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Ultra Mobility Group Event (Updated With Q&A)


[This was posted live during the Intel Ultra Mobility Event. 2nd June 2010. Excuse the formatting, brief analysis and spelling mistakes please!]

I’m ready to go into the ultra mobility event which starts at 1400 here in Taipei

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Stay tuned for updates on Moorestown, Oak trail, MeeGo and AppUp…

We’ve just been given the fact sheet..

Acer Backs MeeGo, ASUS supports Intel AppUp Centre and MeeGo, MeeGo Tablet Demos, MeeGo V1.0 based products (9 demos listed) , Service providers Rally Around MeeGo, MeeGo Enabling Center.

More from fact-sheet:

Mandriva, Linpus (Lite), Novell (SUSE MeeGo), Red Flag (Red Flag inMini), Turbolinux (Great Turbo IVI) to release OS builds based on MeeGo.

1325 Doors should open soon.

Fact-Sheets uploaded to Flickr.

Ultra Mobility Fact Sheet Computex (1)Ultra Mobility Fact Sheet Computex

 

1333 We’re heading in…taking pics of display. brb!

Just had a quick peek into the demo area. Aava smartphone is showing 3D, video, gaming demos and girls…

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1345 Seated at the front. The show starts in 15 minutes

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Sascha from Netbooknews.de sitting next to me.

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Open Peek Moorestown-based products on-stage.

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2-minutes to go. Execs seated to the right of me. More importantly, Nicole from netbooknews just arrived.

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Power usage demo on stage. Lights down. Here we go…

1404 Events kicks off, as usual, with a ‘thank you’ to Taiwan.

Anand Chandrasekhar (sp?) now on stage.

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Anand talks about video consumptions. Content is getting richer. Sharing. Live sharing.

Matt Serletic from Music Mastermind on stage to demo a very cool studio on an X70

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That was a cool demo. He basically layered up a track by using vocal input to set the sequence.

14:17 Anand continues, talks about Intel’s compute continuum and ‘a little bit of magic.’ This is where we go to the power drain demo I guess…

Nope, we’re going into a video…about 1954 and the 4 minute mile. Breaking barriers is the theme I guess.

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Anand goes on to talk about to the power barrier!

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Anand holds up an ARM-based Blackberry and says ‘that’s a platform.’  goes on to talk about the 50x power reduction figures and how they related to a platform and not to silicon.

Video highlights smartphone and tablet. Talks about 8-10 hours battery life on the tablet.

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Andy [?] of Open Peek now on stage demoing the product.

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2:29 we’re getting a demo of the ‘Open Peek’ home energy app.

2:32 Talking about performance. There’s that sub 2 second SunSpider figure again.

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These figures look correct to me. iPad is running 10 seconds on SunSpider.

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Graphics and video slide highlights 1080p performance. (High Profile at 30fps) and 3D performance.

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Interesting slide shows the battery life improvements over Menlow.

1437 Now watching a demo of battery drain. 100mw audio playback. Not bad!

1440 Comparing against competition now….

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Quite some power in Anand’s voice at this stage. He’s pushing this point home.

In performance we’re “In a league by ourselves inch with an average power consumption for the smartphone space.

World Of Warcraft being demonstrated on the Aava smartphone (on Moorestown) but the demo isn’t that impressive. Low FPS.

Quake demo shown. I have no idea if it’s good or bad!! Looks fast.

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Mutitasking demo…of course….and a nice textured interactive 3D demo. Yeah, it looks quite impressive.

14:46 Video conferencing demo. Ofer Shapiro of Vidyo comes in live over a conference. 2 live screens shown. quality very good. 3rd video conference screen now added. It’s coming in via a Moorestown phone.

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1452 We move into MeeGo. Sounds like this is a summary of what we heard this morning. I’ll have a post about that later. Doug Fisher steps up on stage

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Tablet demo now. Oops. Didn’t work. Backup device sent to stage. Doug breaths again! (See out tablet demo from yesterday)

Brief slide on Medfield which is ‘on track’ closes up the event here. Anand rounds up with ‘best is yet to come’

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That rounds it up. We’re off to the demo area and then to a private Q&A. Anyone got questions? Put them on twitter to @chippy and I’ll try and ask Anand.

Updated: Q&A Session reveals timeframes.

In a Q&A session following the event we had the chance to ask Anand questions about Moorestown and related products.

Chippy: “Premium performance, premium price? inch  Anand responded to the effect that Intel will be aggressive with their pricing in order to get into the market saying that Intel will be ‘competitive’ and following up with ‘expect us to be hungry but not stupid.’

Sascha (netbooknews) asked about timeframes for products. Anand responded saying that products will ‘trickle’ in within a 6-12 months timeframe with tablets coming first. It’s not clear if he’s referring to MeeGo/Moorestown tablets or WIndows7/Oak trail tablets. We get the impression that there’s been a slight slip in the Moorestown program.

On Android: I asked about the project both to Anand and Doug Fisher.Was Android was just an internal project or something that is being worked-on with Google? It appears that the X86 branch of Android will become an official branch although some work will needs to be done on the power elements by Intel for its platforms. Medfield (the next generation after Moorestown) was mentioned so I assume that Android-on-Intel will be a late 2011 product.

Smartphones Break the 10-second Barrier.


I’ve had a theory about web-page loading speed for about three years now. When a web page takes more than 12 seconds to load, a user considers it a slow experience. Anything less than 10-12 seconds and everything is in the green zone. Smartphones are now entering the green zone.

The mobile Internet experience needs to be compatible and quick and if either one of those elements fails, then the customers Internet experience fails.

In my search for the full internet experience in my pocket I’ve spent hundreds of hours testing, analyzing, questioning, discussing and writing about the subject and I have a very clear picture of what is satisfying for the end user. In Sept 2007 I wrote about the extremely poor ARM-based internet experience. Really, it was embarrassing. The best phones of the day were taking nearly twice as long as the slowest of X86-based platforms with small screen sizes and low-quality rendering adding to the overall disappointment.

armvsx86

In October 2009, 2 years after my ARM-bashing article, the ecosystem had moved forward a long way and we saw what was probably the fastest ARM-based browsing experience ever. The Archos 5 was even beating low-end UMPCs. The iPhone 3GS was doing well too. Take another 5 months step into the future to the present day and you now have smartphones beating low-end Ultra-Mobile PCs. Pocketables, always reliable for a good set of browsing speed test results, shows us that there are at least three phones out there that are in the green zone now with the Nexus one and iPhone 3GS breaking the 10-second barrier. If JKK’s excitement about the Milestone and the Android 2.1 upgrade is anything to go by, we can expect the Droid/Milestone to be in that category too. The HTC desire will be joining the club in just a few weeks and following closely will be the Dell Mini 5 and Sprint EvO.

Just to re-cap, that’s pocketable, always-on, fast-internet devices with mobile-focused operating systems, mobile photo and video cams, high speed 3G, GPS, sensors, touchscreen, multi-GB’s of storage and access to thousands of apps costing under 400 Euros.

Related: The Full Internet Experience of 2010

Related: ARM’s lock-in opportunity

It’s not just the CPU.

You might think that ARM and their silicon partners are responsible for the advance but fortunately for Intel, that’s not quite true because in the last 2 years we’ve seen some amazing progress in browser software performance. Javascript processing speed, delayed script processing and other tricks and optimisations mean we’re also seeing improvements on desktop browsers too. I haven’t had time to do a complete set of tests but after disabling Flash on my desktop browsers I’m seeing something like 20-30% speed improvements over results of two years ago.

I’m not going to sit here and defend X86 though because its the ARM ecosystem that deserves the praise here. The fact is that the ARM ecosystem of hardware and software developers has moved forward quickly and shows no signs of stopping. In fact, as ARM tablets and always-on netbooks enter the market, that momentum could increase. With Moorestown and MeeGo on the horizon for X86 there’s a ray of hope for X86 but if that hardware/software platform isn’t good enough (most of us in the industry agree that it needs to move on another generation before it’s ‘ripe’ for smartphones) and the speed of development and investment doesn’t ramp-up quickly enough, Intel will never be able to catch up with the smartphone market.

Moblin 2.1 for handhelds. Q&A, Demo.


You may have already seen the video from IDF where Moblin 2.1 for handhelds was announced and seen the demonstration of Moblin 2.0 on Moorestown but in addition to that we were give a sneak peek at Moblin 2.1 for handhelds running on a (Menlow demonstration) platform. Pankaj Kedia from the Ultra Mobility Group also answers questions about the platform.

Key points to note are:

  • Launch with Moorestown in 1H 2009
  • Project open source betas will be available later this year
  • The Atom Developer Program app-store will be included
  • It will be voice-capable

Part 1. Q&A With Pankaj Kedia

Part 2. Demonstration

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