I'm looking at the R.pi for home use as a barebones NAS/Torrent server, upstaging the NS K330 (
http://www.dealextreme.com/p/s.....rver-26320). My wishes would be:
- power from USB. In many instances, the thing will be connected to a powered USB hub, so that would save a power brick, at the cost of one port on the hub if the "power" up connexion has to be distinct from the "down" data connexion, at no cost if you can get data to flow downstream on the same USB cable used to flow power upstream. And even when no hub is connected, USB (micro) power supplies are as easy to find as older ones anyway.
- more USB ports. Even 2 means a hub is almost mandatory: keyboard, mouse, touchscreen, external drive, bluetooth, wifi...
That's it for the pure hardware stuff. But I think software and services will be as, if not more, important:
- optimized, validated OS. Ubuntu is fast becoming Linux's Windows: top heavy with much stuff that isn't used by most people. Hopefully the community will quickly come up with a much-pruned variant, but I'm sure you're in the best place to do that.
- make sure the basic stuff works. Looking at the Plug Computer saga, there seem to be lots of quality issues. Hopefully your simpler design won't run into them, especially thanks to the external PSU and fewer interfaces, but I'd hate for USB to crash regularly.
- validated peripherals. Again, I'm sure the community will quickly come up with which wifi/BT sticks work or not, and which USB hubs are solid enough to handle hard disks and more... but I'm also sure you already know those answers.