Luke admits that he’s both a sports nut and a gadget hound. His favorite after-dinner activity is to plop down on the couch and watch his beloved Red Sox or Patriots on TV. Unfortunately for Luke, his wife and young son often have other ideas for the family room TV. On the nights Luke doesn’t get to drive the remote control, he still likes to watch TV with his family, so he’s been trying to find a handheld Web device to use during American Idol and Survivor. A gadget that will let him go to ESPN.com, game day on MLB.com or watch the video highlights on NFL.com.

Luke has tried lots of devices for couch-top Web access, including his cell phone, a Sony PSP and an old laptop. They’re either too slow, too big, too small, Flash doesn’t work, or they’re just too much trouble. He imagines something less than $500 with the simplicity and reliability of his cell phone, but with a bigger screen and faster performance. It would be pretty cool if it also could be used as a universal remote so he wouldn’t have to keep teaching his family how to use the 5 remote controls now sitting on the coffee table.

Luke checks Engadget.com faithfully and goes to Tweeter on weekends, but he still hasn’t found the perfect handheld gadget. The Pepper team and Pepper Linux can help OEMs to rapidly bring to market Luke’s cool couch computer.

Pablo is a fifth grader at a public school in Rio de Janeiro. His school has been trying to find a laptop that will be low cost and reliable enough to give to Pablo and all of his classmates. They’ve tried Windows laptops and found them to be too expensive to purchase and maintain. They’ve tried various Linux laptops and found them to be expensive and confusing to use.

What Pablo needs is a laptop that costs his school less than $300 and is so simple and secure that Pablo can use and maintain it by himself. He mostly needs Web access for school research at sites like Wikipedia and basic word processing for writing his homework assignments. To chat about his assignments and gossip with his friends, he’d like to have IM or email and maybe voice. He tries to be a serious student, but like most kids, he also enjoys listening to the latest music and watching videos, so he’d love the laptop to have music and video players too.

Pablo’s school has been testing a number of different low-cost laptops, but still hasn’t found the right one for Pablo and his classmates. The Pepper team and Pepper Linux can enable OEMs to rapidly bring to market Pablo’s low-cost laptop.

Ed is a manager in broadband services for a large telco in Hong Kong. He’s responsible for acquiring home subscribers for the telco’s high-speed DSL service. One problem that Ed’s market research has found is that many potential subscribers are not interested in purchasing a PC for their homes. He’s found that many older generation Chinese have heard that PCs are too much trouble and many in the younger generation think that their mobile phone provides sufficient Web and media access.

Ed’s team thinks that if they can find a box that provides a rich Web, media and voice experience but costs less than $150, the telco can subsidize the cost so subscribers won’t even have to purchase it. He’s tried a number of boxes that are either too slow or require too much support, which could destroy the telco’s margins. His telco has signed revenue sharing deals with Baidu and Tencent, so he’d like the software on the box to make it especially simple for subscribers to use those services rather than competing services.

Ed’s team has run trials with a number of Web access boxes, but they haven’t found one that’s sufficiently low-cost or simple. The Pepper team and Pepper Linux can enable OEMs to rapidly bring to market Ed’s broadband mini-box.