After having reviewed the FAQ and Rules Clarification thread, I believe this belongs in the Errata thread. I'm posting the following four passages from the book as I believe they create a rules conflict:
Devices are defined in the Matrix section of the BBB:
A device in the Matrix is any wireless device in the real world.
The next paragraph and the final paragraph indicate that devices are
not personas:
Devices have a smaller-than-person-sized icon in the Matrix... When is a device not a device? When it’s a persona!
I feel the book has firmly established that devices and personas are distinct entities. The fact that there are special rules in the Complex Forms section that allows devices and personas to be considered interchangeable for the purpose of targeting adds to the belief.
When a person uses a device to connect to the Matrix, the device’s icon is subsumed by the persona’s icon, so it’s basically gone from the Matrix until the persona jacks out.
Further clarifying the persona-device relationship. The device is gone, the persona remains.
Which brings us to:
Only devices can be slaves, masters, or part of a PAN.
Which would totally break rigging and matrix defense by the decker if they can't be logged into the Matrix as a Persona at the same time they would need to access the PAN formed by the device they just used to form their persona.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of the whole "the persona subsumes the device icon." It just doesn't really make sense to me that a decker could log onto a host to avoid being spotted in the matrix or attacked, even if an opposing decker was 10 meters away from them. But, if that's pretty much an established fact, I would suggest the following errata to replace the second to last sentence in the PANS and WANS section with the following:
In a PAN, the slaves must be devices, and the master must be a device or persona.
I feel that would solve a lot of these problems as well as answering the question of whether a deck can be slaved to a commlink.
Thanks for the hard work gang!