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Commell announced a pico-ITX SBC (single board computer) featuring Intel's “Pineview” Atom processors. The LP-170 offers N450, D410, or D510 CPUs clocked at 1.66GHz, a SATA port and CompactFlash slot, gigabit Ethernet, two serial ports, and a PCI Express Mini Card slot, the company says.
The MeeGo Linux operating system for mobile devices gained additional software support at the Computex show this week in Taiwan. Novell and Linpus both announced MeeGo-based netbook distributions, Movial announced a “MeeGo Services” offering, and Telefonica weighed in with support for the open source platform.
Lanner released a fanless, Linux-ready network appliance powered by the dual-core Intel Atom D510 or single-core D410 processor. The FW-7535 is equipped with six gigabit Ethernet ports, dual USB 2.0 ports, a 2.5-inch hard disk drive bay, and Mini-PCIe expansion, says the company.
ARM Holdings and five semiconductor manufacturers have formed a not-for-profit engineering firm to develop standardized, open source Linux tools, kernel, and middleware software for consumer electronics. “Linaro” is jointly owned by ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson, and Texas Instruments, and will initially support ARM Cortex-A tools on distros including Android, LiMo, MeeGo, Ubuntu, and WebOS.
The Linux-based MeeGo operating system gained traction at Computex, with prototype tablets shown by Wistron, Compal, Quanta, CZC, and others, and Acer announcing it will offer MeeGo on both netbooks and tablets. Meanwhile, Phoronix benchmarked MeeGo for Netbooks and found it to be faster than Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Fedora, and Moblin.
Motorola announced a square-shaped, low-end Android phone, featuring a pivot design that exposes a hidden, five-row QWERTY keypad. The “Flipout” is equipped with a 2.8-inch, 320 x 240 touchscreen, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, and a three-megapixel camera, and runs Android 2.1 with a new version of Motorola's MotoBlur UI layer.
Finnish mobile firm Aava Mobile has announced what appears to be the first Android development platform for the Intel Atom Z6xx (“Moorestown”) system-on-chip. Virta Android is billed as a hardware-enhanced software developer kit (h-SDK) for developing Android applications for Z6xx -based smartphones and tablets.
Taiwanese mobile development firm Innocomm Mobile Technology and Silicon Valley fabless semiconductor firm Telegent Systems have collaborated on a low-cost Android phone with analog TV reception. The Innocomm Shark is equipped with a 3.2 inch WVGA capacitive touchscreen, eight-megapixel camera, 3.5G connectivity, and WiFi, and incorporates Telegent's analog mobile TV technology.
Yukyung Technologies showed off a Viliv-branded, Android-based tablet at Computex equipped with a 10-inch, 1366 x 768 touchscreen. The Viliv X10 Tablet with Android offers an SD card reader, USB port, HDMI, webcam, and WiFi, and “could be an incredible iPad alternative,” according to a hands-on Laptop story.
Qualcomm announced it is sampling dual-core versions of its Snapdragon chipset, targeting high-end smartphones. The Mobile Station Modem (MSM) chipsets each integrate dual 1.2GHz Snapdragon cores and offer 1080p video encode/decode plus Open GL ES 2.0, with the MSM8260 targeting HSPA+ networks and the MSM8660 supporting HSPA+/CDMA2000 1xEV-DO Rev. B, says the company.
Intel announced yet another “next-generation” Atom platform, this time aimed at tablets and “sleeker” netbooks. Code-named “Oak Trail” and set for 2011 release, it will be joined in the near term by new, DDR3-supporting Atoms, the single-core N455 and D425, and dual-core N475 and D525, the chipmaker says.
Asus announced a tablet combining a monochrome e-reader with Wacom stylus input and notepad support. The Eee Tablet offers input sensitivity of 2400 dots per inch (dpi), as well as a back-facing two-megapixel camera and 0.1-second text file page turns, says the company.
Texas Instruments is prepping a version of its DM6467 DaVinci video processor optimized for videoconferencing. The single-chip VCE6467 Video Communications Engine integrates pre-installed software from RadVision on the ARM9-based, DSP-enabled DM6467 SoC, enabling two-way H.264 video at 720p quality running at 30 frames per second (fps), says the company.
STMicroelectronics announced a new line of SoCs (system on chips) that will employ dual ARM Cortex-A9 processors. The SPEAr1300 product line will support fully symmetrical operation at up to 600MHz/core, include a DDR3 memory interface, and be manufactured using 55nm HCMOS (high speed CMOS) technology, the company says.