Led by the iPad, tablet PCs will sell 19.4 million units in 2010, and soar to 208 million in 2014, according to Gartner. Tablets will pressure sales of mini-notebooks, e-readers, media players, and gaming devices, and perhaps even smartphones — but devices based on Android and other open source OSes will fare better than most against cannibalization, says the study.

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Trenton Technology announced a 3U rackmount computer designed for shipboard and control room applications. The TCS3502 includes dual Intel Xeon processors, two externally accessible, hot-swappable hard disk drives along with internal storage, a DVD-RW drive, three PCI Express slots, and one PCI slot, the company says.

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Pandigital announced a six-inch, electrophoretic ePaper version of its Barnes & Noble-ready e-reader. The Pandigital Novel Personal eReader offers an 800 x 600 grayscale touchscreen made by Sipix, Wi-Fi, 2GB of memory, and a microSD slot, says the company.

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Wind River announced the fourth-generation of its commercial embedded Linux distribution, adding 95 packages. Based on Linux 2.6.34+ kernel, Wind River Linux 4 offers GCC 4.4, EGLIBC 2.11, and GDB 7 cross-compiling toolchains, and provides multiple virtualization options, PREEMPT RT real-time Linux, multi-team collaboration features, a new native x86 build environment, and support for the upcoming CGL 5.0, says the company.

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InHand Electronics announced the first two members of an Android-ready “Apeiron” line of single board computers (SBCs), the “Fury” being based on the Texas Instruments (TI) DaVinci DM3730 system-on-chip (SoC) and the “Siren” on TI's Sitara AM3703. Measuring 2.5 x 2.5 inches, both SBCs offer 1GHz performance, 256MB DDR memory, 512MB flash, plus Ethernet, RS-232, USB, and optional wireless connectivity.

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Diamond Systems says it is now shipping an SBC (single board computer) that offers a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530 CPU plus both SUMIT-A and PC/104 expansion interfaces. The Aurora has a -2 to 150 deg. F operating range, eight digital I/Os, and support for an onboard USB flash drive, the company says.

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MSC Vertriebs announced a COM Express Compact module that's available with three different Intel Atom processors. The CXC-PV525 includes up to 4GB of DDR3 memory and an optional 4GB SSD (solid state disk), gigabit Ethernet, three SATA channels, plus support for both CRT and LVDS displays, the company says.

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Advantech announced a fanless embedded automation computer that offers two PCI slots for expansion. The UNO-3072LA is equipped with an Intel Atom N270 clocked at 1.6GHz, and offers CompactFlash and SATA storage, a DVI-I port, two serial ports, two gigabit Ethernet ports, and five USB 2.0 ports, says the company.

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Alcatel-Lucent has switched from VxWorks to Linux for a new “intelligent” 10-gigabit Ethernet enterprise switch. The OmniSwitch 10K Modular LAN Chassis supports 5Tbps (terabit per second) performance over 256 10G Ethernet ports, and offers intelligent management features, such as flow-based quality of service with variable flow control, as well as virtual output queuing, says the company.

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With Ubuntu 10.10 (“Maverick Meerkat”) now available, eWEEK Labs put the desktop version through its paces. The Software Center is the most changed — and most impressive — aspect of Meerkat, but the netbook edition's new Unity UI and enhancements to the Ubuntu One cloud service also stand out.

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Techsol announced an embedded computer touted for its jumper-selectable serial ports, optional Power over Ethernet (PoE), and sub-two-Watt power consumption. The Linux-based Gateway Express 2 (GWX2) Embedded Computer incorporates Techsol's ARM9-based SA2410 Medallion module, and offers up to 64MB of SDRAM, a microSD slot, an Ethernet port, and four USB ports, says the company.

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Portwell announced a “3.5-inch” embedded system board based on Intel's dual-core Atom D525 processor. The PEB-2771VG2A supports dual displays (VGA and LVDS), IDE or SATA hard drives, and dual gigabit Ethernet ports, according to the company.

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Rhomobile announced a new version of its cross-platform, native app development framework for smartphones, offering expanded Android support. The open source Rhodes 2.2 adds support for Bluetooth, native device calendar events, and “Android Cloud to Device Messaging,” says the company.

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Worldwide PC shipments fell below expectations during the third quarter, according to market research firms Gartner and IDC. Each found commercial refresh projects to be on target, but consumer spending sluggish — a trend each partly attributed to the hype surrounding tablet PCs such as the Apple iPad.

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The MeeGo project says MeeGo 1.1 will be available soon for the Nokia N900 smartphone, which will be able to boot into either the MeeGo or Maemo flavors of Linux. Meanwhile, Aava Mobile, which is porting MeeGo to its Intel Atom N6xx based Aava Mobile smartphone reference design, joined MeeGo's overseer, the Linux Foundation.

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