Community Matters

Moblin launched almost a year ago. It’s “an open source community for sharing software technologies, ideas, projects, code, and applications to create an untethered computing experience across Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), Netbooks, and embedded devices.”

So what?

Well, the much talked about Ubuntu Netbook Remix is based on Moblin. So are a number of products that will be announced in the next few months. But more importantly, Moblin is the place where a lot of developers are looking at ways to create a better experience for users of Linux devices - potentially as small as a phone or as flexible as a Netbook. And in the never-ending discussion of “does Linux matter on the desktop?” this may be the answer: Does the desktop still matter? Or will it be replaced by a different type of devices that follow different rules and create a more level playing field for a wider variety of software offerings?

In a way, the iPhone is one entry in this category. The EeePC and it’s competitors certainly are as well. This category is growing incredibly fast and Linux (or should I say, non-Windows OSs) are extremely successful in this field.

The Moblin team is busily working on its next-generation ideas. Actually, this week about a dozen people were locked away from phones and email in a week-long sprint in order to be able to focus on Moblin2 and in order to be able to get some significant progress towards our plans for the design of and infrastructure around the next generation of Moblin. What I heard and saw is promising. Stay tuned.

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I’m in Berlin at LinuxTag and was very excited to hear updates on both OpenMoko and the OpenEZX projects. OpenMoko is a project that aims at providing a complete open source phone (including open source friendly hardware), while OpenEZX aims to free the existing Motorola EZX phones like the A780 or the A1200/Ming by providing completely open source software stacks for these phones.

But in all honesty, the talks were both rather disappointing. OpenMoko is way behind schedule for their updates and still isn’t able to provide reliable phone functionality. Lots of cool stuff you can do with the device - but it simply isn’t a phone.

And OpenEZX in a way is even worse. If I try to summarize progress since last year all I can say is “marginal”. It still can’t run most of the hardware including the GSM/EDGE radio in the A1200. It basically can boot a 2.6 Linux kernel and not much more. And here as well there is no phone functionality in sight.

Oh well.

If you want to get better flash pictures, the first thing you need to do is to move the flash off your camera. There are great resources telling you how to do this - Strobist might be my favorite.

Depending on the DSLR and external flash that you own, doing this might be easy. A Nikon D300 with SB-800 allows you to do off camera flash without any additional equipment (within some limits regarding distance and angle, for example).

But real flexibility requires a wireless remote trigger. The gold standard for this is the Pocket Wizard. Which is called the “gold” standard for a reason as it is really expensive. Since I didn’t want to spend USD 570 for a setup for two flashes I went with the ultra-cheap Cactus V2s instead. USD 50 for a setup for two flashes. That’s more like it.

I’ve had them for a week now and used them a few times and am really happy. Reliable, easy to use, sufficiently sturdily built. Highly recommended!

Lots of new ultralight notebooks are being announced these days - I’m already at a loss trying to keep track of all the little machines entering the market (or at least being announced - very few seem to actually be shipping). But I’ll admit that this one sparked my interest: the 3K Longitude 400 uses (and I quote) a “Low Power Consumption Ingenic 400MHz 32-Bit Single Core CPU”.

What’s most interesting about this (besides the fact that Ingenic seems to be the International Group for Genetic Improvement of Cocoa - but a little more googling gets you to Ingenic Semiconductor) is that this appears to be the first laptop design based on this CPU. The information on Ingenic’s site is rather sparse. It appears that the CPU was originally only designed to run at up to 360MHz, that it’s based on a 180nm process (the Intel Atom processor, for comparison, is built on a 45nm process) and (based on the data sheet claim of <0.5mW/MHz) it should consume only about 0.2W. It’s a MIPS derivative which means it doesn’t run x86 software like more or less every other laptop out there, which will make comparing the 3K Longitude 400 to other contenders pretty hard; I’ll try to find some benchmarks but am not optimistic.

Everything else seems fairly low-end / standard: 512MB of RAM, 4GB of flash, 7″ 800×480 display (bad), 3 USB ports, wired and wireless Ethernet, Linux pre-installed, estimated price of USD 400. Given all that, I cannot see why someone would prefer this over the original (i.e., the EeePC 701).

While doing some googling I ran across this auction/buy-it-now item on Ebay. A New ASUS EeePC Eee PC900 20G/1G RAM 8.9″<1KG Laptop for USD 650 + USD 60 for shipment to the US. No indication how quickly it would arrive, but likely this will be the fastest way to get your hands on one.

Still, I think I’ll pass.

TrustedReviews has another EeePC 900 review. This is maybe the most positive review that I’ve seen so far; the only thing they criticize is battery life, and that’s where the Atom-based successor will certainly provide a major improvement.

One little gem that I found in the review and hadn’t seen before: instead of the “right edge scroll” on the touchpad of the EeePC 701, the new model uses Mac style multi-touch scrolling. Simply put two fingers on your touchpad and move them vertically or horizontally and you are scrolling instead of moving the mouse pointer. Apparently the display even supports iPhone style zooming motions - sweet.

Given that Gartner expects 293 million PCs to be shipped this year one has to be impressed with Asustek’s expectations for the success of the EeePC. According to DigiTimes, Asus has ordered 2.5-3 million Atom processors from Intel - and the Atom based EeePCs won’t start shipping for another couple of months, so if you add the about 2 million Celeron M based EeePC 701 and EeePC 900 that they will ship on top of their Atom based units, one can extrapolate that they expect that the EeePC series will account for more than 1.5% of all PCs shipped this year. That’s quite impressive!

Add to that the roughly 2 million Intel Atom and Via C7-M processors ordered for this year by the other major competitors in the Netbook space, then you can see that these tiny computers are becoming a significant part of the market, fast. A year ago they sounded like toys and not something that the market was ready for (except for OLPC’s XO which claimed that the market was ready for it, only it wasn’t ready for the market).

The folks over at VR-Zone got their hands on production EeePCs (I still have not been able to get ahold of one - life’s unfair). They have tons of details comparing the different EeePC versions.

The pictures show that I was right that the EeePC 900 has a slightly larger body than the EeePC 701. And most of the other data had been known before, but still, it’s a great summary and confirmation of all the details.

Their overall conclusion is extremely positive. Bigger screen, bigger SSD, bigger touchpad, more memory, CPU clocked higher by default, higher resolution webcam… what’s not to like!

Today I was thrilled to see that a couple of Oregon schools have started to roll out EeePCs for their students. What a great way to get computers in the hands of children. Affordable, useful, and not based on Windows.

I hope this program is successful and gets deployed more broadly. Computers help kids learn - and everyone needs to learn how to use a computer.

Excellent!

Over at XEPC there are the first unboxing pictures of an EeePC 900.

Since IDF the rumors have been flying that Asus would delay their Intel Atom-based product in order to be able to bring an updated EeePC with a bigger screen to market quicker.

The article I link above doesn’t give final clarity on the issue, it only confirms some of the other expected changes (8.9″ 1024×600 screen, 1GB RAM default, 12GB SSD). The system also seems to be slightly heavier (990g instead of 920g) but that’s not surprising, giving the larger LCD. From the pictures the sticker on the front of the tiny laptop doesn’t mention an Intel Atom processor, so that might confirm that this is still a Celeron M based system. I’m sure we’ll know more details in a few days.

Closely studying the pictures you can make some more observations:

• The plugged modem port is gone
• Still three USB ports and an SD card slot
• Still a VGA connector as well as microphone and speaker jacks
• The touchpad seems somewhat bigger and now has two buttons instead of the one button with two press zones on the EeePC 701
• Comparing the spacing of the connectors I am pretty sure that the case is slightly bigger than the previous model; look at the position of the audio jacks and SD card slot in relation to the front edge - there are a few extra millimeters there; maybe it’s to accommodate the larger touchpad.
• Bigger power supply (not sure I like this - the EeePC is all about traveling light!)

For now I can’t wait to get my hands on an EeePC with a larger screen and larger SSD!