Spain to get Europe's first major-vendor smartbook
HP AirLife 100 unveiled
HP has launched the first ARM-based netbook from a major vendor in Europe, though you'll - for now, at least - have to live in Spain to get it.
HP's Compaq AirLife 100 is a 10.1in haptic-enabled touchscreen netbook with 16GB of Flash storage, an SD card slot and a "full milti-tasking operating system".
Which, since you ask, is Android, which lends weight to the assumption that the device - which is being pitched as an internet, email and social networking tool - is based on ARM chippery.
HP's Compaq AirLife 100: ARM 'n' Android
A typical AirLife user "lives much of his life online and no longer values features such as processor speed so much as access to individuals, groups and lists or rankings in social networks", said Charl Snyman, head of HP's Personal Systems Group in Europe, giving further weight to the ARM theory.
HP hasn't confirmed the specs yet, but it did say this "revolutionary device" will offer a 12-hour battery life or run for up to ten days in standby mode. The AirLife has Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity on board.
Spain will get the netbook through mobile phone network operator Telefonica, which owns O2 over here.
Lenovo announced an ARM netbook, the Skylight, earlier this year at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), but so far hasn't said when the device will make it to markets beyond the US. It's scheduled to debut there in April.
So far, HP and Telefonica haven't said when the AirLife will arrive, or indicated what they expect to charge for it. ®
COMMENTS
Absolutely
Getting to the point where the backlight is the biggest consumer of power. So why not make the outer case photovoltaic, and let it top up the battery a bit when not in use?
Or abandon a backlight altogether and have a transparent screen, to be backlit by available light?
Streaming...
Not much good with no internet connection though is it? :-D
I want one of these too but with Ubuntu and more storage space.
Rob
I DO care...and so do others
"A typical AirLife user "lives much of his life online and no longer values features such as processor speed so much as access to individuals, groups and lists or rankings in social networks", said Charl Snyman"
No, they actually DO care that their video streams and plays properly, even at high definition. They care that their music plays even when they are on-line doing other things, and doesn't stutter. They care that it doesn't take 30 seconds for the machine to task switch.
Everything ELSE he mentions I can do...on my iPhone.
ARM vs x86
"Give us ARM based smar/net/wangbooks with similar or greater hardware capabilities than a good x86 netbook (example: my aspire one 1.6GHz Atom n270, 512MB RAM, 120GB HDD) and don't cripple them by locking them to android. Please."
You obviously don't understand what ARM is all about. It is SAVING ENERGY. What you want needs a huge battery that will still live only for 4 hours. That's what existing x86 netbooks already provide.
The innovation here is to provide something which is NOT a very small version of your desktop machine. It is a new class of machines that allow people to surf the internet, do text chat, do Skype, twitter, email, things like that. The very idea of low-power operation rules out that MS-bloat like MS Office and one of those 3D shooting games.
Every heard the term DOWNSIZING ? Less is more - think about it.
My suggestion: 15GB Flash mem, 128 Mbyte RAM, 500 GHz. THAT will allow you to run this box for 20 hours until next recharge.
Can you hear it ?
Old fashioned?
"I fucking hate this corporate assumption that people don't want their own storage."
We all want our own storage, no doubt about that.
But isn't putting a bit (or a lot) of storage in each device a bit last century?
I don't want my VM images on my phone or my backup set on my bedroom radio and I don't want my entire media catalogue on a portable web browser or whatever niche this machine would fill.
I'd expect to be able to stream to it from my home NAS (whether that's across my home network or over the internet) so I don't need to carry a hard drive full of duplicates of stuff around with me.
