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Jun. 7, 2009

For all of you that are so buzy, here's a brief rundown of some of the important news that come out of the Computex show this past week.

The show began when Acer announced it will support Moblin across its entire product lines. Asus showed some new prototypes at the Moblin executive summit. Canonical, Linpus, Novell, Red Hat and Xandros all announced they will deliver Moblin versions of their distributions.

Some even saw several Android applications installed on a netbook running Moblin 2.0 in a speech from Intel on Thursday making it clear that it isn’t necessarily a contest between the two platforms.

For its part, Qualcomm has defined the term Smartbook which combines features of a smartphone and a netbook at the same time. There is one thing that both netbooks and smartbooks have in common and that's Linux.

Moblin, Android and Linux were in all of the preview devices on display behind the scenes and on the show floor at Computex. Linux was actually shipping with a huge number of the PC’s at Computex thanks to a flurry of activity in the fast boot segment.

On display this year were Fastboot from bios giant Phoenix, Splashtop from Device VM, and Presto from Xandros. Clearly consumers are sick of waiting for Windows to boot and with sub five second boot times from each of these vendors using Linux you can access your e-mail or web browser in just a few seconds instead of several minutes.

Not to be left out, Dell introduced its Inspiron 'N' notebook computer this week at Computex for $299. This is a fully equipped notebook computer with a 15 inch screen, a DVD burner, 160 gigs hard drive and more for $299.00. This is breakthrough pricing in a market that can’t be re-categorized by Microsoft as a low-cost small notebook PC.

It's hard to see how Microsoft can maintain their usual margins which would represent basically one-third of the cost of this PC. Linux’s fundamental pricing advantage here could not be more compelling.

In other news, Real Networks announced that it is licensing its RealPlayer for Linux on x86 and ARM-based netbooks, as well as the three instant-on products mentioned above. RealNetworks is actually joining Fluendo who is already partnering with Ubuntu to offer multimedia support for Linux on Dell products.

Palm started selling its ambitious new smartphone product this week to strong reviews. Palm has bet the company on the Pre and it shows... The new smartphone has tremendous potential with slick industrial design and a solid Linux based software platform.

In other news, Intel surprised everyone at Computex this week by acquiring Linux and embedded systems giant Wind River. If anyone questioned Intel’s commitment to Linux and to expanding in the embedded and mobile market, well this certainly made it clear that Intel is going after all of it!

The acquisition, which is Intel’s first important merger and acquisition activity in the past eight years, is certain to help all of their efforts in this arena from the Moblin project they are working on with us here at the Linux Foundation to better software enablement of future products in the Linux segment of the IT industry.

Overall, Computex was a great success, especially as it pertains to Linux and smartphones in general. Some observers were also pleasently surprised to see how Google's Android 2.0 operating system that will soon start taking off. Make no mistake, this is just the beginning.

As it has always been the tradition in the Linux and open source community, expect more shows like Computex in the very near future. The Linux community is a very strong one, and it's getting stronger by the day, and it was very apparent at Computex.

As it's always the case, you can count on Linux News Today to bring you the latest and the most complete news and events in the Linux and open source world.

Source: BLN.

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