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Tegra 2 Tablets/Slates Impress At CES
MartinSchou writes "At this year's CES it seems that everybody and their cousin are talking about tablets, slates or smartbooks. This year, however, might be the year of Linux — if not on the desktop, then at least on your other computing devices. Amongst this years top contenders are slates running nVidia's Tegra 2 chipset, boasting 10+ hours worth of 1080p playback, with entries from Quanta, Mobinnova, ASUS, MSI and Boxee (though this is a media computer). Notion Ink have brought their Adam slate, complete with a Pixel Qi transreflective, multi-touch capable screen."
It would appear that Nvidia has(as was more or less inevitable) moved away from their WinCE support only stance on Tegra.
What remains to be seen, though, is what their linux support looks like. If all there is is "enough binary blobs to get whatever version of Android the OEM decided to install to boot, and nothing more", that is largely useless. A bunch of OEMs get cheap software. Yay, I'm so happy for them.
Given that this is Nvidia, I'd be shocked if any but the barest GPU driver support is OSS; but if the support isn't good enough to produce third party firmwares and upgrades for these devices, they might as well be Tivoized.
I had never seen the term "smartbook" before. This article defines a "smartbook" as a netbook with a non-x86 processor (likely ARM).
I guess it's a portmanteau of "smart phone" and "netbook". Or maybe it means "smart enough finally to use something other than x86 for an ultra-portable device".
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2357758,00.asp
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I never had a problem with compiling the Nvidia kernel driver or their legacy drivers, their installer is heads and shoulders above any other 3rd party driver for Linux I've encountered (which aren't that many) and the biggest problem is that many distros no longer include a build system on the default installation (which is mostly a problem with my network card because it leads to a catch 22. But thank God they fit 3 different twitter apps on that CD...).
I don't have a problem with people preferring OSS drivers. I do have a problem when that preference becomes irrational and ignores glaring deficits of the OSS drivers out of a ideological hatred of binary drivers.
I'd like OSS'ed Nvidia drivers, too. It's not gonna happen. But in the meantime their existing drivers provide timely support of the full feature set of current graphics cards and are quite stable. That's two things I can't say about Intel's OSS'ed drivers.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
If it was the "year of linux dominating on TVs and STBs", who cares...? How many of these devices have any accessible method of replacing or modifying the software? My TV has a USB port that can play pictures and music and upgrade the firmware, but there's no documentation on how to do so and hasn't been a firmware upgrade. And I have my doubts about any mass-market STB hardware being open enough to change the software unless you're the provider or some extremely skilled hacker (at least for US mass-market hardware).
It's not like simply using Linux (or any open source software) will make bad TV programming better, or will enhance picture quality.
The important of a smartphone running *nix seems minimal to me - smartphones are much more than a kernel or unixlike environment. It's the software users interact with and the phone/messaging functionality that matters. If that software happens to run on top of Linux or some other open source kernel, it means the software creator didn't want to create their own or pay to use somebody else's kernel.
My iPhone runs Darwin, but most of the important software that runs on it is closed-source (with the notable exception being WebKit).
The year of Linux will come. While you are off to buy a slate or smartbook, Richard Stallman will come in glory and those who are ready will feast with him. Then the door will be locked. Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour wherein the power of linux comes.
You can expect a press conference in a few days with The Asus board chairman flanked executives from Intel and Microsoft declaring "Non-Windows OS on a non-Intel system? We don't see a future in that." Meanwhile he'll be furtively gesturing pleas for help, but noone will notice.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It seems reasonable to expect given a long history that all of these vendors will show off a bunch of stuff to get us all excited, and then go back to their offices and have a long chat with some rather persuasive gentlemen from Santa Clara and Redmond. And then they'll run into unanticipated difficulties in production that prevent them from shipping more than a few hundred units.
And then Google will go "Oh, screw it." and launch the thing on their online store and reap the billions of dollars from an eager world clamoring for this hot new technology.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I can't help but notice the deafening roar of... silence. Lack of buzz. Boredom. Yawn. Sigh. Tablet? This story has been up for over 24 hours and there are only 40 posts. Slashdot generates more comments than that about obscure astronomical phenomena.
Ok, so it's the weekend. Still. The attempts to generate buzz among the planet's English-speaking technorati has flopped. Miserably. If not even Apple can sustain the buzz, 2010 ain't the year of the tablet.
I see only one possible way to salvage the market. A radically low price point would do the job. These things aren't PCs. They're glorified interactive picture frames. Consumer electronics, in other words. If they're priced accordingly, they'll move. Sell them for $100 to $150 and they'll be all over the place. $200 to $250 might be tolerable, but would still leave a lot of units on the shelf. $300 is really pushing it. Anything over $300? Forget it. That's netbook/low-end desktop territory now. A jumped-up picture frame isn't going to sell for that.
The $1000 price that's been speculated for Apple's tablet? It is to laugh. They'll gather dust in warehouses. Not even the Jobs reality distortion field can make people cough up that much cash for a device with no compelling use.
What are we going to do, sit on the couch with a tablet in our lap and watch a movie... while sitting in front of the 50" flatscreen on the wall?
Maybe the kids will sit in the back seat and watch a movie on the tablet... while the overhead display system that requires no recharging stays off? Just so they can fight over who gets to hold it?
Maybe we'll sit in our office chairs with a tablet in our laps and watch a movie... while our desktop PC idles and the boss starts placing ads for an opening?
There's lots of possible uses. None of them can tolerate a $1000 price point. The $700 smart-phone trick only works once.