Pics and info from the world of ARM

Today we had the chance to drop in on the ARM “Connected Community Technical Symposium 2009” event in Taipei and join about 350 or so other attendees to get up to speed on the latest developments and efforts of ARM working with Taiwanese partners. There were also a few very cool ARM products on display.





The Sharp Netwalker
A 4.5” screen and the world’s tiniest smartbook keyboard Sharp has definitely decided to focus on the portability that ARM based products can deliver. Running a Cortex A8 ARM core at 800MHz with 512MB RAM the dainty little unit runs Ubuntu and is available only in Japan. The nice thing to see was the high resolution (1024 x 600) touchscreen and excellent visual almost full PC-like experience the Netwalker provides. The downside in my opinion is that once a device gets this small, you’ve got to ditch the full qwerty keyboard and go with simpler one or even an onscreen keyboard. Diminutive Japanese women who the device appears to be targeted at my fully disagree.



Mobinova
Mobinova had an unbranded 8.9” smartbook on display running a “CPU ID” Tegra 650 clocked at 750MHz. A slick UI layered on Ubuntu, the devices home screen looked like the digital picture frame of the future. The UI was smooth and designed in such a way that launching any of the home screen applications didn’t really feel like you were “opening” anything at all, but rather cycling though seamlessly to a new feature. No window as such to backdrop the application… very cool. If my damned video camera hadn’t crapped out I would have captured that for you to see in all its glory.



Pegatron
I couldn’t get many details on this device, but needless to say it’s a Pegatron 10” screen ARM based smartbook. It was running an Ubuntu OS and struck me as the “right-sized” type of device in terms of screen size and keyboard that could really give the netbook category a run for their money. Big enough to be usable but still light and portable. I personally use a notebook at my desk, and a netbook on the road. A goods-sized smarbook could replace my netbook.



Acer neo Touch
Representing Windows CE was the Acer smartphone. It’s a bit bigger smartphone compared to the HTC G2 and iPhone sized devices. That struck me as a bit of a negative while handling it but when viewing the map application viewed in the picture below, I certainly did appreciate it’s size. I suppose its just a matter of whether or not you’ve got big pockets or plan on carrying the device in your purse.



ZiiLABS Egg PMP
The ZiiLABS rep wasn’t manning his station when I dropped by and picked up their PMP so I don’t have much details to share with you. It’s not branded so I assume it’s just a demo/prototype device. It also wouldn’t return to the home menu when I pressed the one hardware button at the bottom of the device and I couldn’t figure out how to get it out of the settings mode.



The HTC Hero (G2)
I used to play around with the G1 (also on display here at the event) and was reasonably impressed with it. After manhandling the G2 the G1 feels positively Flinstonian. The G2 is slimmer, sturdier and just a better overall feeling device. HTC’s UI running on top of Android is stunning. Even the little “chin” on the G2 suits it better somehow. As you may recall the G2 runs a Qualcomm 528 MHz ARM processor.

The Kindle 2
Yeah, yeah you’ve read it all before, and so have I but it was the first time I actually got to play around with one. One thing that immediately hits you is how positively thin the device is. It’s a limited functionality type of device and I was navigating around the simple interface in no-time.  I’m still old-school and into my paperbacks when it comes to reading but I suspect I would have no trouble adapting if I found one of these devices under the bamboo Xmas tree. The Kindle runs a Freescale 532 MHz,  ARM 11 proccessor.



Other Tidbits
While there were the usual keynote presentations and demos of ARM based products and the thing that immediately struck me was the amount of Chrome/Android logos littered throughout the presentations and the fact that that most of the demos of products that weren’t smartphones were running Ubuntu and WinCE. Clearly we’re seeing a state of transition here and considering ARM’s recent announcement about their creation of the “XX” to shepherd the Android flock it’s a major focus for the company.

ARM has presently 600 licenses with 200 partners. Optimizing specifically for Android ARM expects 3x to 8x speed improvements.

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