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7-inch Android Netbook From GNB
An anonymous reader writes "Netbooknews.com has scored a video of a 7-inch Google Android netbook from a company called GNB during Computex. The device is powered by a Freescale iMX31 CPU. The design might not be to everyone's taste, but it could turn out to be a super cheap Android netbook."
You know, maybe a description of the spec, a couple of decent photos, that sort of thing...
Check out the video on the site, they're covering all the specs in it
I evaluated a freescale board for a major computer manufacture and we ended up deciding not to go with it. Sure its a fast ARM chip and the video processor supports multimedia acceleration but the resolution is tiny. The max resolution when we looked at it was 1024x768(I beleive this was it, we needed much higher). So don't except to be able to hook these things up to an external monitor unless they go with a different video card.
The good news about all these arm manufactures coming out with netbooks is they really try to support the Linux community and are actively submitting patches.
It looks like they're running their server on a netbook as well - Slashdot has brought it to its knees with only a few comments on the topic so far :)
Better link the youtube video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZlKnubPUbk
First of all, it's a real netbook, with keyboard and touchpad (I wish it had the nipple, but ok) and all the connectors one can find on a number of (intel-based) netbooks. So this is good - this is the first real ARM-based netbook I have seen so far.
I like the weight - 650g! Amazingly light.
But battery consumption is not good. It will work for 2.5 hours on one charge. That's pathetic.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Nice to see another "proper" netbook being brought to market - 7" devices are what started the ball rolling. Ultra-portability combined with a cheap price is what defines a netbook. The term has become so diluted that it's being applied to 12" machines, and machines which cost as much as a traditional laptop.
I've done quite a bit of work on ARM processors without an operating system and limited work using ARM9 devices with a Gentoo based distro and something I've wondered is if under Linux there's a way to conveniently enable low-power mode essentially putting the processor to sleep while allowing certain peripherals to remain running? An obvious example would be leaving the LCD controller running to display an e-book page while the CPU was in sleep mode or running at a low clock rate until a button is pressed. I know how to do that when programming most ARM CPUs natively, but are there any attempts out there to standardize some low power behaviour for the kernel?
It could really help some of these devices that are no doubt often used for a single task at a time. Perhaps it could even be in the form of some sort of system call that allowed a process to request the minimum slice of CPU time per second and wake-up latency required per task and the scheduler could determine the required clock frequency and possible sleep time required to fulfil the requirements of every process. Just seems to me it could be a way to extend the battery life and take advantange of some of the amazing low-power modes of newer ARM cores in a standard manner.
...or something very much like it.
It's called a CnMBook. Have a look at this page. (Yeah, I know - bare IP address looks suspicious. I don't think the manufacturer's quite got the hang of this Internet thing. Google is your friend if you don't trust me.) It's sold under a lot of different names.
The specs are similar to the gadget on show here. Mine has a slower CPU, less memory and no touch screen. Battery life is 2.5-3 hours. The OS is a heavily-customised Debian. I love the small size and low weight. I can fit it into my coat pocket. The screen is nice and clear. The keyboard is reasonable, but is prone to registering phantom keystrokes - running vi is therefore not recommended. I don't know if it's just mine that does this, or if it's a design flaw.
The main app I run on it is a text editor. It's a bit slow for anything else.
I paid £139 for mine just before Christmas. I bought it from Maplin, who are now selling them off for £99 - probably because they were evasive about it not running Windows. They now have a Windows CE version of it, which has "Windows CE" in the product name.
Just another wannabe fantasy novelist...
Is that width (74 characters) really ideal or just some relic of old printers' limitations or some such?
There's a reason that even with today's digital typesetting, printed newspapers have five or six columns of text and not one column running across the whole page. On a reasonably-wide column (30em to 40em, or 60 to 80 characters), your eyes can find the next line while your brain is processing the last words on the current line. Otherwise, hunting for the next line interrupts your train of thought.
Also has an Ethernet port. Estimated run time of 2.5 hours. Apparently will also come in 2GB SSD, 128MiB ram options.