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The ability to walk up to any computer, personalize it, and use it as one's own has long been a goal of mobile computing research. We present SoulPad, a new approach based on carrying an auto-configuring operating system along with a suspended virtual machine on a small portable device. With this approach, the computer boots from the device and resumes the virtual machine, thus giving the user access to his personal environment, including previously running computations. SoulPad has minimal infrastructure requirements and is therefore applicable to a wide range of conditions, particularly in developing countries. We report our experience implementing SoulPad and using it on a variety of hardware configurations. We address challenges common to systems similar to SoulPad, and show that the SoulPad model has significant potential as a mobility solution.

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We recently demonstrated a high function wrist watch computer prototype that runs the Linux operating system and also X11 graphics libraries. In this paper we describe the unique energy related challenges and tradeoffs we encountered while building this watch. We show that the usage duty factor for the device heavily dictates which of the powers, active power or sleep power, needs to be minimized more aggressively in order to achieve the longest perceived battery life. We also describe the energy issues that percolate through several layers of software all the way from device usage scenarios, applications, user interfaces, system level software to device drivers and the need to systematically address all of them to achieve the battery life dictated by the hardware components and the capacity of the battery in the device.