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$199 Freescale Tablet Design Runs Chromium OS

Posted by Soulskill on from the proof-of-concept dept.

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.

4 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Flash by randallman · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:Flash + ARM? by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 4, Informative

    ``I didn't think you could run the flash player at all on ARM chips.''

    Think again: Adobe and ARM Accelerate Flash and AIR for ARM Platforms

    --
    Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
  3. Re:Question by pj81381 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Hey, this thing is (supposedly) $199 and has a touch screen!

    At least the exact same tablets running Android and Ubuntu do. At about 11:34, Mr. Subramanian says "Chromium today does not support touch screen...". So it's not the tablet hardware which doesn't include a touch screen, but the build of Chromium they're using.

  4. Re:Why not take the next step by slim · · Score: 4, Informative

    Firefox supports Ogg/Theora/Vorbis.
    Safari, iPhone, Android support H.264,AAC,MP4
    Chrome supports all of the above.

    http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html#what-works

    If you're a web site developer, it's probably best to host both, and have your pages detect what the browser supports.