Freescale whips up netbook and smartbook design concepts, waits for someone to notice
By Darren Murph 
posted Jun 7th 2009 9:24AM
posted Jun 7th 2009 9:24AM
[Via Slashgear]
posted Jun 7th 2009 9:24AM
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
yes, we do need more netbooks, let them do their stuff, atleast a couple of these here are interesting!
Yep, love the Flip (gray one).
I filmed an interview with Freescale top executive explaining their Smartbook and Android strategy at http://techvideoblog.com/computex/arm-freescale-smartbooks-and-smartphones/
Where do the sandwiches go?
Yeah I'd buy one. Like that video Charbax. That Inventec IAC Smart Handheld looked very good with Android OS playing HD video and it had buttons for phoning, so basically a smart phone. Bring that out and I'd buy it, Nvidia Tegra is taking way too long too come out, so this looks like a good alternative.
DAMN YOU FREESCALE! NO INNOVATION ALLOWED ON ENGAGET
So, we don't need another netbook... except for Apple's, right? Engadget, you suck.
Is it just me, or is apple introduced in unrelated topics more often by apple-haters?
If what apple reveals on Monday is as uninspired and already seen as these designs are, expect engadget's writers to be quite critical.
I'm not an Apple hater. I'm an Engadget one.
Not only do we need more varied netbooks but we need varied chipsets. X86 has been made to do things it was never meant to do because Intel shoved others out of the market. Now thanks to power concerns ARM, PPC, and other architectures are making a resurgence. Yet Intel seems bent on pulling more crap like what they pulled with AMD, go and try to find the ubuntu 9.04 arm release, also ask yourself why they did not make a netbook remix version for it. O, wait intel is one of the big players on the netbook remix.
I cannot prove my theory on Intel on this one, but if quacks like a duck...
Either way, tin foil hat off, innovation and diversification are never bad things
of course the Arm release is more compact and efficient to begin with! It doesn't NEED a special netbook release because all the ARM devices are already low power and memory footprint!!
Remember too, Intel was one of the biggest ARM sellers in XScale for a few years before Atom.
mabhatter: Uhh, what? Low CPU performance and memory and small screens are the reasons WHY a netbook-specific version is needed. Therefore, the ARM stuff needs it just as much as the Atom stuff.
I don't know about anybody else, but I've always wanted a QWERT[SCREEN]Y keyboard....
None of these will usually comes to market. Even they can solve those technical difficulties, usually end up too expensive to be manufactured. The only cute stuff that could be marketed are mp3 players and thumb drives.
Stop retrenching your staff!!! None of this would have happened, had you gotten rid of your mobile division ions ago. What are you waiting for? A total collapse of Motorola?
Um.... not sure what the hell you are talking about.
Freescale is completely separate from Mototola... they spun out out of Motorola in 2003 and went public in 2004. As such, Freescale has NEVER been in the mobile phone business.
Well I meant semiconductor solutions meant for the mobile phone sector. Even though they have spurned off from Motorola, they still relied too much on Mot's business. Motorola mobile business is dying and they couldn't care less about Freescale's survival.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Most of Freescale's business is in the automotive industry, and has nothing to do with Motorola or mobile phones. Their major products are based around the m68k/Coldfire architecture, and I can't think of a single phone, from Motorola or otherwise, that uses this architecture. Crack open your car's ECU though, and you may very well see a Coldfire chip in there.
Freescale has also been producing POWER based SoC's that are serious overkill for mobile phones, but fit right in the netbook/smartbook market.
i'd be more than happy to buy an arm based netbook later this year...
but it certainly needs a non-glossy screen and good batterylife...
It seems that someone has forgotten why companies and individual do design concepts.
These seem to me to be going the wrong way. I don't want 3 removable parts to my netbooks. I want fewer moving pieces and more display space. Personally, I think display and input technology is driving the netbooks and small devices now. As the devices become smaller and the needs more quantified, players like ARM and PowerPC will get back involved based on battery life and programming simplicity. That's why they rule in most "computing" devices in the world.
I think what they need to be designing are functional things that "just work". That's what will split the netbook from the small laptop. The iPhone model of a device with just 1 button and apps that "just work" is the future. Of course things like ubuntu are already like that with their repository model.. and free too. We need devices to put in people's hands and figure out how customer WANT to USE them, not concepts.
Just don't reboot them around New Year's on a leap year.
Ill just drop 1 coin for them
those mockups looks like someone's freshman year 3d modeling project.
Good god.
The colours of these things.. Are buttugly. It's like someone decided to buy a watercolour and pastel set from the dollarstore and dump them on lego-inspired laptops.
These are beautiful if we were living in 1983 or so. They look painfully clunky now.