Very cool stuff from Phoenix Technologies: Software that gives you read-only access to email, calendar, contacts and more without booting the operating system.

I’m pretty sure my tablet has the requisite hardware; however, the software only works with Windows and Office, and these days, I’m running Linux and Evolution/OpenOffice on my tablet (¡Sí, mis amigos españoles, es verdad!).

Even though it doesn’t directly help me, the news did get me thinking about how I might use my tablet more like a PDA, which was one of the reasons I bought a tablet instead of a laptop.

Could I build my own “DIY PDA” using the tablet, a Compact Flash card (I’m assuming you can boot from those?) and a customized Linux distribution supporting the hardware in the tablet and the software I want to use in “PDA mode”–which, incidentally, wouldn’t necessarily need to be a static set?

In fact, not only would this allow me to use the tablet as a PDA, but I wouldn’t be subject to the same limitations as the Phoenix software–for instance, I could enable read-write access to my data, and I could tweak the distro over time as my needs change or I learn more about how I want to work.

Sounds like a great application for Componentized Linux.