back to article Spain to get Europe's first major-vendor smartbook

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, …

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  1. LPF

    Seriously for the love of god!!..

    PRICE .. why is it that article after article is produced and no one mentiosn the price!

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "full milti-tasking operating system".

    I guess that means the CPU can only cope with a thousandth of the tasks regular machines are capable of? But then it'll only be used for twittering so I guess it's up to the job.

    1. Anton Ivanov
      Flame

      apt-get install life

      I do not see a reason for it not to. I bet it runs some Debian derivative so nothing as far as the OS preventing it. As far as the machine itself - Arm is a fairly reasonable CPU. Coupled with a decent OS it should have no problem running whatever desktop task you throw at it.

      Do not expect to play Crisis. Openoffice, mail, internet or anything else doable on Linux should not be a problem. If it runs some Debian variety of course (which it looks like).

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    dude, wait.. what?

    ``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.''

    Seriously? I want ARM based net/smart/wangbooks because they'd benefit from ARMs low power consumption and have better battery life than the existing atom based x86 machines. Obviously porting all the apps from a typical linux distro to an ARM platform is no small task but Fuck You(tm) mr Snyman. I want an ARM based net/smart/wangbook with at least a 1+GHz multi-core board (something in the cortex8 range perhaps?), 1GB of RAM and no less than 120GB of storage.

    I fucking hate this corporate assumption that people don't want their own storage. I have 15GB of music alone on my netbook, 50+GB of movies and 20+gb of games. Where am I supposed to put all this stuff on some poxy little 16GB of flash storage? I want to be able to sit down, bust out a terminal and open up VIM so I can use it as a mobile platform for developing code, so it'll need to be able to run various interpreted languages(I'm thinking perl, python, ruby etc as I don't personally write in any fully compiled ones).

    One of the great failures of the industry when the netbook market started gaining momentum was to think that people didn't want power and storage. The fact is that many people want to use netbooks as small, agile laptops. That is precisely what I use mine for (Currently running ubuntu netbook remix 9.10) so here's my throwdown to the industry.

    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.

    1. Jolyon

      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.

      1. Rob Beard

        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

  4. Sampler

    Looks like a slate with a keyboard

    Though if they're releasing ARM chipped devices then that could mean the Slate is too, I was hoping for an Atom Slate with nVidia Ion graphics for some portable HD :D

  5. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

    I DO

    I value processor speed. I want to play videos on my devices.

    However, I also value long battery life. And you can't have that AND have processor speed. That's the law.

  6. Dr_Spain
    Grenade

    type

    milti ? millions of tasks at one time? you go ARM!

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Megaphone

    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 ?

    1. Robert E A Harvey
      Thumb Up

      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?

  8. Robert Hill

    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.

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