I had the same issue with my parents. What I did was worked _hard_ for the money, despite being told 'no'. So what happened when I asked again? "...sure...0_o". So I have my Pandora preordered. This was late September/early October last year - I'm in Batch 2. If you order now, you get one within a week

(as you may know, most people in batch 1 and nobody in batch 2 has a Pandora yet).
Of course that one won't really work for you...
But I can recommend the assembly suggestion - learning assembly language was one of the best decisions I ever made. The other was moving to a UNIX-like operating system (Linux). You can do both of these of the Pandora.
In case you have never used a programming language before, learn C first (other languages..and I might regret saying this since you will be tempted to jump for the easier option...might be easier - I disagree, IMHO C is the ultimate language. If you learn C you get most of the concepts of assembly. Learn python/etc, you get near complete abstraction, and thus are still lost when you try low level stuff).
My sole reason(to my parents) for getting the Pandora was genuine: Programming(mostly C though. I don't plan to do much ASM - but I will have to do some if I do write an operating system, as I plan to).
The other reason was to play games, but hey. I honestly code more than I game, and nobody try and bash C with that comment!
Honestly, a full qwerty keyboard on a tiny, OPEN device. You _can't_ beat it. (Well, open as far as you'll ever need to know, unless you want to write an OS - wifi and the graphics chipset are not open...).
I despise Apple. Greatly. My financial status has _absolutely nothing_ to do with it. I'll leave it at that.
But, unrelated to my hatred for Apple, suggesting the iPad as a substitute for a Pandora is, in complete honesty, f*cking ridiculous! Reasons have been listed. Jailbreaking is no substitute for a device that comes with dev tools. Plus as has been said, that voids your warranty(jailbreaking).
*Does* the Pandora come with development tools(gcc, as, ld, even NASM?)?
edit: Can't have NASM, it only assembles to x86. But I can probably port it to ARM (the assembler itself, not the output) - and probably will at some point in time. Hey, if you're a demoscener maybe you want it for DOSBOX?

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