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Intel's Atom To Ship In Over 35 Tablets Next Year
nateman1352 writes with a bit from TechSpot: "Intel has been trying to cut itself a slice of the mobile market for years, and it seems the company is finally making some headway. During a conference yesterday, Intel CEO Paul Otellini revealed that the company's Atom platform will ship in over 35 tablets starting early next year. The chipmaker has partnered with more than a dozen manufacturers who will launch slates running Windows [or] Android as well as Intel's own MeeGo operating system." The article lists Toshiba, Dell, Fujitsu, Lenovo, Asus, AT&T, Cisco, and Acer as developing Atom-based tablets.
I think it's more of a hardware problem than a OS issue. Samsung has shown that Android tablets can sell well, but they've used an ARM chip just like Apple has used. ARM chips get a hell of a lot more performance per watt than Atom has ever been able to get. Unless the amount of power they can offer is significantly better, I can't see a good reason why anyone would want to use one. Tablets require small sizes and light weights to be successful. Cramming a more power hungry chip in one is just going to make it burn through the battery more quickly or require a bigger battery.
I also wonder how many of these are going to end up being Windows 7 tablets because those haven't sold worth a damn and if the vast majority of these are Windows 7 devices, I wouldn't expect more than a few hundred thousand atom-based tablets to sell all year. That's hardly a praise-worthy figure when both Apple and Samsung can sell over one million ARM-based tablets in a month.
It's not an Apple thing. It's an unsuitable CPU thing.
Galaxy S = Samsung Flagship - manufactured by Samsung for Samsung. This phone runs the Samsung proprietary RFS filesystem, uses Samsungs TouchWiz interface and is poorly supported by Samsung. Google has nothing to say about it.
Nexus S = Google Flagship - manufactured by Samsung for Google. This phone runs on EXT4 filesystem, uses stock Android with some device specific drivers and will be well supported by Google (if the Nexus One is any indication). Samsung has nothing to say about it.
"Lame" - Galaxar
You want to know the sad part? MSFT has the fricking source code and doesn't do as well as the pirate hackers with their own shit. look up "Tiny7" and you'll find a version of Windows 7 that'll run anything a regular Win7 will and just takes 145MB of RAM and almost 0% CPU on the desktop. For even crazier numbers look up "TinyXP Rev 09" which uses just 45MB! on the desktop or MicroXP A03" which uses just 32MB.
MSFT needs to hire the pirate hackers and have THEM design the lightweight versions, because trying them out they'll play any game or office app you throw at them and feel fast even on 10 year old crap. Which considering the Atom is in order crap that is like a hyper P3 would mean you'd actually have a Windows that was snappy on one. Personally I'll wait until some come out with the AMD Neo, as it pairs an actual AMD CPU, which means out of order dual cores with virtualization and x64 support as well as DEP, with a nice Radeon GPU so the videos will all be unskippy and smooth.
Playing with Atom based netbooks here at the shop it always amazes me people buy these things, as I have 7 year old laptops that feel smoother and handle better than the Atom single cores everyone keeps using. I guess it just proves folks will buy just about anything if it is cheap enough. Hell I should have known that when the local Walgreen's sold out of the $99 Android tablet, which felt so anemic that even launching a fricking browser felt like you needed to pack a lunch first.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.