[wsfii-discuss] ultraportable, they say

[Vickram Crishna]

http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/285026428/

Ross Rubin writes on open source based devices, including the EEE PC. Astonishingly (only because it has happened so quickly) relatively powerful hardware devices are emerging rapidly, portables at what used to be desktop pricing, loaded with 'tuned' FOSS OSes. Of course, XO deserves credit for focusing the world's attention on this gap, against the many other projects that attempted to do the same thing before (the Jhai, Simputer, Sirius, ... so many more).  I totally doubt any manufacturer would otherwise have put any effort into resolving the gap between perceived and real performance specs. 

As I expected (and of course most people on these lists know already, so I am just belabouring the point), the sort of software development needed to make a device work 'out of the box' was actually much easier to kick off in the non-proprietary world. 

Will this be repeated with hardware? The EEE and its more expensive recent sidekick (I forget the name) have not come out of open design efforts, nor have most of the others. To a large extent, this has been due to restrictions from manufacturers of components, I think. I don't know how ready the manufacturing wolrd is now, to encourage this approach to design. 

 Vickram
http://communicall.wordpress.com
http://vvcrishna.wordpress.com



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