Submitted by We have found the device of your dreams. Make no mistake: this is what OSNews readers have always wanted. You are going to buy this device, in droves. Trust me, as far as geekness goes, this is pretty much the best it’ll ever get. Fully open source (from hardware to software), easily servicable, runs Linux, has an ARM processor, accelerometer, powerful 3D capabilities, 10-15 hours of battery life, touchscreen, and internal USB ports. And you know what? I didn’t even mention the best part: the keyboard of the Touch Book netbook is detachable, leaving you with a 8.9″ tablet. And all that for USD 299!
Yes, you guessed it, I’m pretty enthusiastic about the Touch Book. At such a low price, you’re getting every geek’s desire, and because of the total openness of the hard and software, the community will easily pick up on this one and improve it. Even if you don’t care about the geeky nonsense, this is still an insanely cool device. It runs completely fanless and is instant-on. Let’s round up the specifications:
- 9.4″ x 7″ x 1.4″ for 2 lbs (with keyboard)
- ARM Texas Instruments OMAP3 chip
- 1024×600 8.9″ screen
- Storage: 8GB micro SD card
- Wifi 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth
- 3-dimensional accelerometer
- Speakers, micro and headphone
- 6 USB 2.0 (3 internal, 2 external, 1 mini)
- 10h to 15 hours of battery life
Usually these devices-by-and-for-geeks look ugly, but the Touch Book defies that general rule and actually looks pretty decent, with the design coming from Fred Bould. The Touch Book was demonstrated at Demo, and there’s a video of it.
The make/break point here is of course the software. While Linux itself won’t pose much of a problem, the question is whether or not the custom touch interface that’s included will actually be any good. Looking at the few shots of it in the video I have my reservations about it, but it is important to note that it might not be ready yet, and that of course I haven’t tried it myself yet.
At a price of only USD 299, this is an absolute bargain. It will become available in May or June 2009. Now, pre-order this thing, but please note that so far you may only pre-order in the United States (boo! Hiss! We Europeans want it too!).
I hope it really happens and the price will good in Europe.
I will sell my Eee PC 901 for that thing without thinking about it. Awesome!
US-only, once again
It is $299 without keyboard. $399 with keyboard. Still…
Yeah. I’m thinkin’ it could be the replacement for my Dell Axim X51v when it dies. I’ve thought about a smartphone, but none of them has the screen size of my Dell. The Touch is too big to fit in my pocket, however. If I were to buy one of these, I’d wait until after the first wave & see how people are liking them.
How useful is a system running an ARM processor, compared to an x86-compatible platform? Yes, things can be compiled for it, but in practice hardly any Linux users actually compile all of the applications they need. Can you reliably find binaries for anything you might want to run on this device?
Geez, where do you live? Just run Debian or Ubuntu and apt-get everything you need. Or use Synaptic if you are into the pointy-clicky thing.
And yes, before you ask, Flash is well supported on Arm Linux. The only difference you’ll notice is the excellent battery life compared to Intel devices.
Edit: Sorry if that sounded harsh. But subtle FUD about how you have to use Intel under *Linux* or you won’t have the software you want is highly annoying.
Edited 2009-03-03 20:35 UTC
There’s now coming several low-price gadgets with ARM processors so I do actually expect to see the rise of Linux distros specifically tailored for such machines. Gentoo does support ARM so one can start with that if one is familiar with compiling stuff by oneself, or one can just wait for some more common distro to pump out ARM compatibility.
Being a Mandriva fan myself I am eagerly waiting to get a lightweight, low-cost ARM netbook and run Mandriva on it
Debian already does it, Ubuntu Jaunty will have it. Gentoo seems like a bad idea, compiling is pretty slow on these devices.
It seems time is ripe for arm to enter the “general purpose” market (as opposed to closed gadgets that of course are selling zillions of units).
Actually, Gentoo (or Arch) would probably be pretty good once it was set up and working; I found Gentoo’s main strength to be that it was designed to only have what you wanted installed on it; no more and no less. The fewer programs you have running on a computer, the faster it is.
Of course, any system that allows for that level of flexibility would also work well on systems like this. I’d worry more about compile issues in Gentoo’s stable tree (or, having to use the ~ARM arch to get reasonably up-to-date software…)
I am a former Gentoo user myself. I did love the flexibility it offered, but eventually I just grew tired of constantly having to compile stuff and often the builds failing for whatever reason. As such, I’d use Gentoo on one of these low-cost devices only until a suitably stable ARM distro with large repository became available.
Gentoo does have its strengths, but the bad things only get more pronounced the slower the machine is.
Sadly Arch is x86 only.
Arch have support for 64 bits too.
Yeah, but only on an x86 instruction set – thus my post.
Edited 2009-03-04 12:02 UTC
Funnily enough, that would be a re-entry to that market. The A in ARM originally stood for Acorn, then a British producer of home-computers which was fairly successfull, especially in the UK. The original ARM processors were designed specifically for their computers.
The last more or less general purpose machines with ARMs in them were (iirc) the Acorn RISC PCs, which ran RISC OS. That one may have come up here on OS News once or twice
I think that several factors contributed to ARM disappearing from the stage for general purpose computers at that time. To name 2 that in my opinion are very important: Microsoft was king at the time, and only x86 was really well supported by them. Secondly, there was a very capital intensive race on to produce the most computing power, at any cost.
This latter point resulted in more and more power hungry CPUs. However, a small chip area and corresponding modest energy consumption had always been strong points of ARM designs. I also doubt ARM would have had the cash to participate in that race (and nowadays AMD is more or less the only competitor of Intel left in the x86 arena, others having gone bankrupt and/or taken over).
Now that in recent years a bit of a ceiling has been reached in terms of raw computing power per core, emphasis is being placed on more, simpler cores on one die, but also on energy efficiency. Of course, the increasing demand for mobile devices and ubiquity of wireless communication helps a lot with that last trend.
So while the big CPU manufacturers first ramped up pure power, and only then got into the habit of conserving energy, ARM remained on the side of the curve that demanded less energy. But still, their CPUs became steadily more powerful, and apparently can now compete on the mobile end of the spectrum for general purpose computers again.
To that you can add the diversifying software ecosystem, which is starting to make people slightly less leary of Anything Not Windows. Also, the emergence of Open Source generally has made software less dependent on one particular platform.
All in all I agree with you that the time is ripe for ARM to re-enter the general purpose market. But (for the time being?) only on the mobile end of the scale.
ARM-based machines running RISC OS are still made, and the OS is still developed (albeit slowly). A port to Pandora is apparently underway. Porting RISC OS to the Touchbook would be neat.
ARM started out as being much faster than contemporary x86 processors, and it was only after ARM was spun off from Acorn that this ended. This was because the focus of ARM then became portable devices (starting with Apple’s Newton).
The server market is getting more power conscious, so I also think ARM has a role here in the near future. We have already seen Marvell’s Plug Computer, but more will come.
The desktop PC market seem to be mainly driven by either games or office applications. PC games are not likely to be ported to ARM (though they rely more on graphics cards than CPUs), but since Open Office is gaining in the office space, OO on ARM would be a viable option.
But the desktop home computer is more or less dead, except with power gamers.
Actually compiling wouldn’t be too bad so long as you have a cross-compiler set up on a faster x86 machine that the touch-book (or whatever ARM netbook out there) can send compile jobs to via distcc.
I don’t see running apps on a ARM platform as much of a problem. Especially the kind of applications that this device is targeted at.
The beauty of linux is that apps can be recompiled to run on other architectures. So for example the OpenSuSE build system as ARM support, so I should think it’s quite easy to get ARM builds of most apps. I suspect the other distributions do something similar.
So it’s a touchbook with detachable smallish parts… Okay…
Thus … starting at (only) $299.Meh. I bet the price will translate directly into euro (EUR299).And that’s starting! With that price you can buy an Aspire or even an eee. Bigger screen,even a camera. If they drop the price to EUR200 then,yes,it becomes viable.
Did you miss the part about “10-15 hours of battery life, touchscreen”? 9″ affordable tablet is a market-changer, and could finally drive the touch-based tablet UIs to mainstream.
I dunno, the Euro ain’t as strong against the dollar as it used to be. At the current rate, 299 Euro might not cover VAT in some countries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAT#EU_countries
When will it be available for sale inside the EU, and with a Swedish keyboard? heh
say this on tech crunch ealier and pre-ordered mine already. can’t wait to check it out.
say this on tech crunch ealier and pre-ordered mine already. can’t wait to check it out.
Buy me one too while you’re at it
Well, as much as this DOES sound awesome, I’m not too thrilled with the 8.9″ screen. I’ve tried store demo Eee 901 and Eee 1000H at my neighborhood Best Buy, and apparently my fingers are too fat to be comfortable even on the 10″ keyboard. Give me an 11″ or 12″ version with a 1280×800 screen, and I’ll bite. Seriously. Yeah, it’d probably have nowhere near the battery life, but it would be more COMFORTABLE.
I also note that there appear to be TWO internal and THREE external USB ports in the Gizmodo article’s pictures, contradicting the product’s own website… not a big deal though.
…Yes, I know I usually rail on about people with their ‘one remaining deal breaker’. Hypocrisy smells so sweet…
The other thing that bothers me is the storage being 8 GB microSD (microSDHC?) cards. They’re EXTREMELY tiny, and not very fast compared to SD cards… I think I’d rather hook up a fast and capacious USB flash drive to one of the internal USB ports, and use that for internal storage.
RAM seems a bit short, but if it works for the Pandora handheld, it ought to work fine for this thing.
Nevertheless, this device gives me a good feeling about the oncoming crop of ARM-based netbooks.
Have you also tried the keyboard of the acer aspire one? For me its the difference between useless and very handy.
I use me aspire one as primary machine, but such a device might convince me to buy one.
Apparently, the keyboard is optional. I guess you can interact with it via the touch screen.
I’m not sure I’m ready to get rid of wired ethernet just yet…
TBH though, this seems like it could be the perfect mix between laptop and mobile phone for me… especially if there’s a device that would let it work like an actual mobile phone… I always carry a backpack and laptop, and it makes far, far more sense for me to get my SMSes a calls on my laptop than to try to scale up phone hardware to do everything my laptop does.
Am I blind or do they not tell the memory (RAM) size? Also they don’t tell which of the OMAP3 chips is used, they come in a lot of varieties.
http://i.gizmodo.com/5162584/always-innovating-touch-book-is-part+n…
From their own “Buzz” link to Gizmodo (which might be nice to have in the main story, since the actual link doesn’t give many specs).
600 MHz OMAP3; 256 MB RAM; resistive touch panel…
Edited 2009-03-03 23:12 UTC
I want one NOW!
Very very interesting piece of hardware, right in the spirit of the Eee: Emphasize on your strengths, don’t try to mimick the competition.
My wishlist:
– non-mini SD card slot for a faster, bigger drive
– availability in Europe
– 10″ screen.
That’s all, almost all netbooks currently shipping have a much longer list of personal mislikes 🙂
You could always get a compact SD-card reader (they’re very cheap) and stick it in one of the internal USB sockets.
Agreed with Europe availability
Edited 2009-03-04 01:18 UTC
Can somebody please point me to the proof of these “powerful 3D capabilities”? I found nothing regarding the graphics chip used by this (beautiful) thing.
Plus, if it doesn’t have dedicated memory for 3D, and I bet it doesn’t, how are those 256 Mb going to be enough?
I have a bad feeling about the graphical horse-power of this machine. Remember we are close to nVidia-powered netbooks, they better not do the mistake of ignoring this. Because I don’t see it very difficult to build exactly the same thing but with nVidia graphics…
It probably comes with the same OMAP3530 processor (http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/omap3530.html) used in beagleboard (http://www.beagleboard.org).
Read about graphics capabilities in these specs.
Very cool architecture, didn’t know about it.
So the new Intel Atom is not inventing anything new…
Edited 2009-03-04 13:19 UTC
Sorry, but 10-15 hours of battery life is nothing compared to the ‘infinite’ battery life you can get from laptops running off _AA-batteries_ that the Chinese shanzais are making now.
AA-batteries are now my Killer Feature for netbooks…
yeah… definetly when those ‘infinite life’ batteries will run out of power… its also nothing new: it was used as an option on one of ibm’s handheld /sorry, don’t remember name/- but it had cpu ~150mhz and 16mb of ram :/
Sorry, but 10-15 hours of battery life is nothing compared to the ‘infinite’ battery life you can get from laptops running off _AA-batteries_ that the Chinese shanzais are making now.
AA-batteries are now my Killer Feature for netbooks…
O_o
I’d MUCH rather choose a single rechargeable battery instead of having to lug around AA-batteries. Sure, you can buy AA-batteries anywhere, but they last an insignificant portion of the time a single larger battery does. An it’s not like there aren’t places to plug that cord in after 10 hours of use.. atleast here even trains supply travelers with plugs to use for their laptops.
Have you ever owned a Point&Shoot Camera with LiIon batteries? A -big- PITA when they lose charge when you’re traveling– gotta stay the night at another $80/night Motel to do the 5-hour recharge on those things..
Nope, the experience here is that AA batteries are a feature on cameras: they’re cheap, readily available, swappable (and quickly rechargeable) — I want that on a netbook.
Elite PowerUser Poseur Netbook owners can carry around 4x $150 extra laptop batteries everywhere they go if they want..
Go find a TRS Model 100 or AlphaSmart Neo owner, and ask them if they wish their devices used NiMH/LiIon…
Edited 2009-03-04 03:26 UTC
Hey, it can’t be that bad a deal: I have four old NiMH rechargeable AA cell batteries that, combined, give 8200 mAh of power. Modern rechargeables are up in the range of 2600 mAh a piece, so we’re talking 10 amps. And if these batteries die faster than LiON batteries, purchasing more is FAR less expensive than what OEMs charge.
If you put the battery case under the hinge as in the new ASUS EeePCs, it wouldn’t be all that bad. Of course, your laptop couldn’t get any thinner than just over half an inch. (1.5 cm)
You do realize that notebooks don’t work at 1.2V, right?
I do now. Sigh, another dream killed by harsh reality.
I never used your point & shoot, but mine (a Canon SD870) has a LiIon battery and it works brilliantly. The battery easily lasts two days under average use and charges in 1-2 hours.
And it’s not as if these things are built-in to the device or expensive anymore. Buy yourself a second LiIon.
Really. And how much battery life do they get out of one set of AA batteries? I can think of many things I’d rather do than change batteries every 10 minutes.
I like it. While I have nothing against the ARM processor, I would like to know how the same would perform against the atom or other Intel chips. Mainly I would really like to see some big company like Intel come out with a Moblin like build for it. Moblin looks like its going to be a big feather in Intel’s cap. Seeing as most netbooks (sorry Psion) come with a crap distro, having one with a majorly supported build is going to be important. Bet this thing is really hackable though.
EDIT: Bad engluish
Edited 2009-03-04 00:55 UTC
So wipe it and install your own distro preference. There’s more than enough that support ARM.
I’m pretty sure there’s even a flavour or two of BSD that support ARM.
If you fancy something a little more mainstream – then the video suggested installing Android.
No more hackable than the OS (and software) you choose to run.
Well if a big name company jumps on board sporting an ARM based OS, great. Otherwise I consider using ARM to be a drawback at the moment. Like I said, its not about the processor, its about the support.
Gentoo:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-arm.xml
Deban:
http://www.debian.org/ports/arm/
Slackware:
http://www.armedslack.org/
I had read that RedHat and Ubuntu supports ARM too –
plus there’s Google Android (which might be better suited for the smaller screen) as discussed in the video.
All of the above links took no longer than 10s by typing “<distro> arm” – so support for ARM is clearly there.
However what you’re describing is a bit like the chicken and egg senario.
A major personal computer vendor wont start shipping with ARM as they don’t see the demand for it because people aren’t buying smaller devices like these.
Thus smaller devices like these wont sell because people like yourself refuse to buy them until a major company jumps in.
It’s also half the reason we’re stuck with x86 now
Watch what you wish for .!!!
This product may do to US PC makers
what Toyota/Honda did to Detroit.
And while it seems sexy and many may buy at $299,
skiping the Dells and HPs it will make salaries for US based employees like R&D engineers all the infeasible in the end. It will force jobs to move elsewhere
where Engineering costs are less in order to compete.
Remember! Innovation doesnt pay the bills when your
competition drives you of the market.
And who do you think are building your laptops nowadays? My last Dell was stamped “Made in Malaysia”. And I’m pretty sure MSI and ASUS are Taiwanese; Sony is Japanese…
It’s exactly what I wish for.
You say it’s like it’s a bad thing. If you can’t make good enough products that’s what happens.
What about all the manufacturing jobs that Dell and HP has canned in order to produce their units cheaper in China? Aren’t those as important as the R&D jobs?
Guess those R&D guys will just have to worker better and harder, eh?
Awesome. Maybe they’ll move here. That’ll be a boon for OUR economy which is, after all, what *I* care about.
Ah yes, we know. Only U.S companies ever innovate. That’s just so true. Or not.
This looks like an amazing machine. I will have to wait until it is available in Europe but I will be waiting for the first reviews.
Meh, just another netbook: too big to carry around all day, too small for a desktop replacement. For me, the perfect solution is a PDA phone with a qwerty keyboard (HTC Touch Pro in my case) for phone, mail, IM, web on the run (plus everybody goes ‘wow’ when you put it on a projector), and a full-sized 15″ laptop for work. The only problem: price. Only the Touch Pro cost ~ 600€.
P.S. How do I change the damned comment’s title? I forgot to set it originally (d’oh)…
Edited 2009-03-04 09:43 UTC
Right, this looks like a worthy successor to my Nokia N800, however my past experience tells me that while the hardware looks perfect, I am sure that it will be plagued by the buggy software and lacking support. There will be endless updates to the software which will never get completed and be usable in any decent way, intil it gets crushed by the competition based on x86 CPU’s from the big boys and will end up just like another obscure and abandoned gadget. Nokia couldn’t pull it off, why would they succeed?
Devices like these need a top notch OS written for the touch interface in mind, and Linux just won’t do (unless some puts some serious effort into it, which I doubt – see above).
I’m not an Apple fanboy, but they are sure capable of creating a usable OS for these things…too bad they are not in the game yet.
It’s all fine and good to have Bluetooth, but if you don’t have A2DP on something that can play media, this small and portable. Put it back in development.
The speakers will never sound as good as a stereo headset, and using the bluetooth for this is ideal.
Also would rather see a SDHC media instead of the micro.
Thanks
I like that it has Bluetooth built-in, this alone probably makes the machine pretty good value for money. Ok so you can buy dongles for $25 but still.
I probably won’t get one, since I already got an Acer Aspire One 8GB/Linux version and I intend to wear it down before buying something else :p
It would have been good for Apple to come out with something like this. Then again, they’ll have their own reasons for doing what they do.
Edited 2009-03-05 07:27 UTC
I like the design, it actually looks a lot like a design I dreamt up a few years ago for just such a device (but never published).
What I can’t tell from the video is how the thing stays propped up given the fact that it’s so top-heavy. My design had a slide-out “foot” built into the back of the keyboard to make sure the whole thing didn’t tip backwards.
I’d also want the keyboard to be wireless, with a kick-stand attachable or built into the display for use in that mode.
Always Innovating, if you’re reading this, please feel free to use my ideas.
There’s an important point I found at