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New Asus Device Runs Both Windows and Android
taz346 writes "Asus has unveiled a new 11.6-inch tablet/laptop that runs both Windows 8 and Android Jelly Bean side by side, the BBC reports. The firm said 'users would be able to synchronise data between the platforms in order to enjoy a "smooth transition" between each mode.' Hmmm, I'm guessing one could also create another partition and install a full Linux distro as well, though there's no telling how UEFI might come into play."
i don't understand anybody that wants android on a pc, hell i barely understand why i have it on my phone.
I'm guessing one could also create another partition and install a full Linux distro as well, though there's no telling how UEFI might come into play."
There's no telling whether this thing will shit ice-cream either, but like the issue of UEFI we do have a pretty good idea about it. Firstly it is SecureBoot that would affect installation of other operating systems and secondly since it is Windows 8 it has the option to turn SecureBoot off, for fuck sake even Microsoft's own device, the Surface Pro, allows SecureBoot to be turned off and Linux to be installed on it so do we really need all the continued scaremongering?
One of the more interesting aspects about this device is that the keyboard-dock can be connected to an external monitor and used as a PC at the same time that tablet part is being used. It's essentially two independent computers that can be linked together to share peripherals and storage. I think that's quite an engineering feat.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Sources say it will be available sometime in the next two years as demand is sure to be hot! Take a look at the Transformer Book timeline for more details. //end-sarcasm
This seems very cool. However, why are they touting the device as a laptop, tablet and a DESKTOP. It seems a little underpowered for desktop use.
it is good to see AMD as the processor choice. I have enjoyed my A8-3200m powered laptop. fast enough for developement and such while clocked at 1.5ghz.
Is it Intel or ARM?
If it's Intel, it won't run any Android native apps, and if it's Arm it won't run most Windows apps.
Adding Android to a Windows device doesn't make up for Windows apps lack of touch friendliness, nobody will seek out the Android version of a Windows app, just to sync it to the Windows side.
As an Android tablet, its very very expensive, low res, and heavy. The tradeoffs to run Windows negatively impact the Android experience.
Really ASUS already make a compromised device, the Asus Infinity. It has a touch pad which nobody uses on Android because you can simply tap the screen. It has a laptop form factor, with a hinge that flexes as you tap the screen. Meanwhile Samsung make full on tablets and are taking all the market.
ASUS need to think again, these Padfone , Windows/Android, Android Laptop format, devices they're all very confused.
Too many possibilities to list, but frankly I would love to use one of these as my mobile machine. Load it up with all the Windows and Android programs I currently find most useful and use them on a single device with a keyboard/mouse anywhere... I'll keep the large desktop setup of course, and while most of the servers are in datacenters elsewhere so I'm fairly sedentary this would be great for the local datacenter/lab setup instead of rolling the crash cart around. Ok I want it because it sounds like an all in one toolbox that I'll probably use far less than I'm thinking right now but damn it, I want one. - HEX
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
It sounds like a great idea because there's less to carry around. As always we'll see how the device performs, how they're going to manage memory (how much memory?), and how much it will cost. Until then, bring on the innovation.
Transformer AiO also runs both Windows and Android... so, it's easy to make and small version (Transformer Book Trio) from biggy one (Transformer AiO). :)
The presentation of this device running on Android : Asus Android
"Too many possibilities to list, but frankly I would love to use one of these as my mobile machine."
Not mobile, seems to be an Atom based Android screen, which acts like a tablet, and a Windows based keyboard dock with 1TB hard drive and a faster i7 processor that acts like a desktop PC but can't be used unless you plug in the screen!
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7017/the-asus-transformer-book-trio-atom-haswell-android-windows-8
Which means you won't be able to run the same software when plugged in and unplugged into the keyboard dock. And for that you get a lot of tradeoffs, like having two CPUs, an Android device based on Intel not Arm, if the hard drive is in the dock, Android tablet mode can't access it (so no video playback of movies on the harddrive).
I think they haven't thought it through.
Its key feature is that it can run both the Jelly Bean version of Google's Android OS and Windows 8.
It doesn't say it can do both at the same time.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I've been running Windows and Android dual boot on my Asus T101MT (multi-touch touchscreen) for a couple of years now. Currently it's just ICS and Win 8, but I even have ARM emulation with Android so it runs most apps. TFA doesn't particularly state if it runs simultaneously, but if not, then it doesn't seem to be innovative.
I thought it was running Window 8 and/or Android on same system; nope.
Detachable screen is in fact an andoid tablet; when you plug it into the 'docking station' that's actually a full-spec Win PC sitting in the keyboard / chassis.
If your use cases including running both a tablet and an ultra-PC, could be temping I guess, but hardling a tech breakthrough.
Try these for more info:
http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/03/asus-announces-the-transformer-book-trio-likens-it-to-a-laptop/
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/157253-asus-unveils-dual-os-dual-cpu-jekyll-hyde-transformer-book-trio
have 2 running at the same time off a hypervisor but it seems a bit overkill for this class of device and potentially confusing for the user if they hit the "switch" button by mistake.
But more importantly, can it run Linux? If so, then this would be a truly great device!
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Hmmm, I'm guessing one could also create another partition and install a full Linux distro as well, though there's no telling how UEFI might come into play.
What the hell? Android is a Linux distro.
He said "try to force you" not "has successfully forced you".
While the summary mentions the Linux-running potential of the device, it fails to address the imagination of a Beowulf cluster of these. I expect better, /.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
True, but there are technical reasons for this decision. Namely battery life and screen real estate.
Screen real estate? BS. My Nexus 7 tablet's screen is bigger than the screens of two smartphones put together. A 10" tablet is even bigger. The only reason that an Android tablet can't run two phone applications side-by-side is some a short-sighted design decision made early on by Google to allow applications to assume that the screen size never changes after installation.
At the point of install you don't necessarily know the details of what an app does, nor why it might want to access certain resources.
While browsing Google Play Store on my Nexus 7 tablet, I've seen more and more applications that explain in the description exactly what they do with each permission.
Of course whatever way permissions are granted, there also needs to be a way to withdraw them from apps as well.
A way for whom to withdraw them? The user or the operating system publisher?
If you launch an app then hit the home button, that app stays running in the background.
If a task involves two applications, each with its own user interface, it's still more jarring for the user to have to switch back and forth between two maximized windows than to split it down the middle. It gives the user doorway amnesia.
Also the latest firmware update [for the Samsung Galaxy S3] gives you a split screen option to run 2 apps on the same screen at the same time.
I'm told very few applications support this, other than those few applications supplied by Samsung, because variable window size is not a standard feature of Android. See my reply to Cenan.
I can't figure out why running Android on a PC would be superior to just preloading Ubuntu or something along those lines.
Because Android has more applications that end users want than Ubuntu has.
Consider the major personal computing operating systems that allow showing more than one application's window on the screen at a time. The ones I can think of are Windows, Windows RT, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux, and among these four, Windows has such a supermajority of usage share that it arguably has market power. Let me know when the iPad can run an iPhone app in a floating or tiled window or when the usage share of Mac OS X rises from its current 7% (source: Wikipedia citing Net Applications) to even 20%.
On a device like that Metro would be more useful most of the time.
Which is why the Surface Pro and other Windows 8 (x86 or x86-64) devices also include the environment formerly known as Metro.
On my Nexus 7 tablet, when I look at what applications are using the battery, "Screen" consistently takes 66 to 80 percent of the energy since last charge. So I imagine that even if Android applications continue to run, it won't drain that much more power than a typical laptop's screen alone.
Maybe this is what Windows 8 should have been. Two OSs on the same machine that can communicate back and forth, but have two different environments for operation/interaction. You have the traditional "desktop" version for when your tablet is docked, but then you can separate the pieces and change it to the "metro" style.
By "a full Linux distro" they mean GNU/Linux. Now we're starting to see why RMS would always insist on the distinction. Debian is GNU/Linux. Fedora is GNU/Linux. Android is not; it uses Bionic instead of glibc, and it uses a different fundamental set of userspace CLI applications instead of Bash and Coreutils.
Ultimately, until someone solves "has to", there's little point in arguing "wants to".
...but the Windows half sounds compelling. If I want to run an Android app (which so far has never happened) then I'd just run Bluestacks on Windows.
Good luck if you're trying to play multiple videos at once
In the case of video, it's probably already compressed, and local displays probably use hardware-accelerated decoding
Can these hypothetical displays use hardware-accelerated decoding for multiple video streams at the same time?
Yes, in the exotic case where you have uncompressed, or compressed-with-a-codec-the-display-host-doesn't-speak, video streams, you might have to go to real-time encoding with resultant lossiness
I disagree that the case of "compressed-with-a-codec-the-display-host-doesn't-speak" is as "exotic" as you claim. In such a case, how many displays would support anything other than H.264? For example, how many would support MPEG-2 (DVD), H.263 (FLV), MPEG-4 ASP (DivX), VC-1 (some HD-DVD and early BD), etc.? Each non-free codec introduces an additional patent royalty. How many would support Theora or VP8, and how many would support VP9 once it becomes final two weeks from tomorrow?
Make a system that does what the Google Play store and the App Store do, and you'll have publishers, I assure you.
That's what the Windows Store and the paid apps that Ubuntu Software Center added in 12.04 were supposed to be. Have they caught on yet? If not, what are they missing compared to Google Play Store and Apple's App Store?
When iOS 2 was released, the App Store had no user base. When Android 1.0 was released, Android Market had no user base. How did these manage to gain a user base while Ubuntu Software Center and Windows Store have failed?
If you're using narrow definitions of markets like that then everybody has a monopoly in a particular market.
You try getting work done in a task that uses multiple applications if the only window management policy available to you is all maximized all the time. Otherwise, if you want to see more than one document at once, you have to do like they did on Star Trek: buy multiple tablets, one to show each window. I don't think 51 percent of people are willing to spend that much money.
No 'Windows' has no market power, it is a product.
I meant "Windows" in the sense of the division of Microsoft dedicated to developing and marketing Windows, just as "PlayStation" refers to Sony Computer Entertainment.
however the dismal adoption of Windows 8 proves that [the division of Microsoft making Windows] no longer [has market power]
That depends on what happens in April 2014 when just about every remaining Windows XP PC connected to the Internet gets 0wn3d through a vulnerability that shall remain forever unpatched. What do you think is most likely to replace, or replace Windows XP on, the 38% of PCs that run Windows XP (same source)?
Software compatibility is key, and there's a substantial number of people that rely on Open/Libre Office -- yet even though there's a whole slew of MS Office clones for Android, there's nothing beyond a few document readers when it comes to Open/Libre Office...which drastically reduces the usefulness of a device like this for a lot of people. Hopefully if devices like it take off, developers will notice the niche waiting to be filled and we'll start to see Android ports...
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
My contention has always been that user expectations from a tablet and user expectations from a laptop are very different, just as their expectations from a phone and a laptop are very different.
Which leaves the difference in expectations between a phone and a tablet unstated. My question here is whether the difference in user expectations from a tablet and from a phone is greater than the difference in user expectations from a tablet and from a laptop. In the space of user expectations, there's a line between phone and laptop, and I want to know whether a tablet is closer to a phone, closer to a laptop, or closer to the halfway point.
My tablet runs Android, my laptop runs Linux. Two separate devices.
And these are two separate devices. The top half is a screen that also happens to be an Android tablet when detached; the bottom half is a Windows PC. It's as if you had a desktop computer running Windows or GNU/Linux and were using an Android-powered smart TV as its monitor. You can use the laptop in Windows, or you can use the screen alone in Android.
However, I see no fundamental reason to run two operating systems on one convertible device.
Weight, power, and heat are reasons that Windows runs on the bottom half and not the top half. The hardware to run Windows effectively is heavier and hotter than the hardware to run Android effectively.
Why not develop a compatibility layer for Android apps, and then provide better functionality for app developers for platform-specific development? One has to admit that Linux provides a lot of possibilities in that way.
Because applications that users want to use while the device is in laptop mode are made for Windows and not GNU/Linux, and they work in Windows but fail in Wine.
The Transformer Book Trio is actually two computers - an Atom-based tablet that runs Android plus a i7-equipped keyboard/CPU that runs Windows 8. This article http://www.zdnet.com/asus-doubles-down-with-the-transformer-book-trio-7000016269/ states it a bit more clearly.