New Spark Tablet To Come Loaded With KDE's Active Plasma Interface

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New Spark Tablet To Come Loaded With KDE's Active Plasma Interface

Posted by timothy on Sunday January 29, 2012 @02:23AM from the domain-folding dept.

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."

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Spark != SPARC by LoRdTAW · 2012-01-29 02:28 · Score: 4, Funny

I just woke up and decided to read ./. And to my surprise someone was making a SPARC based tablet running KDE, AWESOME! Then I read the summary. Gets Coffee...
1. Re:Spark != SPARC by oodaloop · 2012-01-29 03:02 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Yeah and I thought it read Gnu Spork Table Too Comb Lauded Wit KFC's Archive Palm Intertubes. Seriously, I don't want to see everyon's spelling/reading comprehension problems on slashdot.
  
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2. Re:Spark != SPARC by machine321 · 2012-01-29 03:46 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  To be fair, I can see the editors confusing SPARC and spark.
3. Re:Spark != SPARC by unixisc · 2012-01-29 04:58 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  In that context, remember the SPARC notebooks that Tadpole Technology used to make, somewhere in the early 90s? That would have been a great notebook for Linux and BSD. And had anyone made a SPARC w/ really low power consumption capable of tablet use, that could have had some good potential as a tablet and one could have had Gnome3, KDE4.8 or even Unity on it ;)
4. Re:Spark != SPARC by hairyfeet · 2012-01-29 08:30 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Yeah I've noticed talking to customers that jumped on the tablet bandwagon most of them suck on time which to me kinda kills the whole point of having one. What are they doing wrong? Are they making them too thin and thus with no room for a battery? Are they using shitty batteries? Because my EEE 1215B isn't much thicker yet gets nearly 8 hours under Expressgate and 6 hours with Win 7 HP X64, and that's with me watching 720p movies. Now I know the E-350 has hardware decode but surely a generic X86-64 chip, even one designed for low power like Zacate, surely it uses more power than ARM right? so what's the deal?
  Because most of the reviews on the new tablets unless you buy one like the Transformer where the keyboard has a second battery the average seems to be around 2 and a half hours which to me is kinds worthless. i mean who cares if they stick Plasma or Ubuntu or whatever on the thing if you've got to have a cord running from it to the wall constantly? Hell if you're gonna get that little time you might as well stick with your smart phone which is what my customers are finding out, most are using their android tablets as expensive digital photo frames.
  
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  ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
5. Re:Spark != SPARC by ozmanjusri · 2012-01-29 10:20 · Score: 2
  
  You must be talking to the wrong people.
  My $120 Ainol Novo 7 easily gets 5 hours on a charge, while a friend's Zenithink ZT280 does about 6 hours.
  
  --
  "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Android needs some competition by visualight · 2012-01-29 02:42 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
1. Re:Android needs some competition by hitmark · 2012-01-29 03:14 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Media sales via the Android Market in general, more like it.
  And it echoes a statement made by Nokia regarding Maemo/Meego, where they said the then upcoming phone would have a dual mode boot loader. One mode would check signatures on vital OS components, but would allow media purchases via the Nokia Ovi store. The other mode would allow people to tinker with the OS internals, but would lock them out of the mentioned store and any media bought from there.
  I wonder if this is why we see the hoopla about UEFI cryptographic boot in Win8, because MS is trying to set up a Window online store themselves and big media is demanding "trusted computing" before they put anything into the store.
  
  --
  comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
To bad the specs once again suck donkey balls by SmallFurryCreature · 2012-01-29 02:50 · Score: 4, Interesting

There have been a few other linux tablets and so far they just don't compete on specs. They seem to think that going linux means going budget but I am a Linux user and have no interest whatsoever in going budget.
This thing seems to have a single core CPU... the new asus tablet transformer prime has 4.
A 800x480 resolution, my 2 year old MP3 player has that, on a far smaller screen. The tablet after the prime, the TF700T, will have a 1920x1200 resolution.
Yes, these are larger devices and cost three times as much but geez whiz, where are you more likely to find people who will appreciate having a full OS at their disposal with real desktop quality applications instead of fart apps, at the bottom budget market or at the high end cutting edge?
MS must be loving this, there tablets are not going to be underpowered rebrands of yesterday model, so if an average consumer is browsing for a tablet, they will see highend sexy devices as being Android/iOS/Windows8 and Linux in the bargain bin... and gosh, wanna bet that people who bargain hunt will still want Android/iOS/Windows8 and just get an older device?
Evidence? The total and complete failure of previous linux tablets that pulled such braindead stunts as using a resistive screen... Save a few pennies and make your device basically unsellable.
It is basic economy, niche markets exist at the high end not the bottom end. You can't sell handmade fiat panda's.

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1. Re:To bad the specs once again suck donkey balls by hitmark · 2012-01-29 03:16 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  1. this is a enthusiast project and so is likely bootstrapped on a shoestring budget.
  2. they are trying to get all drivers into the kernel proper, no blobs and similar. This means finding a supplier that can go along with that.
  Android have none of these issues, and so can get the latest and greatest.
  In the end one have to decide what is more important, principles or instant gratification.
  
  --
  comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
2. Re:To bad the specs once again suck donkey balls by countertrolling · 2012-01-29 03:30 · Score: 2
  
  In the end one have to decide what is more important, principles or instant gratification.
  Right now it's price. Damn things and computers in general are an enormous ripoff.
  
  --
  For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
3. Re:To bad the specs once again suck donkey balls by devent · 2012-01-29 03:40 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Why does the specs matters for a tablet (or for a netbook or notebook)? As long as it does what is suppose to do, meaning playing videos and show Pdfs, I really don't care if it's have 10 CPUs or just one. What matters is the whole product and if it's useable or better then the competition. I would wait for the product and for the reviews.
  
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  http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
4. Re:To bad the specs once again suck donkey balls by Lumpy · 2012-01-29 03:42 · Score: 2
  
  says the boy that has zero clue.
  Maybe you need to get yourself a class in economics and understand that Computing devices in the USA are dirt dirt cheap because of the slave labor, they are built with.
  Just because you cant afford a $399.00 ipad/androidpad/low end laptop, does not make it a rip off.
  In fact it's an incredibly cheap price for what you get. Try saving up all your money from your paper route for 2 years to buy a TRS-80 Model I so you could have a computer that was B&W only and had less power than a $9.00 watch.
  
  --
  Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
5. Re:To bad the specs once again suck donkey balls by hairyfeet · 2012-01-29 09:23 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Before the flood I paid $300 for a 12 inch EEE 1215B, that's an E-350 dual core with an HD6310 GPU built in, 320Gb of RAM and I got an 8Gb upgrade on the RAM since it came with Win 7 HP X64 (the RAM was $32 after MIR) and a nice carrying sleeve for it for a final price of $352 shipped. Even after the flood you can still pick it up for $450 for a dual core that gets 6 hours playing 720p or 8 hours under expressgate. Seriously how fucking cheap do you think they can go? With a little care a unit like that can easily last you 5 plus years and my 17 inch Dell from 2005 last i heard is STILL running just fine with the guy that bought it off me, same as my Athlon dual laptop from 09 I sold to help pay for my EEE.
  While i'm sure there is some price fixing that happens luckily enough there is enough companies still fighting for business that prices are pretty damned low. the PC I'm typing this on I built myself for less than $850 if you count the upgrades, less than $700 if you count the fact i got $50 for the original dual core and the board and quad i had after that is now in my GFs PC so I didn't have to buy those, and we're talking 6 cores, 8Gb of RAM, an HD4850 GPU, 3Tb of HDDs, dual DVD burners and a 1600x900 22 inch screen. Dude that is insanely cheap for that amount of power! hell my customers get new triples and quads to hook up to their HDTVs for around $550 and that is with me making a nice profit putting them together, again that is just crazy cheap.
  So I really don't see what anyone is bitching about, my first x86 was a whole 40Mhz (I stayed with the VIC and Trash 80 for years past everyone else) and I got a steal on the thing at $500 simply because the guy wanted to get a state of the art 100Mhz to play Hexen with. By the time i got a monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, etc i was out damned near $800 and again i got 'em cheaper than ordinary folks because i knew people. it wasn't a year and a half before the software coming out wouldn't run decently on it because it was too slow and there was ZERO upgrade paths so I was SOL. Now I can build a box and have it run the latest software no problem years later, the nettop i use to surf in the shop is a 2004 Sempron 1.8Ghz with 1.5gb of RAM and frankly it'll do anything on the web I wanna do. My boys are gonna finally have to be upgraded this spring because some of the newer games don't play nice on their Pentium Ds which is a circa 2006 chip but I'll get to keep their HD4850s which I paid a whole $60 refurb for a couple of years back.
  dude the amount of power we get for dirt cheap is truly mind boggling and the amount of time it lasts is just nuts. you can buy an AMD E-350 board for like $80, slap a 4gb RAM chip in it for $20, and have a system you can surf with 5 years from now, hell you can even plug it in via HDMI to your widescreen and it'll play 1080p no problem. So I don't know what anybody is bitching about, as someone who has been into computing since the days of the VIC and Trash 80 I'd consider this a "golden age" of computing, where even the throw away stuff is so insanely overpowered it'll do the jobs 90% of the public want to do with them with ease. Hell I've already got a buyer for the guts out of one of the boys boxes so that 2006 Pentium D will just be moved along with the board and RAM from his machine to a neighbor who while having no trouble surfing with his late model P4 has a couple of older flight sims he wants to play online and that Pentium D will be more than enough for that. i wouldn't be surprised if a decade from now he's not still running that 2006 chip and quite happy with it, its a golden age friend, enjoy it.
  
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  ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
why the premium price ? by Coeurderoy · 2012-01-29 02:50 · Score: 4, Insightful

Since the KDE plasma tablet is the zenithink c71, why should the price be 200€ when the android version is 139 ?
Does Google sponsors the Android tablets that much ?
I do understand that the developpers expect to make some revenue for their work, but at this price it just kills the device...
A typical software licence in this domain is less than 20€ for the OS and 15€ for the codecs (and this would be for very small quantities....)
So the price should not be more than 175, and even then it should be marketed as "dual boot" Android and Linux (since you'd pay for Android anyway)
So it seems that the distribution channel is not under control, and most probably it will die just like other great technical ideas not correctly implemented
Sad ...
1. Re:why the premium price ? by Junta · 2012-01-29 04:48 · Score: 2
  
  I don't really see the point in comparing this device to a €139 device that sells millions.
  
  It isn't comparing two different devices, it's showing two price points for the *exact same device*, with different software loads, both of which are OSS.
  Of course, it oversimplifies things. On one hand you have the practical market evident price for a device already on sale. On the other hand, what is effectively 'MSRP' as suggested at announce. Rarely in this sort of situation does MSRP have a particularly strong correlation to the price it sells at. I wouldn't be surprised if pricing ended up being about even when things settle in.
  
  --
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Bad tablet by dmesg0 · 2012-01-29 02:59 · Score: 5, Informative

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).
Re:KDE on 512MB RAM? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-29 03:26 · Score: 3, Informative

By the way, they don't just dump default KDE on and call it Plasma Active, a lot of optimization and tweaking has been done for it to have decent performance.
And it will suck by Lumpy · 2012-01-29 03:37 · Score: 2, Interesting

I have been down the Linux, Gnome,KDE tablet road several times. and they dont have Handwriting recognition or on screen keyboard as a part of the window manager. It will suck unless they built those into the WM.
All the Linux UI's need to have tablet specific code in them. Make them rotate orientation smoothly without wierd artifacts or location issues,etc...
Linux Tablets have a future if the UI devs stop with the eye candy crap and focus on adding in Tablet specific features that 90% of the UI users(I.E. non tablet users) will never use.

--
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
1. Re:And it will suck by Teun · 2012-01-29 04:27 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  It's not exactly a tablet but I've got standard Kubuntu installed on an HP TouchSmart and there are several on-screen keyboards to choose from.
  And they work quite well.
  
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2. Re:And it will suck by SomeKDEUser · 2012-01-29 04:40 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  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.
3. Re:And it will suck by Lumpy · 2012-01-29 07:07 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  and none of them pop up the second you click on a text field. It's an epic fail that I have to go hunting for it or take up 1/5 of the screen all the time with it.
  
  --
  Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Re:KDE on 512MB RAM? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-29 03:50 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
Re:KDE on 512MB RAM? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-29 04:02 · Score: 4, Informative

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....
Reality is a bitch by YA_Python_dev · 2012-01-29 04:37 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

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It may suck, but ... by eyegone · 2012-01-29 05:00 · Score: 4, Insightful

At least the KDE guys aren't trying to shove one uber-interface to rule them all down our throats.
A similar announcement from GNOME would have included a list of all the functionality that was removed from the desktop interface to make it tablet-friendly.

--
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Re:GUI? by unixisc · 2012-01-29 05:40 · Score: 3, Informative

As SomeKDEUser pointed out above, KDE has different workspaces (as they call it) for desktops and netbooks/tablets. They don't try to force desktop users to use a tablet UI, as do Microsoft, Canonical & Gnome. Nor do they try to have a desktop UX on a tablet. That way, they can fine tune each workspace to its target platform.
The Active Plasma screenshots show how they've finetuned the interface for a tablet. More details can be found on the KDE website
Re:Finally an excuse to run KDE by devent · 2012-01-29 07:23 · Score: 2

Why do you need an excuse? In fact, pro-linux.de run a poll what is the most used desktop environment. KDE is with 43% the most used, Gnome3 is 12% and Gnome2 is 14% and all the others are lower.
So I would say that KDE is very much used, maybe more than Gnome.

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