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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."

3 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. 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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