$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.

Comments

Yeah right

[Anonymous Coward]

Wake me up when I can buy the thing at a store for $199.

Re:Yeah right

[PopeRatzo]

Wake me up when I can buy the thing at a store for $199.

That's actually very insightful. There are a lot of big players who are going to have to make sure a $200 Freescale Tablet never sees the light of day to keep their shareholders happy.

If it ever hit the market, they'd sell a ton of them. Even the most ardent Mac supporter would have to think twice before spending more than $800 on an "iSlate" that will require another $600 in upgrades before it can be used instead of running out and spending $200 on a basic tablet that works.

I'd take three of them right now, today, if they were on the market.

Before they come out, I predict there will be "problems with the supply chain" and more "driver issues" and then several rounds of "intellectual property disputes" that will make sure a Freescale Tablet stays off the market at least until the big players can hit the markets with their more expensive offerings so the early adopters (aka "chumps") spend their money on 0-day.

Re:Yeah right

[PopeRatzo]

The dirty tricks squad is out in full force to nip this in the bud.

And the media is going to do their dirty work, just like they are with the Nexus

Watch and see.

But it would have to be pretty blatant before the DOJ gets involved. The antitrust group practically works for the dirty tricks squad, after all. They won't bring a lawsuit until the Freescale is safely dead and buried, and then in 10 years, the fines will be a fraction of the profits that the big boys make.

It's just the cost of doing business to them.

Re:Yeah right

[hairyfeet]

Well considering that we have been hearing about $200 and under ARM netbooks that are supposed to come out "any day now" for a couple of years now I'm afraid you're probably right. I just wonder how much of it is other companies interference VS being new players and simply not having their shit together?

Starting new products in a field where margins are usually razor thin to start with is hard enough, then add in the fact that you can't show VC investors your new device running the dominant OS, because Windows don't run on ARM, add in having to cut corners all over the place and the sometimes dodgy vendors one deals with when going bottom of the barrel, and I can see why so many devices end up as nothing more than vaporware.

Personally if they come out with sub $150 ARM netbooks (preferably $99) and $200 tablets I'll be happy to snap some up to sell in my shop, but I'm not holding my breath. There is a niche for these non Windows devices, how big a niche I don't know, but with a college nearby I'm sure I wouldn't have any problems moving a "browser in a box" that let them take notes in class and had 6 hour plus battery life. For college and HS kids these things would be perfect! Hell i would even snatch up a couple for myself just so when I had to go to the doctors office or some other "hurry up and wait" establishment I could kick back and surf and read.

But considering the money Intel is already losing by having Atom eat into notebook sales, plus now AMD entering the market with really nice sub $500 netbooks with Radeon GPUs and real Athlon CPUs, I really don't see Intel sitting back quietly on this. so while I'm sure a lot will go tits up thanks to simply not having all their ducks in a row, after Intel shelling out 1.25 Billion to AMD for not playing fair i wouldn't be surprised if any of these do manage to get their shit together that old Chipzilla wouldn't be willing to grease a few palms to make them go away. with the kind of money Intel has in the bank if it looks like one is close to market Intel can always "buy 'em and bury 'em". So while I would love to have this and a few of those cheapo ARM netbooks sitting in my shop, I won't be betting the farm on them.

Content is the problem.

[Dzimas]

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.

Re:Content is the problem.

[The End Of Days]

If the rumors of Apple's "advanced gestures" for iWorks are true, I can't imagine anything more user hostile. Sure, there will be a contingent of people who rabidly defend Steve's decision to throw gangsigns at the computer to open a file, but those people also praised him for only ever making mice that didn't fit human hands.

And no one has seen the Chrome OS in a finished state yet, because it's not finished. How can you dismiss something that doesn't exist?

Re:Content is the problem.

[obarthelemy]

the "compelling suite of apps" is already there, on the web: facebook, email, IM, twitter, browsing. Throw in google maps, an ebook reader, remote terminal... I don't think apps are that critical anymore, because they are already there.

As far as a keyboard is concerned, I'd rather have a tablet + separate keyboard/mouse for when I need them, rather than lug them around all the time. A pure tablet is better when not inputting much info, which is 50-75% of my time on a netbook.

Re:Content is the problem.

[obarthelemy]

Oh, OK sorry, didn't realize you wanted specific apps for the thing. The way I see it, I don't, it's just a more portable way to do the same things, and it's easier to add a keyboard want I want one than to rip it away when I don't ^^

Re:Content is the problem.

[KeithJM]

How can you dismiss something that doesn't exist?

Uh, you made good points until this. How can you NOT dismiss something that doesn't exist?

Re:Content is the problem.

[insufflate10mg]

I agree fully. My main use for this would be browsing the internet and (since monitors do not strain my eyes) I would also use them to read on the couch and have much more massive personal library available for 'dedicated reading'.. When I need a more diverse range of applications I will go to command central and do work where my work is best done. It would just be nice to have a decent tablet capable of full web browsing capabilities and touch screen. Reading takes up such a large portion of my day that this would be invaluable and I would be willing to pay well over $200 for it.

Flash

[randallman]

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.

Re:Flash

[clang_jangle]

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.

My 3 year old Pentium-M laptop with FreeBSD 8.0 plays flash just fine via the linux-f10-flashplugin10 port -- we don't even get a native libflashplayer.so. Sounds like you have an Ubuntu problem, not a flash problem...

Re:Flash + ARM?

[RAMMS EIN]

``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

Re:Question

[TheRaven64]

It has a touchscreen. It does not yet have (working) drivers for the touch screen.

Re:Flash + ARM?

[TheRaven64]

Adobe now supports Flash on a variety of ARM chips. The i.MX515 in TFA was launched with a version of Flash, supported by Adobe, and provided to OEMs right from the start.

Why not take the next step

[SmallFurryCreature]

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.

Re:Why not take the next step

[slim]

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.

Re:Why not take the next step

[StreetStealth]

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

And right there is why the HTML5 video tag will never defeat Flash video in its current form. With Flash, you need only one encoding.

Re:Flash + ARM?

[oh2]

The Nokia N900 has an ARM processor and full Flash support, v9.4 currently and 10.1 is coming in a few weeks according to Nokia. Its quite doable.

Re:That's missing the point

[iammani]

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.)

Er, actually Chromium is Linux.

IDEA!

[clinko]

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!!!!

Re:IDEA!

[StreetStealth]

Ouch, man. Ouch.

But warranted.

Re:Question

[pj81381]

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.

Work around Flash

[loudmax]

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.

Re:Flash + ARM?

[symbolset]

Annnnd... that's what Microsoft gets for bringing out their Silverlight "Flash killer": Enthusiastic support from Adobe for alternative platforms. Way to drive innovation, Microsoft! Why don't you come out with a creative suite next? That would be great.

A more recent quote...

[symbolset]

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.

Re:A more recent quote...

[TheRaven64]

I'm not sure what you think he got wrong. Apple has under 2% of the total phone market share (although a bit more than that if you only count Smartphones, and a lot more than that if you do what a lot of analysts have done and redefine Smartphone to mean 'thing like an iPhone' before you do), and they've made a lot of money. Personally, I'd prefer to own the highest margin 2-3% of the market than the lowest-margin 60%; the money's often about the same, and the effort required is a lot lower. I guess that's why I'm not a manager at Microsoft.

Re:A more recent quote...

[mgblst]

You are right, but since he is talking about having Microsoft OS on those phones, I am pretty sure he is talking about smartphones, since Microsoft only produces OS for smartphones, not for regular mobile phones.

He seems to be confused.