Day: Thursday, May 13, 2010

Acer to launch Chrome OS laptops at Computex

Posted by Charbax – May 13, 2010

Acer Incorporated {{lang|zh-Hant|宏碁股份有限公司}}
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Venturebeat.com reports that it has heard from several sources that Acer is going to launch Chrome OS laptops at Computex in June.

Last year’s Computex, Acer really disappointed me with their “fake” Android netbook, one that booted Android as a dual-boot with Windows on an expensive and power consuming Intel Atom based Netbook.

The big questions are:

- Will Acer’s first Chrome OS laptop use an ARM Processor or will it be based on Intel?

- What type of price point does Acer plan to reach?

The answers to those questions I think could be found by answering following two other questions:

- Does Acer want to be innovative enough and be one of the first big laptop manufacturers to use an ARM Processor in a Laptop form factor to lower the price, increase battery runtime, lower the weight and size of their new Chrome OS line of laptops?

or

- Does Acer feel it needs to stay in bed with Intel and Microsoft, and thus keep any non-Wintel projects out of their marketing radar?

If they announce it with ARM and Pixel Qi at Computex, hear the drum rolls:

1. 50h battery runtime

2. Instant on, month of standby

3. Below 800gr, 1cm thickness

4. Below $199 retail, no contracts, they sell tens of millions?

5. Built-in 3G module (maybe not included by default) for always connected use

6. Native Code SDK and OpenGL for even advanced video-editing and 3D games

7. Maybe even a swivel screen and the device holds like an e-reader? Touch-screen not absolute necessity for cheap model. Next/previous page and enter/exit buttons on the side would be good enough.

Source: Venturebeat.com

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Native Client enables video-editing on cheap ARM Powered devices

Posted by Charbax – May 13, 2010

Google has just released a developer preview of the Native Client software development kit at http://blog.chromium.org. What this could mean is to run more powerful web apps, such that require C/C++ code to run smoothly with Javascript, CSS and other HTML5 features in the web browser.

This could be how very powerful authoring applications like video and photo editing may work on ARM based Chrome OS laptops or in Chrome on Android laptops and tablets.

Imagine uploading all your rough video files from your camcorder to the cloud, then launch a web app that combine offline web app caching features of HTML5 (previously called Google Gears) together with Native Code features, this will enable to download to cache storage and stream the thumbnail video from the server while editing, then when the edit is done in the timeline, the full quality video encoding and publishing happens on the cloud in seconds. This could thus provide powerful video and photo editing tools to professionals and enthusiasts, and actually provide a more powerful rendering and encoding performance using a basic and cheap ARM Powered device than would be achieved using any expensive machine with powerful local processors.

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