It’s hard to believe it is October already and the leaves are already falling off the trees. Another week come and gone and today I am back with another week in review for your perusal. We found out early this week that the Palm Pre is still headed to Verizon according to an insider. The alleged insider didn’t give any word on when exactly this may happen.
Intel’s Classmate PC was heralded as the way that children in emerging markets would avoid getting left behind in the silicon revolution; now it seems that lifeline may have been cut. DigiTimes is claiming that various governments and OEM partners have cancelled their orders for the low-powered netbook, having been forced to reprioritize their budgets in the wake of the ongoing economic downturn.
Patchy and delayed networking infrastructure has also been blamed for the cancellations, which have not been made publically but leaked out via Taiwanese component manufacturers.
It’s ironic to me that such a small netbook has such a long name. The long name aside, the new 10.1-inch 2go Classmate PC E10 netbook has been revealed and will replace the previous netbooks from the manufacturer. The device has a 10.1-inch LCD and 160GB of storage.
The CTL 2go Convertible Classmate PC (aka Intel Convertible Classmate PC) had its official launch at CES 2009, and many had high-hopes for the touchscreen netbook. Much of that was down to its already infamous touch-usability, and that’s certainly won praise in Laptop Mag’s review. Sitting on top of Windows XP is a quick-launcher CTL call “Blue Dolphin”, offering finger-friendly instant access to apps and settings. As previews suggested, it’s one of the most successful launcher implementations on a netbook-style device, and should, according to reviewer Joanna Stern, find favor with adults and children alike.
Intel’s Convertible Classmate PC, aka the CTL 2go PC, has made another public appearance before its official CES 2009 unveiling, and both the hardware and software have been tweaked since last time we saw it. Gone is the bile-green lid, replaced with a blue-white pattern, and build-quality is much improved; more impressive is the ways that Intel have made Windows XP pen-friendly, with their new Vision Objects Pen Input app.
The last we saw of Intel’s Classmate Netvertible – aka the CTL 2go tablet – it was a surprise guest at the Intel Developer Forum in August. Several months have passed, and CTL entrusted the guys at Laptop Mag with their only demo unit. It’s still pre-production hardware, particularly when it comes to the physical design, but we can apparently expect to see it on sale in the US come December, priced at $499.
Intel have been holding their annual Developers’ Forum in San Francisco this week, and quite a few prototypes and commercial products have come out to play. Of the former, most exciting seems to be the UrbanMax Tablet PC concept; of the latter, Viliv’s S5 MID and S7 UMPC both promise to crank the netbook market up a gear or two.
That’s probably not what Acer want to hear; the company has snipped pricing off of their Aspire One netbook, presumably remembering (only a little late) that the ultraportables are meant to be cheap. Not far from the shelves, Fujitsu’s Amilo Mini and Dell’s Inspiron 910 continued to leak information, but still no official word from the tongue-tied companies themselves.
Intel’s Classmate Tablet PC was a surprise announcement at IDF yesterday, and Laptop Mag have scored a little more time with the education-focused notebook. While the hardware is certainly pre-production – both the handle and the touchpad you see here are temporary, with Intel still working out exactly how they will look – overall it looks too promising even to be simply left for the classroom.
Hey Intel, this is what should’ve been your mystery device! At a round-table event today, Intel’s Tom Rampone unveiled the company’s new Classmate Tablet PC, a touchscreen convertible version of the existing Classmate PC that was first tipped back in July. Designed to sell alongside the current model, the new Classmate has an 8.9-inch, 1024 x 600 display and runs on a 1.6GHz Atom CPU.
Intel briefly stoked some curiosity in the unnamed Tablet PC concept they showed at the end of the first IDF keynote, but most people assumed it was merely another sort of medical assistant device. That assumption seems to be true, as Intel’s ultraportable surprise was somewhat spoilt by having a working prototype – confirming Panasonic as the manufacturer – elsewhere at IDF.
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