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Tegra 2 Tablets/Slates Impress At CES

Posted by Soulskill on from the and-they-actually-exist dept.

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."

7 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. Nice; but... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Nice; but... by TheKidWho · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A driver doesn't need to be OSS to work correctly.

      Many of you have gotten the means to an end confused... You act as if OSS is the end and hardware/software is the means to it.

    2. Re:Nice; but... by nutshell42 · · Score: 3, Informative
      Stop spewing crap.

      When it came to building my HTPC I went with Intel Graphics because everyone on /. was touting their great OSS drivers and how much better they were than nVidia's binary blob.
      The reality is that I should have dug deeper because then I'd have found out that the gloriously OSS G45 drivers didn't want to implement a "cheap hack" and instead wanted to "Do It Right"(TM) - I don't know if they're still doing it right or if they're done doing it right by now, but the bottom line was that using xv crashed the X server. So I had an HTPC that couldn't play videos. Great.

      My HTPC now runs Windows 7 and my next PC's gonna be nVidia again because I prefer a Linux with cheap hacks to having to use Windows.

      So could the true believers please cease their Maoist campaign for ideological purity? Linux doesn't need a great leap, lots of small steps work just fine, thank you.

      --
      Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
  2. New term: "smartbook" by steveha · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

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  3. Re:Wow, I have a different experience by nutshell42 · · Score: 3, Insightful
    If they've finally fixed it two years (?) after the chipset's been released that's great. I'm gonna try it again some time next month to see if I have to buy Windows 7 when the forced shutdowns on the RC start and your post makes me hopeful.

    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
  4. Asus? Not likely. by symbolset · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

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  5. Vaporware by symbolset · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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