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New Spark Tablet To Come Loaded With KDE's Active Plasma Interface
mpol writes "KDE's Plasma Active introduced last Saturday its own 7" tablet. According to Aaron J. Seigo, 'It's the first tablet computer that comes with Plasma Active pre-installed.' The Spark, with its 7" screen, is built around a Cortex A9 with a Mali-400-gpu, 512MB RAM and an SD-card slot. It will have a 800x480 screen resolution and will cost around 200 Euro. It is actually a rebrand of the Zenithink ZT-180 C71, which comes with Android by default. On a personal note, Aaron J. Seigo will no longer be sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks to work on Qt and KDE. He will, however, stay involved with KDE and Free Software, he says."
And this is a start. The recent story around the Asus Prime indicates that Google Video may be the reason that non-phone wifi only tablets have locked boot loaders, so I'm not seeing Android as "open" anymore. Really hope this is good.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
ZT-180 C71 has a slow single core AML8726-M CPU (despite being based on ARM A9 which is usually found in dual or quad core configurations), low resolution screen and just 512M of RAM. It costs 120$-130$ including international shipping.
There are much better Chinese tablets now (with higher resolution, 1GB ram, IPS screens. Even dual core cpus, though not as good as branded offerings).
KDE can very well run on 512mb of ram. KDE 4 has a smaller memory usage then KDE 3.5 which runs decently with 512mb of ram. Early version of KDE 4 used a bit too much CPU, however, though this may have changed. I'm also sure this has been carefully customized so the QT framework is the only framework. Now it will slow down to a crawl if used for heavy multitasking (apps that don't rely on the framework much) but single tasking or light multitasking usage, which is more tablet like anyways, will be perfectly fine.
KDE has always been large because of it's large library. That means that more functions are shared across programs. Basically a large base footprint with smaller program footprints. The KDE still fits well within 512mb.
Proof:
http://blogs.kde.org/node/3138
http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?22401-KDE4-memory-usage-vs-KDE3-gt-benchmark
http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/applications/414533-memory-usage-11-1-kde4.html
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_desktop_vitals&num=1 (this uses ubuntu which which also includes the gtk framework hence the higher memory usage)
and many others online.
I have slackware 13.0 with KDE on my laptop (which I use more than my desktop). It's a 1.4Ghz Pentium M with 512MB of RAM and Nvidia 5200Go gfx.
And it runs great....
Funny how the phones designed directly by Google or in strict collaboration with Google (the Nexus series) all have an unlockable booloader and support Google Videos.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
Plasma active _is_ a tablet-specific UI. The whole point of plasma as a foundation for the KDE desktop was that you got a generic library for making interfaces.
They have a desktop interface, but the also have a netbook interface. Active is their tablet interface. I have played around with it on an asus T91MT, and it works quite well. In fact, it is perhaps the only tablet interface which does multitasking in a clever way.
And yes the on-screen keyboard pops up when you touch a text entry field. And they also provide touch-friendly interfaces for common apps.