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Dell Considering ARM-Based Smartbooks
wonkavader sends us this quote from an article in PCWorld:
"In an effort to expand its Linux offerings, Dell is researching new netbook-type devices and will soon offer netbook Linux OS upgrades, a company official said on Wednesday. The company is researching the possibility of offering new Linux-based mobile devices called smartbooks, said Todd Finch, senior product marketing manager for Linux clients, at the OpenSourceWorld conference in San Francisco. The company will also upgrade its Ubuntu Linux OS for netbooks to the latest version in the next few weeks ... Smartbooks with Arm chips have inherent advantages over x86 chips like Atom, such as lower power consumption and longer battery life, according to Finch. The chips are also becoming more powerful, as indicated by the growing number of applications on smartphones, he said. 'I think it's natural and reasonable for us to begin looking at them as they begin scaling their processors up.'"
Debian has a complete ARM distribution including all of those things you describe. It wouldn't be hard for Ubuntu to shift their distribution efforts to ARM. In fact, it's just changing a few lines in a shell script.
Ubuntu will have an ARM-architecture for their new release: Karmic Koala, scheduled for release in October 2009
New things are always on the horizon
At the bottom of Mathcad's Wikipedia page you'll find 9 open source options.
If ARM-based netbooks become popular, you will see an ARM port of Win7 in a few months, with a thorough porting guide for applications, tools to check for potential problems, etc (most cross-architecture quirks were already ironed out when x64 and especially Itanium support were introduced).
People kinda miss the fact that most applications are just a recompile away from a different architecture, so long as OS is the same - and not just FOSS code. Yes, you cannot do the recompilation/porting yourself, so there is some disadvantage, but you can be sure that, if there's market, all products that are still being actively developed will be ported.
I just bought an Acer Aspire One AO751h.
It has 6-8h (wlan/no wlan, depending on brightness). it's got an Atom z520 and the GMA500 graphics chip (very low power) which has PowerVR which can accelerate 1080p videos. There's some driver issues ATM (jumping through hoops with special settings in KMPlayer) but h264, AVC1 play great. VC.1 plays as well, but I have use DXVA checker to get it to play without dropping frames-- showing that the capability is in the hardware, just needs some driver work.
It weighs 3lbs, has a 11.6" screen (1366x768) and a full-sized keyboard. It's the perfect size for a netbook; the 10.1" screens don't have enough vertical viewing resolution and you end up scrolling up/down all the time in Excel spreadsheets and Firefox/Chrome, especially if you roll with the taskbar on the bottom like most people. 768vert is 28% more viewing area vertically compared with the 10.1" models.
With Win7 on it and 2GB RAM, it flies; I love it.
There's really no need to wait.