Interesting news and pictures from engadget.com today about Intel's MID UMPCs.
Looks to me to be running a version of MAEMO OS. I'm an APPLE fanboy through and through and cant wait to get my hands on the iphone but still long for a device that has a sceen 6-7 inches and APPLE's intergration and ease of use. Thats why i bought a 770 in the first place ( no MicroSoft inside ).
Apparently it will also use a "Mozilla based" browser. Looks like Asian languages will be supported - Intel aren't stupid, but Nokias lack of Asian support suggests they are.
What's the betting the Intel device will have working 3D and OpenGL, and lots of other good hardware stuff that Nokia didn't bother to activate despite being present in the N800?
It seems like Intel is announcing later this week their own flavor of internet tablets they are calling MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices). From a presentation document (PDF) Intel has officially released, what we can gather are the following: Foundation leverages Gnome Linux Desktop Technology, GTK+, DBUS, GConf Intel developed user interface called 'Master User Interface' New Linux distro called RedFlag MIDINUX (v1.0 to be available sometime May) Support of the Intel 915 chipsets Finger-friendly Applications &n bsp; Browser, news reader, IM, VoIP Media player, audio recorder, image viewer, camera GPS, email, PDF reader, Bluetooth 18 second boot time, 3.2 second resume time
From the screenshots, the MIDs look like Maemo with Intel's customized front-end Master User Interface (MUI), finger freindly, application launcher. It is not yet clear how far Maemo and RedFlag MIDINUX will inter-operate but you can be sure that both platforms will be covered in Internet Tablet Talk. A lot more images after the jump. MID Screenshots:
yes, thanks, I've typed long reply and when submitting I saw invalid thread id an everything was lost :-)
What I wanted to say is - let's see how they can match power efficiency of ARM platform. They talk about boot and suspend/resume time a lot. That means they either don't get it or they know their devices won't last long in always on mode. Also it will take year of two until we see real devices so I wouldn't hold my breath.
But x86 compatibility and PC-like hardware would be nice and would solve some problems of current Internet Tablets.
That's a year for Nokia to start delivering on the software quality and innovating in the hardware again - the N800 hardware (particularly the graphics performance) seems to be a step back from the 770. The extra memory and CPU performance is very nice, but so much in the SoC isn't actually used.
The N900 needs to see improved graphics performance and 3D support would be a good idea. Dumping Opera in favour of Minimo/Mozilla doesn't sound like a bad idea either.
Battery life needs to be improved - a larger capacity battery would be welcome as it's unlikely to come via any other route.
I fully expect the Intel device to be heavier (huge battery) and more expensive (dual core cpus?!) but I also hope it will give Nokia a kick up the @rse.
According to the article it looks like intel is going to offer the umpc without vista and instead using linux. Some of the pictures in the gallery look alot like maemo.
