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$199 Freescale Tablet Design Runs Chromium OS
Charbax writes "This is an extensive video interview with Freescale's manager of software development about their integration of the Chromium OS onto their ARM Cortex A8 i.MX51-based $199 Tablet reference design. It seems to run smoothly and fast with multiple tabs. There's no touch screen support yet, so input is done through a USB keyboard and mouse for now, but the WiFi drivers are fine. Freescale is also demonstrating Android and Ubuntu versions. Those have a 3G SIM card reader built-in, an HDMI output and 720p video playback. The question is: will they be able to support Chrome browsing at full speed on the most JavaScript- and Flash-intensive websites and support a large amount of opened tabs?"
The demonstration of the Chromium tablet begins at about 11:20 into the video. The Android and Ubuntu versions are displayed earlier.
Wake me up when I can buy the thing at a store for $199.
Can you even consider it a tablet if it doesn't have a touchscreen or stylus? Otherwise it's just a funky pc that nobody wants. Come back to me when this thing is $199 and has a touch screen...otherwise it's not much of a story, IMHO.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
I don't need a tablet PC unless it offers access to a compelling suite of applications. As it stands, this thing is basically an extremely underpowered netbook with a discrete keyboard and pointing device. Even with a touchscreen, it can't compete with a bottom end netbook for generic computing tasks (for example, typing just isn't efficient - I can't manage 45 wpm on a touchscreen). Apple gets this. The iPhone/touch is successful because of its integration with the app store, which offers *device-specific* apps. If apple releases a giant iPod Touch/eReader in the next couple of months, it will succeed only if there's a strong suite of apps written specifically for it. Other manufacturers will be left scrambling, because Chromium OS, Ubuntu NBE and Windows 7 just don't translate well to the tablet environment - you're left using a desktop OS on something that very definitely isn't a desktop. So Freescale's initiative will fail, as will dozens of goofy "tablets" that are little more than touchscreen-equipped PCs with user-hostile ergonomics.
It says "will they be able to support Chrome browsing at full speed on the most JavaScript- and Flash-intensive websites"; I didn't think you could run the flash player at all on ARM chips. Gnash is probably out of the question too. It's coming along nicely but at present it only seems to function 25% of the time and it's very slow for video playback.
In response to all of the questions of the form "can it play flash". It's up to Adobe, not so much the hardware manufacturer. A manufacturer can included chips to offload video processing, etc., but if Adobe doesn't take advantage of the hardware capabilities, Flash won't play well.
Flash is terrible on everything but Windows. My 3 year old Pentium-M laptop with Ubuntu 9.04 can play 720p nicely using mplayer, but can't play 480p acceptably in flash. The problem is Adobe's exclusive control over the flash player. We need a real standard, hence the debate over html5 video codec inclusion.
So please realize more times than not that the shortcoming is with flash and Adobe, not with the hardware.
I think that the main news (whether it was news worthy or not is entirely different thing...) was that $199 (138 €) machine has enough power to run the OS decently. Which is kinda neat. IE: news about the OS, not hardware... The OS is still unfinished and doesn't yet have support for touch screen but that is pretty irrelevant as long as we can make two assumptions: They will get it working eventually and it will not hog large amounts of processing power. I think we can trust on those two.
It's neat to see that Chromium OS is going to be light. (Yeah, Linux is also. As is mobile version of Windows. But more options is still nice.) That said, I'm not sure if this was news worthy: I thought that was given already. That we knew about this.
This is what Intel and Microsoft most fear - a perfectly usable ecosystem of increasingly powerful web connected devices that don't need them. At all. At last! M (Note they didn't bother to do a Windows Mobile version - kinda a dead os there)
And that is to blame website developers who use flash for stuff that it ain't needed for. Such as playing video. The video tag works now (not on IE, but lets face it, if you got IE, you got flash) so support it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Well, thank you for that. That's a great weight off my mind. Except you still haven't told us just who the fuck you are, apart from someone who does cats with q-tips of course.
I have an awesome idea!
Instead of $199 for people that will buy it, lets make it:
- For Children in (um, africa? india? as long as it's not Gadget Geeks...)
- Bright green (or uglier if possible! Think Big!)
- Delayed by 4 years
- Cost Twice as much!
THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!
"Can you even consider it a tablet if it doesn't have a touchscreen or stylus? "
Slim square or rectangular hand held computers I think will generally be called "tablets" because that's what the pundits and sellers have decided to call them. When you have more influence than Steve Jobs, the New York Times, or other influential voice in the world of computing, you can call them something different.
The best solution to working around Flash video that I've worked out it to use the Video download helper Firefox plugin, then play the videos in Mplayer. It has pretty good support for Youtube and its many imitators. Unfortunately, it doesn't handle copy-protected stuff so it won't work with the full length movies on Youtube or anything on Hulu. It is an extra step to download the video before playing it, but the add-on makes it pretty easy, so I find it worth the hassle if I'm going to watch anything more than a few minutes long.
I haven't seen anything approximate ported to Chrome yet. Hopefully it'll get one soon... or better yet the <Video> tag becomes universally supported even sooner.
KTHXBYE
* Get the cat spayed
Personally I prefer the much more recent statements from Mr. Ballmer:
There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.
That foresight - it's eerie. It's like he's got some sort of direct view into the future... Maybe we should call him the Oracle of Redmond.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Hey, maybe for a change we could get a nice whistleblower to leak some documents. That would be great.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
They did make a lot of money. He got that right.
I really do feel sorry for him the interview really is terrible
why cant people do interviews...
...browsing at full speed on the most JavaScript- and Flash-intensive websites and support a large amount of opened tabs?
Dude, my (rather powerfull) desktop comp. doesn't do that.
I didn't mod it funny.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Missed one. I guess maybe Bing is useful after all. It's a humor engine.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Seriously, especially if it's not locked down to disallow other operating systems.
I'm not interested in Ubuntu or Chromium OS, I'd like to install whatever flavour or Linux/BSD/${OtherOS} I feel (obviously that means something that will run on ARM, anyway).
I bought an iPod for my wife for that price (8GB model) and it is very restricted and physically smaller than what she actually uses it for (eBook reader via BookShelf and light web browsing).
This is the reason I browse Slashdot at -1. Sometimes, I get a great laugh from some truly absurd posts.
Here's a post from GigaOM that basically says that Google stabbed Motorola's Droid in the back to deliver this, despite the fact that Droid has a keyboard and Nexus One does not and so it's fair game.
That was picked up by TheRegister which for some bizarre reason sees this as a reason for Moto to run home to the warm embrace of Microsoft, as if the whole Sendo Maneuver had not happened (even though they reported it), and as if Google had actually done something dastardly. Now it's in the Mainstream press [Businessweek.com] and by Tuesday they'll be trying to meme it.
I'm doing what I can but we need more fans of open systems to get out there and make fun of these idiots or they will continue to spew their nonsense and Joe Sixpack might believe them and then we won't get our cool new stuff. Slashdot is popular but there are a lot of other sites out there like cnet, zdnet, Google Groups and Yahoo where this nonsense might take root. People who know stuff need to go from here to there and put the word out that we'd like some shiny new Tegra 2 or Android slates, a Nexus One, and a Droid under our tree at Christmas and anybody that opposes that is a Luddite.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
ok, seriously, i know tablets and "netbooks" are great for people with gigantic pockets but really i need a keyboard that you can type on. why cant i just get a full sized laptop with an ARM processor (not co-processor!) that will have a really long battery life?! my ARM based cellphone still lasts a week with it's tiny battery, so why cant i have a laptop that lasts a week?!
the industry seems to be more interested in the latest buzzword bullshit instead of actually making shit people want.
Hey guys this is off topic but it concerns freescale and Linux so this is the best place to ask. I'm looking for Codewarrior for the HCS12 that runs on Linux. I've looked on there site but all I find are .exe versions. I need the software for a univserity course and of course because I'm on Linux my profs don't try to help lol.
ya so don't mod this off topic because i know it is but this is a freescale Linux / Chromium question so where better to ask.
Will these be available at wal-mart , or best buy or will you buy them online?