader). Also they seem commercial, and for this project... hmmm I would like to see if I can go free /open source. (After all... isn't Android supposed to be open source - am I missing something here).

LineageOS - So this looked promising, but it didn't actually have an official Raspberry Pi release, so it seems the guys at KonstaKANG.com made one - and unofficial one!

KonstaKANG.com - Now there are a good few videos on this one, AND they seem to support Android 9! Wow... very cool, ok, but I also looked at their web site, and there hasn't been any update since about 2017 also... so im not sure how current this is all going to be, and if they will put out a Raspberry Pi 4 version (i understand this to be quite the update).

Right, so with all this, I go and get my KonstaKANG / LineageOS disk ready, boot up, and .... NOTHING! blank LCD screen. So the problem there is they made it to only use the HDMI... I have no idea why?!?!? I tried to fiddle around a lot in the config.txt and the files in /boot/ but nothing seemed to have any effect.

Ok, then I looked around some more, thinking out the box... I looked at Ubuntu - thinking that maybe their OS is more Tablet/Touch friendly... sadly not. Ubuntu Mate seems to look nice and all, but we are still dealing with "window" based system and there is no way to log into the wifi at first boot without a keyboard plugged in.

Taking all this into account.... Im turning to the greater community to see if anyone out there is interested in helping be solve this problem?

My objectives are:

• Must be touch screen FIRST (can support mouse and keyboard)

• Must be able to work out the box - no building, no config, no nothing... flash and go

• Must be Raspberry Pi LCD primary with: touch, rotate, brightness, etc... then (if possible) also support HDMI

• Must tap into an already existing app store, like Play Store. (If not play store, then must support external developed apps like what you get on Ubuntu)

• All the peripherals must work - like: Wifi, Bluetooth, Audio, GPIO (like for adding mods like 3G/LTE), USB, Ethernet (if necessary)

• ~~ If you have any more please let me know ~~

I have time, and am very willing to do/learn/get it done! Anyone want to work with me on this?

[fruitoftheloom]

Hi guys, i'm busy working(starting) on a project to use a Raspberry Pi as the mainboard for a tablet - it's a homebrew type project, and probably quite similar to RasPad... so while I commend the guys at RasPad, there are a few things that I would like to approach quite differently.

The one thing that I just cant get over however... is the Operating System... ok, look I totally take my hat off here to the Raspbian OS guys.. but... im sorry... its really NOT a tablet OS. I'm thinking along the lines of iOS and Android.

So, since iOS is out of the question, I have looked into Android, and from about a days worth of googling and fiddling around, this seems to be the way things are:

RTAndroid - this seemed popular at first, with a lost of mentions from about 2017, and it seems like you could have gotten Android seven point something installed on a RP2/3/3+. It seems however that RTAndroid was abandoned - someone mentioned they are now Emteria.OS.

Emteria.OS - At first this seemed like the leading solution, but when I actually tried to boot the first time, it failed (just sat on the linux looking boot loader). Also they seem commercial, and for this project... hmmm I would like to see if I can go free /open source. (After all... isn't Android supposed to be open source - am I missing something here).

LineageOS - So this looked promising, but it didn't actually have an official Raspberry Pi release, so it seems the guys at KonstaKANG.com made one - and unofficial one!

KonstaKANG.com - Now there are a good few videos on this one, AND they seem to support Android 9! Wow... very cool, ok, but I also looked at their web site, and there hasn't been any update since about 2017 also... so im not sure how current this is all going to be, and if they will put out a Raspberry Pi 4 version (i understand this to be quite the update).

Right, so with all this, I go and get my KonstaKANG / LineageOS disk ready, boot up, and .... NOTHING! blank LCD screen. So the problem there is they made it to only use the HDMI... I have no idea why?!?!? I tried to fiddle around a lot in the config.txt and the files in /boot/ but nothing seemed to have any effect.

Ok, then I looked around some more, thinking out the box... I looked at Ubuntu - thinking that maybe their OS is more Tablet/Touch friendly... sadly not. Ubuntu Mate seems to look nice and all, but we are still dealing with "window" based system and there is no way to log into the wifi at first boot without a keyboard plugged in.

Taking all this into account.... Im turning to the greater community to see if anyone out there is interested in helping be solve this problem?

My objectives are:

• Must be touch screen FIRST (can support mouse and keyboard)

• Must be able to work out the box - no building, no config, no nothing... flash and go

• Must be Raspberry Pi LCD primary with: touch, rotate, brightness, etc... then (if possible) also support HDMI

• Must tap into an already existing app store, like Play Store. (If not play store, then must support external developed apps like what you get on Ubuntu)

• All the peripherals must work - like: Wifi, Bluetooth, Audio, GPIO (like for adding mods like 3G/LTE), USB, Ethernet (if necessary)

• ~~ If you have any more please let me know ~~

I have time, and am very willing to do/learn/get it done! Anyone want to work with me on this?

Reference board is a Raspberry Pi 4B;

https://www.webosose.org/about/overview/introduction/

[dustnbone]

Have you tried running KDE Plasma on it? Both that and GNOME 3 have pretty good touch support, and you'll get decent hardware support that way. I don't think you're going to get a satisfactory Android experience from a Pi.

Once you have something up and running making a flashable image for it is pretty easy.

[Gavinmc42]

WebOS went open
https://www.webosose.org/docs/guides/se ... webos-ose/
Will it build on a Pi4?
Rats, it expects Ubuntu, does not like Gentoo64.

Tap into Playstore = Android?
All your other wants can be met with Raspbian or any other Linux that all ready runs on Pi's

For a Tablet OS I can trust I want something that is baremetal with something like BBCBasic as the OS.
All apps are readable source, perhaps compiled JIT?
Javascript based OS?

Wonder if Bluestacks can be ported to Pi's?
It would still run apps that want to do and know ??? about your system.

Must be able to work out the box - no building, no config, no nothing... flash and go

PalmOS?

[Heater]

Gavinmc42,

Rats, it expects Ubuntu, does not like Gentoo64.

I very much suspect that it will also build on a Debian system.

Gentoo is flexible enough that you can probably set up the prerequisite there as well.

[InnovateAsterisk]

Ok, so today(and this weekend) im going to try:

• WebOS (Appears support Raspberry Pi 4)
• ChromeOS (Appears to support Raspberry Pi 3)
• WindowsIOT (Appears to support Raspberry Pi 3)
• Ubuntu Touch (If I can find support for Raspberry Pi). It seem to have apps via https://open-store.io/

Some Thoughts/Notes:

• Supporting Raspberry PI 4 (and future boards) is also going to be something quite important - as the CPU boost will make a big difference here.
• The best user experience would probably be Android, mainly because of the "non-window" style UI, and the Play Store (although I see that Google Play store appears to be a propriety software from Google... this is a major factor, because otherwise it has to run https://opengapps.org/ and apparently is very slow)
• I also cam across a downloadable UI for Raspbian OS called Mate. You selected it as the session ui, and then it looks something like Ubuntu Mate. This was interesting as it points to there being a way that I can use the officially supported OS, but maybe I can completely re-skin the UI, taking out the "window-style", and introduce a completely mobile/tablet UI. The question there is: would Rasbian OS (with a Tablet skin) give the user enough Apps from the "store"... I would assume you are limited to Rasbian OS apps... most of them would be command-line type apps.
• Google's betting (evident by Chrome OS) that in the future anything will be possible in your browser... so ya sure apps and stores may be a thing of the past... Let's see. I think we have a bit of time before that is a reality.

[fruitoftheloom]

Ok, so today(and this weekend) im going to try:

• WebOS (Appears support Raspberry Pi 4)
• ChromeOS (Appears to support Raspberry Pi 3)
• WindowsIOT (Appears to support Raspberry Pi 3)
• Ubuntu Touch (If I can find support for Raspberry Pi). It seem to have apps via https://open-store.io/

Some Thoughts/Notes:

• Supporting Raspberry PI 4 (and future boards) is also going to be something quite important - as the CPU boost will make a big difference here.
• The best user experience would probably be Android, mainly because of the "non-window" style UI, and the Play Store (although I see that Google Play store appears to be a propriety software from Google... this is a major factor, because otherwise it has to run https://opengapps.org/ and apparently is very slow)
• I also cam across a downloadable UI for Raspbian OS called Mate. You selected it as the session ui, and then it looks something like Ubuntu Mate. This was interesting as it points to there being a way that I can use the officially supported OS, but maybe I can completely re-skin the UI, taking out the "window-style", and introduce a completely mobile/tablet UI. The question there is: would Rasbian OS (with a Tablet skin) give the user enough Apps from the "store"... I would assume you are limited to Rasbian OS apps... most of them would be command-line type apps.
• Google's betting (evident by Chrome OS) that in the future anything will be possible in your browser... so ya sure apps and stores may be a thing of the past... Let's see. I think we have a bit of time before that is a reality.

FydeOS Chinese ( based of Chromium OS, there has never been a version of Google Chrome OS ) supports 4B:

https://github.com/FydeOS/chromium_os_f ... /README.md

ChromeOS Tablet is available for around £285.00, so already has touch support:

https://uk.ctl.net/products/ctl-chrome-tablet-tx1


Windows 10 IoT Core has limited support for 3B+ , but no support for 4B, but would consider unsuitable for your purpose.


Google Android Things only support 3B:

https://developer.android.com/things/hardware/


Ubuntu Touch was abandoned in 2017 by Canonical but still lives on, but no "official" support for the RPi, in Community Developed version:

https://ubports.com/devices/promoted-devices

Though there is UBPorts community for Raspberry Pi:

https://github.com/ubports/raspberry-pi/wiki



Progressive Web Apps running in a Web Browser are already a reality and have been for a few years:

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/0 ... -web-apps/



So basically while your enthusiasm is to be commended, you are lacking in depth research ?

This was posted 4 years ago:

https://learn.adafruit.com/7-portable-r ... uch-tablet

[Gavinmc42]

I also cam across a downloadable UI for Raspbian OS called Mate. You selected it as the session ui, and then it looks something like Ubuntu Mate. This was interesting as it points to there being a way that I can use the officially supported OS, but maybe I can completely re-skin the UI, taking out the "window-style", and introduce a completely mobile/tablet UI.

There are few posts on how to do that, start with Raspbian Lite and skin a Desktop onto it.
I have run Mate on Pi2 before the support disappeared.

Android is Linux, usually version 3 with a different rendering engine than the Linux X11.
Wayland was/is supposed to be a better x11 replacement.
A new UI library called Flutter is out.

Lots of wheel reinvention if you want to go down this road.

I would assume you are limited to Rasbian OS apps... most of them would be command-line type apps.

You would be wrong now, the Pi4 and it's OpenGL/x11 combo is very Desktop GUI based.
Lots of stuff will compile and work and they are NOT "Raspbian" apps, but some might be Debian build base.
Linux apps using Cmake/Make can and usually are Distribution agnostic, lots are even CPU agnostic.
That means they can compile for Arm32 and Arm64 bit and many other CPU architectures.

Pi's did have a "Store" in the early days, stores for Linux are not successful outside their Distribution.
Flatpack is the closest current Linux "store" method.
Store apps are for those to lazy too compile their own apps?
Or lack the skill, knowledge or time to learn to do it themselves.
The RPF mission is to teach us "kids" how to learn to fish, not to provide a store to buy fish.

The Pi4 is now so mainstream we will see many more OS's available for it in the next few years.

But you are right a Tablet OS would be nice, I am even trying to write one myself.
Got distracted by the release of the Pi4.
If you learn enough to write your own OS then writing apps would be easy.

[InnovateAsterisk]

So basically while your enthusiasm is to be commended, you are lacking in depth research ?

This was posted 4 years ago:

https://learn.adafruit.com/7-portable-r ... uch-tablet

Actually, I'm not lacking in anything... If you read my post i'm not looking at the hardware, and I know there are many (terrible) Raspberry Pi based Tablet projects.... im stating CLEARLY that Raspbian OS is without a shadow of a doubt... a totally USELESS tablet/touch/mobile operating system (sorry Raspbian Team I mean no offence to you ... it just isn't designed for it)

I'll make a prediction here... In the future, the "desktop" style OS will completely fall away to only a touch-based or tablet-like solution. Keyboards, mice, etc... they are all gone!

Raspbian, Ubuntu, Windows... all of it, have no place in the future in their current style/format... change or die!

[Heater]

InnovateAsterisk,

Ok, so today(and this weekend) im going to try:
WebOS (Appears support Raspberry Pi 4)
ChromeOS (Appears to support Raspberry Pi 3)
WindowsIOT (Appears to support Raspberry Pi 3)
Ubuntu Touch (If I can find support for Raspberry Pi). It seem to have apps via https://open-store.io/

I admire your optimism.

I suspect if you can just WebOS up and running over the weekend that would be a major achievment. Never mind evealuate it for yor purposes. Actually I would be interested to hear how well it goes. Let us know.

I'll make a prediction here... In the future, the "desktop" style OS will completely fall away to only a touch-based or tablet-like solution. Keyboards, mice, etc... they are all gone!
Raspbian, Ubuntu, Windows... all of it, have no place in the future in their current style/format... change or die!

A very bold prediction.

Here, today, a tablet operating system is completely useless for anything I want or need to do with a computer. I don't see that changing until they get a lot better.

It has taken the Windows operating system 30 years from inception to Win 10 before it became anything actually usable with the arrival of the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

At that rate I will certainly be dead before a tablet operating system becomes usable.

[Mod: edited out some unnecessarily harsh words - please refrain from do that]

[InnovateAsterisk]

The RPF mission is to teach us "kids" how to learn to fish, not to provide a store to buy fish.

I absolutely love that! However... you gone an made the blimin thing to good... now its the most desirable SBC... and going to find its way into all sorts of things, like home-brew tablets, phones, etc

The Pi4 is now so mainstream we will see many more OS's available for it in the next few years.

Years?? no I needs something sooner

But you are right a Tablet OS would be nice, I am even trying to write one myself.
Got distracted by the release of the Pi4.
If you learn enough to write your own OS then writing apps would be easy.

What direction are you taking? Can I assist in any way?

The way i see it... a traditional OS is not that far off a tablet OS.. it needs to have the following:

• Everything is full screen, there is no window resizing, moving closing, etc
• Like the Alt+Tab in windows, it should be easy to access your open apps, and swipe them closed.
• Keyboard pops up (if you dont have one plugged in) each time to have to enter text. (OR a mic is active for voice-to-text)
• Resolution orientation should be smoothing and easy to rotate.
• All installed apps are on the desktop, and can be re-arranged (and removed) easily.
• The UI should work at different resolutions, allowing items to scroll if need be.
• Finally, the UI should look modern, clean, and slick (without being fussy) and easy to use.

Ubuntu Touch
I looked so far at Ubuntu Touch - there is a small community there, but the version i tried started up, and got to the welcome screen, but I cant get passed the "TimeZone" page... there is no skip, and Next is disabled.

[fruitoftheloom]

So basically while your enthusiasm is to be commended, you are lacking in depth research ?

This was posted 4 years ago:

https://learn.adafruit.com/7-portable-r ... uch-tablet

Actually, I'm not lacking in anything... If you read my post i'm not looking at the hardware, and I know there are many (terrible) Raspberry Pi based Tablet projects.... im stating CLEARLY that Raspbian OS is without a shadow of a doubt... a totally USELESS tablet/touch/mobile operating system (sorry Raspbian Team I mean no offence to you ... it just isn't designed for it)

I'll make a prediction here... In the future, the "desktop" style OS will completely fall away to only a touch-based or tablet-like solution. Keyboards, mice, etc... they are all gone!

Raspbian, Ubuntu, Windows... all of it, have no place in the future in their current style/format... change or die!

That sentiment has been there for 30+ years, Android 3.0 was a good example of a recent Tablet-Centric OS which failed.

[fruitoftheloom]

I'll make a prediction here... your home brew tablet is going nowhere.

Challenge accepted!

If it costs £94.99 like a Fire 10" Tablet and similar size / weight / battery life I am interested

https://www.amazon.co.uk/amazon-fire-hd ... B07KD63BQ5

[dustnbone]

Check out this video of KDE with touchegg from 3+ years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28Jjf5Ak6Q0

If my Android tablet could do that I probably wouldn't hate on it so much. The big problem I think with any significant adoption of KDE Plasma has been lack of hardware. I'm not talking about Ubuntu touch, that's almost a whole different beast, this is just KDE running on Debian or Ubuntu or whatever and I think with the right display (1080p+ and at least 9") the Pi4 could be the platform that gets it some attention.

But is there such a display? I haven't really looked into it, but high res is a must for a good tablet experience in my opinion. I still keep my old 2012 Nexus 10 around because of it's 2048x1536 display. It's useful because it can display a good deal of information at once.

[jamesh]

So basically while your enthusiasm is to be commended, you are lacking in depth research ?

This was posted 4 years ago:

https://learn.adafruit.com/7-portable-r ... uch-tablet

Actually, I'm not lacking in anything... If you read my post i'm not looking at the hardware, and I know there are many (terrible) Raspberry Pi based Tablet projects.... im stating CLEARLY that Raspbian OS is without a shadow of a doubt... a totally USELESS tablet/touch/mobile operating system (sorry Raspbian Team I mean no offence to you ... it just isn't designed for it)

I'll make a prediction here... In the future, the "desktop" style OS will completely fall away to only a touch-based or tablet-like solution. Keyboards, mice, etc... they are all gone!

Raspbian, Ubuntu, Windows... all of it, have no place in the future in their current style/format... change or die!

Interesting that Android, and all these other tablet OS's mentioned, use the same kernel as Raspbian (or at least, very close). So its not really OS you are talking about, but the graphical interface living on top of it.

So have you tried simply adding different desktops to the Pi kernel to see if any of them give you what you want?

[PeterO]

I'll make a prediction here... your home brew tablet is going nowhere.

Why are you trying to put off someone who is doing something that they think will be useful to them just because you think it won't be of use to yourself ?
PeterO

[jamesh]

I had hoped that deleting a load of posts would stop people sniping at each other. Seems not to be the case. Do I need to be more persuasive?

Edit: Have now edited/deleted more stuff from the previous posts. Less of the snark please.

[Heater]

PeterO,

Why are you trying to put off someone who is doing something that they think will be useful to them just because you think it won't be of use to yourself ?

Useful to me or not is beside the point.

Let's just say it was a knee jerk reaction to extremely bold and brash claims being made.

Later I said "That's the spirit"

Am I being discouraging or encouraging?

[jamesh]

PeterO,

Why are you trying to put off someone who is doing something that they think will be useful to them just because you think it won't be of use to yourself ?

Useful to me or not is beside the point.

Let's just say it was a knee jerk reaction to extremely bold and brash claims being made.

Later I said "That's the spirit"

Am I being discouraging or encouraging?

I think you forgot disingenuous.

But let's stop the meta discussion shall we, and get back on topic?

Actually, that less of a question than the mark may imply.

[HawaiianPi]

... im stating CLEARLY that Raspbian OS is without a shadow of a doubt... a totally USELESS tablet/touch/mobile operating system (sorry Raspbian Team I mean no offence to you ... it just isn't designed for it)

That is wrong in so many ways.

Raspbian is Linux at its core, just as Android is. The main usability difference is the GUI, which is not part of the core OS in Linux. Don't like the Raspberry Pi Desktop GUI, use something else, or create your own GUI. Ubuntu's Unity would be more tablet friendly, but Linux applications themselves might not be particularly tablet friendly (of course that could be fixed with some modifications).

Canonical was developing a mobile OS for their own phone, based on Ubuntu. The phone failed to generate enough interest, but there is info on the OS here: https://docs.ubuntu.com/phone/en/devices/

I'll make a prediction here... In the future, the "desktop" style OS will completely fall away to only a touch-based or tablet-like solution. Keyboards, mice, etc... they are all gone!

Raspbian, Ubuntu, Windows... all of it, have no place in the future in their current style/format... change or die!

Yea, that's not going to happen any time soon (in case you haven't heard, the tablet market has been dwindling for years).

There is no way most people interested in genuine productivity will give up their keyboard and mouse in favor of a touchscreen only interface. Touchscreens certainly have their place, and they are a nice addition to a computer with a keyboard and mouse, but they are not a replacement for those input devices if you want to work quickly and efficiently.

My objectives are:

1. Must be touch screen FIRST (can support mouse and keyboard)
2. Must be able to work out the box - no building, no config, no nothing... flash and go
3. Must be Raspberry Pi LCD primary with: touch, rotate, brightness, etc... then (if possible) also support HDMI
4. Must tap into an already existing app store, like Play Store.
5. All the peripherals must work - like: Wifi, Bluetooth, Audio, GPIO (like for adding mods like 3G/LTE), USB, Ethernet (if necessary)

1. Certainly achievable, but I know of no complete solution available right now for the Raspberry Pi4.
2. Does not exist. If you want this, you will have to make it yourself.
3. Again, achievable, but no complete solution available at this time (AOSP or Ubuntu mobile OS might be a good place to start).
4. Google Play Store is only available to approved, licensed Android devices (no legitimate solution for the Pi).
5. Then Raspbian would be a good OS to start with...

Achieving all of your objectives will be difficult, and it will require a lot of work (and money, if you want #4), and in the end you will have an inferior tablet. But good luck.

[epoch1970]

I don't believe mimicking a commercial tablet is the right angle. HawaiianPi already said most of this I think:
- Tablets are consumer products, the Pi is not (really)
- Besides good software, a good tablet has a good screen and battery. These components are very expensive, if available at all. And drivers/firmware follow suit.
- An app store builds upon an OS+SDK, courses, free/paid support, ..., "rigourous" quality testing before distribution of 1/3 party apps, accounting/billing, and the usual ops including security.
There will never be a free, platform-neutral, open membership store. By nature and in order to protect the cost they represent, stores are a closed type of thing. Initiatives like DockerHub, flatpack, snapcraft ... might look a bit more open, but there are always contraints if not a catch hiding somewhere.

Now, surely there are interesting angles, including to the current Pi community/market.
For example first-boot setup is a tough nut to crack. Every headless Pi user is confronted with the issue. We live with it as it is, but it could be better, surely. How? Noobs-style, online SD image generation, OTA/cloud-init style provisioning/install at boot or runtime, push-button trust/cloning...

[Gavinmc42]

But you are right a Tablet OS would be nice, I am even trying to write one myself.
Got distracted by the release of the Pi4.
If you learn enough to write your own OS then writing apps would be easy.

What direction are you taking? Can I assist in any way?

Most of my OS experiments are done with Ultibo, others in the Baremetal Pi forums have/are using other tools.
On the Ultibo forums look in the PDA/OpenVG/SteamPunk posts.

Got as far as an auto-scaling OpenVG accelerated G part of a GUI.
Others in the Pi Baremetal forum have done shaders.
There is some "Raspberry Pi PDA" posts you can read.
"Stupid idea", "nobody cares" etc.

I see no point in having an OS that does not make use of the hardware acceleration.
The VC4 Pi have been figured out, not the VC6 as much.
The Pi4 is using the Mesa driver and I spend a lot of time trying to understand that OpenGL stuff.
Understand, I am allowing about three years to figure this out.
Need to add a year to that since Pi4 came out as I am learning how to use the PI4 as a development PC.
It's pretty good

Basically reinventing the wheel, not because I need a wheel, more as a an exercise in how to make wheels.
At the moment we have Android or iOS, I don't much like either.

Have a look at Project Looking Glass, that got me inspired years ago.
Touch interfaces have been layers over an OS.
GUIs are/can be separate from the OS.

OSdev is a good place to learn
https://wiki.osdev.org/Main_Page
Buildroot and Barebox are worth looking at too.
QT5 UI on headless Linux...

If someone had done it by now we would all be using it.
At the moment I don't think what you want can be done baremetal with a Pi4, the VC6 is a bit unknown.
Software rendering could be fast enough on a Pi4?

[bjtheone]

I think that tablets will continue to do very well in the media consumption centric market (and its huge). The space that fascinates me in the the fusion of "good" AI with fast networking, and flex screen. There are going to be some interesting devices coming out over the next 5 years.

As many people have pointed out the solution has almost nothing to do with the underlying OS. The issue is the UI and it is very hard to make a touch based UI that is efficient/effective at doing data entry. On screen keyboards quite frankly suck.

Most general purpose computing could be done without a keyboard if the voice recognition was good enough. I don't think we are every getting rid of the keyboard for programming/admin work until we get a neutral interface. Point and click stuff is harder to do, so I can see the keyboard going away before the mouse. Fine resolution touch is hard to do and gets bloody fingerprints all over the screen.

[Gavinmc42]

UI's is a big field of research, It is now voice not touch.
Not many 10 point touch UI's yet. Pinch and zoom yes.
Keyboard have turned to crap and so mechanical keyboards are back as well.
Google glass displays and eye gaze sensing etc.

Tablets and phones are mostly used for youtube, streaming viewing etc
Not for data entry where a Coleman keyboard is "best", keyboard flame war?

Elon is working on neural interfaces?

[InnovateAsterisk]

There is a huge amount now to consider from the info in this post, so what ill do so long is... Build/Print the case based on the official 7" Raspberry Pi screen, and a 3B+ or a 4 board (i think they are quite similar in the screw positions etc.)

Ill include:
1x Raspberry Pi 7" LCD Touch Screen
1x Camera
2x Speakers (probably need a small amp for this)
1x Audio jack
2x USB (full size)
1x Battery and micro-usb charger kit (with power button)
(I'll leave space for a 3G mod if I can)

Then, once it's done, ill get onto the OS.. and yes... i totally agree... in the end we are NOT looking at the OS here as the problem... you are correct, its the UI of the operating system. It may be in the end that l'll need to make a ui that will get installed on top of Raspbian OS... But let's see, first things first.

P.S. I made this case last week for another project, and i will probably base this project on a similar look and feel. This was my first attempt, so i should be able to improve on this. I will keep you all up to date.