ARM elbows out Intel in Albatron's Eee beater
Move over Eee PC - here's the... er... Tee PC
Cheeky Taiwanese manufacturer Albatron has come up with a compact UMPC ready to take on Asus' Eee PC. Why cheeky? The new machine's called the Tee PC.
Or maybe it's aimed at golfers, we don't know. What we do know is that it's based not on the usual x86 processor type but on a 400MHz ARM 926 running Windows CE 6.0. It has 128MB of memory and 128MB of Flash for storage.
Albatron's Tee PC Rocker: ARM ousts x86 in this UMPC
The chip sits beneath a 7in, 800 x 480 touchscreen - a stylus is included too. The unit has a SD card slot, a swivel-mount webcam, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, but it relies on a docking stand for USB. The base unit has a pair of such ports, along with a power feed, audio sockets and an integrated speaker.
Albatron didn't say what GPU this chap comes with, but it did claim the "graphics facilities in this product can decode H.264, MPEG4 and VGA at 30f/s".
Dock included
The main unit measures 188 x 113 x 12.9mm and weighs 343g. That's a lot less than your average Small, Cheap Computer, but then it is really just a glorified PDA.
The machine is also dubbed the "Rocker", presumably because of that big round speaker.
Unknown at this point are how much it costs and when it'll become available. We're waiting to hear back from Albatron.
COMMENTS
T is for Tablet
It's supposed to be a 'tablet' for taking notes etc. The slate form factor (lack of physical keyboard) may be useful if you're writing instead of typing but otherwise it better come with good software to make use of the lower hardware.
If it's priced around 100 - 150 quid then it'll might be useful for note taking (with Evernote), web browsing (Opera 9.5), audio/video (Core Player) and simple games. If they include Office Mobile (which can be made part of the CE then they'll have a very useful device...and of course the Linux users would have a fantastic new hardware platform...
Pointless...
Really, what is the point of windows ce?
It's not compatible with x86 windows apps, and what few apps it does have tend to be rather lousy and limited.
Compare that to linux running on an arm processor, to which the vast majority of existing linux applications have been ported and can usually just be recompiled. The nokia n810 is arm based and works nicely, it has a proper build of firefox installed on it instead of a crippled stripped down browser.
Re: Have Balls
No it wont run x86 Windows, but worse than that it runs Windows Mobile. That offers a hopeless slow and limited web browsing experience, even if you install the far superior Opera, Firefox on the EEE is going to knock it in to a cocked hat. Microsoft's motley collection of mobile Office format viewers is also vastly inferior to a copy of Open Office shipped as standard on the EEE.
I'm all for the use of ARM over x86 in low power devices, but a 400MHz processor as used in 4 year old PDAs isn't the way to show case it, there are ARM cores with a lot more performance, and unshackled from the horribly inefficient Windows Mobile OS might have a chance against cheap Linux x86 netbooks at the lower end of the market. This device just smacks of being cheap and nasty.
Finally some pr0n for gay/bi men and straight/bi women to check out
Forget that chick on the beach with the eee - I think that display of the mighty, er, edifice and whatever-it-is shooting off the end bears closer examination.
Have Balls
Finally someone with balls enough to make one of these things that won't run Windows. Being able to run WIndows is the only real justification for putting an x86 in a device like this so being prepared to dump WIndows allows a different set of solutions.
These ARM-based machines can be made a lot cheaper than x86-based. Not just the chipsets, but things like simpler power supplies, smaller batteries etc.
