you might have a pocket pc, or can pick one up for under $100 on ebay, with that, along with a robosapien (usually under $100) you’ve got yourself a good hack project. the api (click the read link, bottom of the page) is so the pocket to communicate via ir to the robosapien. should be a lot of fun.
you can speed up (or slow down) many of the pocket pcs out there, just using software. speeding up things is the obvious fun thing, but if you’re looking to max out your battery life you can throttle the processor back, all from a control panel.
i’m using vonage, the voice over ip service, and it turns out you can get a special type of add-on called a “softphone account” which allows you to use software on a mac, pc, linux computer to make and receive phone calls as well. turns out you can use just about any wi-fi enable pocket pc as phone too.
