Submitted by “Intel announced that Lava International, a cell phone company in India, has launched the XOLO X900. The device will launch on April 23 in India and will be sold through Croma, a big retail chain in India. XOLO X900 features a 1.6GHz Atom Z2460 (a.k.a. Medfield) with Intel Hyper Threading Technology, 400 MHz graphics, a 4-inch 1024×600 display, full 1080p HD video encoding and playback, a 1-megapixel camera up front, an 8-megapixel camera in the back, and support for HSPA+ 3G connectivity. The phone will ship with Android Gingerbread but Intel is already promising an OTA update to Ice Cream Sandwich. The phone is priced around INR 22000 (around USD 425).”
Is it 4 inches thick too?
Full MS-DOS multitouch driver support or GTFO.
This SHOULD have been the first full on MeeGo phone, instead we get a lame Gingerbread one? It’s an x86 phone, time to slap some full on Debian on it with telepathy for some SIP awesomeness.
Blah, like we don’t already have a billion and one different Android phones…
YES! seriously Intel!
I haven’t been paying much attention to Intel’s smartphone chipsets. Can someone tell me about the 400MHz graphics chipset. Is it an “in-built” one like on Intel netbook processors (ala HDxxxx/GMExxx) or is it by the usual PowerVR or Mali bunch?
It’s PowerVR. I think I read somewhere they’re planning to switch to their own GPU based on the Ivy Bridge GMA in the future.
As in the PowerVR based “GMA500” in some of the netbooks from the past two years? I believe there is support for that chipset in MeeGo now.
I’m running MeeGo on my HP Mini 210 netbook and LOVING it! It makes me wish I’d stuck it out with T-Mobile and the N900, nerfed data speeds be damned.
Oh yeah… totally forgot that PowerVR made stuff for Intel graphics chipsets/controllers.
You’re talking about the infamous Poulsbo, right? Good to know that it’s finally got decent support on Linux. I remember it being a liquid pain in the past.
Don’t quote me on this as I may be remembering it wrong, but it was my impression that Intel had to scrape up support for the 500 since they were targeting netbooks with MeeGo. Given that the MeeGo project is on more or less permanent hiatus, I don’t see that situation getting any better.
Still, I’ll use it until Haiku matures to the point of daily usability on my Mini. And if that never pans out, I’ll try to figure out how MeeGo and/or QuickWeb go about fully supporting the clickpad and go back to Arch with some drivers in tow. For the foreseeable future though, MeeGo fits like a glove.
Don’t lose too much sleep; even the latest builds I tried haven’t sorted out out the dialer issues on the N900, leaving it unreliable as an actual phone… even if it is pretty sweet. *sigh*
Well I rarely use my phone as an actual telephone; most of my communication is by text, chat, or email. So, that issue wouldn’t have been a problem for me as much as T-Mobile somehow capping the N900 to under 100Kbps on their network shortly after I bought it last year. I could put the SIM in my old Android and get the usual ~3Mbps with no ping issues. And, on WiFi the N900 worked at whatever speed the router and modem supported; I tested it all the way up to 10Mbps at home, which approached the limits of my Comcast connection.
Now that I’m on Sprint the fastest I’ve seen is 800Kbps on an HTC Arrive, but that’s plenty for my needs, as I don’t tether anymore.
I do miss that slick Maemo interface though…
Questions: How would you rate MeeGo compared to some of the embedded Linux OSes for netbooks like Expressgate/SplashTop? How is the boot time? app support? Do you dual boot and if so how hard was it to set up? How about drivers, how stable are they?
Because while I have the EEE PC and love Expressgate (6 seconds cold boot and tons of apps) I’d love to find something similar for my customers with Atom based like the Dell mini 9.
As for TFA this is something I figured would happen sooner or later, as both Intel with atom and AMD with bobcat keep coming up with lower and lower powered chips while at the same time ARM seems to be sucking ever more power as it tries to get higher performance but in the end even low end Atom and Bobcat just stomps ARM when it comes to IPC. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Intel and AMD splitting the mobile segment with ARM in the next two years as folks want their phones and tablets to do more and more stuff which ends up negating the whole point of ARM which was a simple design that sipped power.
I haven’t used those two, though my HP Mini does include HP’s QuickWeb based in part on SplashTop. I absolutely detest QuickWeb and it’s the first thing I delete when I reinstall WinXP from the original disc set.
About on par with Windows, just over 30 seconds. In contrast, QuickWeb is a misnomer, that pile of garbage takes about 10 seconds to see the GUI but another 15-20 seconds to be operable. I may as well just boot into Windows if those two are all I have on the device. Since I’ve installed MeeGo I haven’t missed Windows (more on that later).
While I haven’t messed around with other repositories, it uses an RPM compatible package manager that is nearly as easy to use as apt-get or Pacman on the command line. There is also a GUI front end that is based on Gnome-PackageKit. It works but is slow compared to the command prompt.
There isn’t a whole lot of software in the default repos but all the basic PIM stuff is there, and I was surprised to see that there isn’t even a stripped down office suite like Gnome Office. I think AbiWord and Gnumeric are a great fit for a netbook; I used them extensively under Lubuntu as LibreOffice is just a tad bloated for the little laptop.
The OS has integrated support for Facebook, SmugMug and several third party Sync services including Google Sync. If you use Gmail and Google Calendar, you just have to put in your username and password and it syncs all of your email, contacts and calendar entries to a stripped down version of Evolution.
EDIT: One more thing. Unless you are opposed to using it, you should definitely get the version that ships with the Chromium web browser installed. It’s very nimble and integrates well with the OS, especially once you’ve installed the latest updates.
I don’t right now, though I may set it up if I feel the need to go back into Windows. So far I’m not missing any functionality, and I certainly don’t miss being bugged by MSE to run a virus scan. One thing: I thought I told the installer to add the Windows partition to a boot menu, but I must have either not clicked something, or else found a bug in the installer. I don’t actually have a boot menu present; it boots directly into MeeGo. It’s an easy fix of course, I just haven’t bothered yet.
So far everything works out of the box except WiFi, and that is because of the Linux-hating Broadcom BCM4312 adapter I have. It’s a simple matter of connecting an ethernet cable, installing a couple of development tools and the kernel headers, compiling and building an RPM and installing it. Now, I said “simple” but that doesn’t mean I was happy with having to do it! I detest Broadcom for things like that and I am tempted to seek out an Atheros or RaLink card with full Linux support in the future.
I will say too, this is the ONLY Linux OS to fully support my netbook’s clickpad! If you’re not familiar, it is similar to Apple’s buttonless trackpads, in that the entire pad is a physical,clickable button and there are button “zones” on the bottom edge of the pad. The clickpad supports multitouch gestures under Windows as well. Until MeeGo, I had not run across a Linux based OS that fully supported the multitouch gestures, button zones and proper two finger scrolling. Lubuntu and other Ubuntu derivatives use a kludge to get two finger clicking/scrolling but the button zones are ignored by those OSes.
Also, according to the MeeGo website there are some netbooks (Acer Aspire One comes to mind, also most older eeePCs) that are 100% supported out of the box.
I believe I read in the MeeGo forums that the Dell Mini 9 and 10/10v are well supported, with the only issue possibly being (again) a Broadcom wireless card.
Bottom line: If you are comfortable messing around with Linux under the hood (in case you have driver issues like mine), you really should give MeeGo a spin! I installed it using the Universal USB Installer to burn the .img to a 2GB SD card and booted from it. You can run live or install from the same image. It’s a full GNU/Linux OS under the pretty interface, and the Terminal is already installed. With some tweaking and the developer tools provided by MeeGo/Tizen I bet you could whip up a custom image for your clients in no time at all!
It’s definitely staying on my netbook, most likely as the only OS once I get around to copying my Windows documents over and deleting that OS.
Honestly, when it comes to mobile devices (including netbooks and tablets) I don’t care who makes the processor or what architecture it uses. As long as it is affordable, runs fast and cool, and sips power I’m happy. AMD has always been my preference in desktop machines, and Intel in laptops, but I’d love to see an Intel powered phone with MeeGo/Tizen come to Sprint! I doubt it would ever happen, but on the odd chance it does when I’m ready for a new phone, I may just have to give Android a pass yet again.
Edited 2012-04-21 00:50 UTC
You can refer to http://xolo.in“> for more the details specifications of the phone.
Edited 2012-04-20 05:50 UTC
I am now waiting for an independent test of battery life…
If it runs vanilla Android and not some crappy shell it could be interesting.
Where is Tizen?
Probably in the hands of Samsung. They seem to be more committed to Tizen than Intel is at the moment.
Shame Intel weren’t more aggressive with Meego’s development. Heck, just imagine the possibilities if Intel and Nokia persevered with Meego. They could’ve had something special to go with the launch of this new Atom.
Like someone said above. These chips (a Meego) could’ve been powering the N9’s descendants.
Still, it’s all just speculation on my part. These Atoms (and X86 in general) haven’t really proven themselves on phones yet.
Edited 2012-04-20 12:38 UTC
Most likely joining MeeGo…