The $100 Tablet, $85 Netbook
Posted on 04. Mar, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey in News, Videos
It hasn’t been surprising that there aren’t too many Chrome OS products on display at Germany’s CeBIT conference, which is the largest computer manufacturer meet in the world. While I had heard rumors of Chrome OS ARM devices popping up there, nothing of interest has shown up yet. The best bet is that the largely Taiwanese manufactures of netbooks such as Acer, Asus and MSI are planning to reveal some interesting things on their home turf at Taipei’s Computex, set for the first week of June.
So while we sit through this lull before the exciting developments come to fruition, there are some really cheap gadgets that are coming out of CeBIT. And both of these prototypes could possibly be loaded with Chrome OS. It’s hard to tell because the Chromium projects site doesn’t offer me too much information on minimum requirements.
The first is a tablet, set at a price point of $100. It’s the 7″ Hivision Speedpad and it comes with a ARM 11 chip by Samsung, 2GB of storage and 256 MB of RAM. Did I mention it’s loaded with Android? Based on these specs, it may be difficult to run Chrome OS on this machine, but with ever falling component prices it may not be a far flung reality:
And then there’s the $85 netbook, or perhaps best described as “mini-netbook”. Made be Coby, its dubbed the NBPC722. It has a Marvell ARM, has a 7″ display and is running Windows CE. I couldn’t get any info as of yet on storage or memory, but I’m betting because it’s running Windows CE, these specs are pretty dimunitive:
Conclusion? Expect to see more devices like this coming in the next few months. While these two are running operating systems befit for a mobile phone or the distant past, I see them simply as placeholders for a time that will soon come where we see a browser-based OS being the standard for these devices. This is because that is the core function these products will provide for users.
What would you do with one of these?
