The calendar tool is based on Dates from the pimlico project. It comes from the folks at OpenedHand and is part of a suite of personal information management (PIM) tools including Tasks, Contacts and Sync. The Sync tool is still in the early stages of development, but we were able to use it to move contacts from Google Mail to our S10e test machine. This required registering with one of the supported services.

Copy and paste was never easier with a tool called the Pasteboard. To use Pasteboard you simply highlight the text you wish to copy and press Control-C on the keyboard. This places the text in the copied data area at the top of the list. You can then copy any of the fragments and paste them into another application of your choice. You can clear the entire pasteboard with a single button click or remove a single item by clicking on the X beside it.

For sending an Instant Message (IM) there's the Empathy client. The 2.26.1 version of Empathy supports Jabber, Salut, Google Talk and IRC in this release.

Web browsing uses a Mozilla-based browser with a clutter shell. One of the things missing in the browser is a setup / configuration tool. The beta is also missing the flash plugin but it only takes two command line instructions to install it. From the Moblin Known Issues page you simply enter:

$ su - root
Password: moblin
# yum install flash-plugin

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Final Observations

This release of Moblin shows lots of promise and definitely shines in the user interface department. The clutter-based shell and applications work well on the smaller Netbook screen. Boot times are really fast and represent an area that the team has spent a considerable amount of time optimizing.

The good news is that this beta version seems to be pretty stable and works right out of the box on a good number of Netbooks. Judging by the amount of comments on the discussion boards it won't be long before a lot of other devices are supported as well.

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