Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 24th Feb 2009 18:22 UTC
Chip company ARM is prepping to make its move into the netbook market, and now it has shown off a few prototype designs that really show off the benefits of using the ARM platform: thanks to passive cooling, no fans are required, enabling ARM netbooks to be much thinner and lighter than their Intel counterparts. Thanks to ZDNet, we have a nice video overview of these ARM netbooks - as well as a few very tiny ARM desktop machines.
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RE: I've been waiting for this...
by jal_ on Wed 25th Feb 2009 09:08
in reply to "I've been waiting for this..."
Member since:2006-11-02
RE[2]: I've been waiting for this...
by UZ64 on Wed 25th Feb 2009 09:34
in reply to "RE: I've been waiting for this..."
Member since:2006-12-05
IMO it'd be better built-in, to have the USB slots available for external storage, such as a USB thumb drive and/or maybe an external hard drive. Plus, if it's built-in, it'll no doubt be well-chosen hardware in the first place, and work well with Linux. And one less thing to pop out and lose.
Although I'm not sure what the state of Bluetooth in Linux is currently, since I have no need for it on a desktop (and no reason to pour more money into this old machine that just needs replaced). If it's nothing like the WiFi mess and is likely to work no matter what Bluetooth device is used, good. If not...
Member since:
2006-12-05
And I'm impressed so far. It's pretty cool that those things can be so thin and can do just fine without a fan, *while* delivering the battery savings I expected. Combine with some kind of solid-state storage, and there goes any kind of noise whatsoever. The *only* thing that can make it better, in my opinion, would be BlueTooth support, if only to support a portable, wireless mouse (and possible touchscreen capabilities in the future). I can't wait to find out more about these. And hopefully it causes more distros to release ARM versions of their, well, distros... I think non-x86/x86_64 versions are a bit too lacking right now.
Unfortunately, I don't think netbooks are quite at the place I want them, especially when it comes to storage space (with SSD), so I'll probably wait a generation or two to buy one myself.
Edited 2009-02-25 06:47 UTC