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."

Comments

Re:Some information would be nice.

[hotfireball]

Definitely not super-thin. BTW, why I need Android (roughly saying, a limited Linux) on my netbook if there is a regular Linux?..

Re:Some information would be nice.

[LiquidCoooled]

can't you just turn the computer upside down and shake it till the button is visible?

Re:Some information would be nice.

[angryphase]

• CPU: 533MHz Freescale i.MX31 ARM-based processor
• Operating System: Google Android
• Display: 800 x 480 pixel touchscreen (Sascha says it's not glossy, but you can see a fair bit of glare in the video)
• RAM: 256MB
• Storage: Up to 8GB SSD
• I/O: 3 USB ports, mic, headphone, and 4-in-1 card reader
• Weight: 680 grams, or about 1.5 pounds

See working video of it here

Re:Some information would be nice.

[corsec67]

In most of the window managers I have used, if you hold alt, dragging anywhere on a window moves the window.

Having the OK buttons off the screen is a very bad design, but it can be worked around.

Re:Some information would be nice.

[TheRaven64]

Note that the i.MX3 series is very old (in CPU terms). The current generation, the i.MX5, is based on the Cortex A8 and is a very nice chip capable of, among other things, running Flash and encoding H.264 in real time. The i.MX3 is an older generation (there was no i.MX4) based on an ARM11 core. It does have the VFP (vector / floating point) coprocessor, but does not support the NEON SIMD instruction set. It is likely to be significantly slower than a 600MHz A8 as found in something like the OMAP3, and a lot slower than the 1GHz A8 found in the i.MX5. The i.MX3 didn't have an on-die GPU, so this may be using a simple frame buffer while most A8 SoCs (OMAP3, i.MX5, etc) include an OpenGL 2.0 ES-compatible GPU.

The A8 is currently in the process of being superseded by the Cortex A9, which includes a slightly improved pipeline, out-of-order execution, and support for up to 4 cores on a single die. ARM started licensing it a year ago, and SoCs based on the core (e.g. nVidia's Tegra) are beginning to appear.