Touch Book: Linux based touch screen device announced (The H) [LWN.net]

An interesting twist on Linux-based netbooks is the subject of an article over at The H. "The Touch Book sports a number of unique features in a small device. The keyboard is detachable, allowing the device to used as just a tablet, and the back of the tablet is magnetic, letting a user stick the device to a fridge or other metallic surface. The device weighs less than two pounds, but offers a ten to fifteen hour battery life. However, there is a catch; the two parts of the Touch Book, the tablet and the keyboard, have their own separate batteries. The tablet alone has 3 to 5 hours battery life, with the keyboard battery extending that to the ten to fifteen hours."

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Touch Book: Linux based touch screen device announced (The H)

Posted Mar 2, 2009 17:56 UTC (Mon) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]

Ouch, the keyboard is an extra $100. Makes sense, given the included battery, but still.

The released schematics is based on the Beagle Board B5 -- that's the one with *only* 128 MB of RAM (the C-series will have 256 MB). I have the schematics downloaded but it does not really say (AFAICT) whether the amount of memory has changed.

1 GB and I'm sold.

Touch Book: Linux based touch screen device announced (The H)

Posted Mar 2, 2009 18:57 UTC (Mon) by leromarinvit (guest, #56850) [Link]

I also find 256MB a bit on the low side for GUI apps. Bulky apps like Firefox or OpenOffice will probably be quite slow, and running more than one of them at a time will be a nightmare. This thing needs more RAM to be really useful. That said, I do find the concept an interesting take on the normally horrendously expensive Tablet PCs.

I'm really looking forward to the coming ARM netbooks. Also, I hope for more laptop-sized ARM devices in the future - 1024x600 is a tad small for a lot of GUI apps. Make something with a 12" 1280x800 screen and decent battery life that doesn't cost an arm and a leg like current ultraportables and I'm sold.

Touch Book: Linux based touch screen device announced (The H)

Posted Mar 2, 2009 20:26 UTC (Mon) by macson_g (subscriber, #12717) [Link]

Will Firefox and OOo ever run on an ARM machine? What about Java, Flash and multimedia codecs?

Touch Book: Linux based touch screen device announced (The H)

Posted Mar 2, 2009 20:41 UTC (Mon) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link]

Debian make an ARM port which has virtually all of the 23000 packages in
Debian. I've run Iceweasel, Apache and KDE on an NSLU2 (32M of RAM, 266MHz
processor) - because I could (and for the local LUG demo).

Touch Book: Linux based touch screen device announced (The H)

Posted Mar 2, 2009 21:05 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Pretty much any open source thing should run on the ARM platform. Multimedia codecs, too.. but they would probably have to be recompiled and probably have some optimizations done to take advantage of the platform to it's fullest.

For example the OMAP3 platform has the capabilities to decode 720p H.264 realtime for watch HD movies and such. But you won't get anywhere near that if you depend solely on the ARM processor. Depending on the version of the OMAP3 stuff you can get DSPs and such that can be taken advantage of to give very good performance for codecs.

Touch Book: Linux based touch screen device announced (The H)

Posted Mar 3, 2009 1:39 UTC (Tue) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]

Ack! Someone must be reading my mind.

First, a small, very low power machine perfect for an asterisk box.

Now this.

I started with an 8 1/2" X 5 1/2" daytime binder, graduated to the pocket
sized, then bought, used and wore out 3 Palm machines, eventually getting
frustrated with the difficulty of text entry. I now carry my original
daytimer with success and satisfaction.

My eeepc is the same size closed, and a bit thinner, not much heavier, but
when it comes to using it as a pda, instant on is essential. But I
thought, something the same size, touch screen. Hmmm.

Derek

RAM, video, storage

Posted Mar 4, 2009 8:21 UTC (Wed) by pjm (subscriber, #2080) [Link]

One comment about RAM is that even 128MB is enough so long as one has swap space, so amount of RAM only affects speed rather than what you can do with the machine. It's a bit hard to compare because most of us are used to spinning discs as what gets used when there isn't enough RAM, and flash has rather different characteristics, and it varies quite a bit between flash devices (speed and how well wear levelling is done).

So rather than saying I won't buy one if it has less than x MB RAM, it's just a matter of trying your usual workloads and deciding whether the overall speed (CPU, flash, memory) is acceptable, and using their 15-day return option if necessary.

Other than RAM, one item I noticed missing in the specs given is external video. (The Beagle Board supports HDMI and S-Video, but not VGA. So hopefully the Touch Book supports at least HDMI. It's now easy enough to buy new monitors that support HDMI, though I'm not so confident about video projectors one might encounter in one's travels.)

With a magnetic back, I'm guessing that an internal hard drive won't be an option :-) . Still, there are plenty of USB ports for either a large USB key or an external hard drive. The internal flash is 8GB, which is plenty of space for installing applications, but won't fit many build trees, or video files to test that 720p playback, or however you use more than 8GB on your current machine.