Albatron Rocker- Windows CE Haiku
The quest for the thin and light Haiku slate that Bill Gates teased us with a few years ago has taken a left turn with the Albatron Rocker appearing in Korea. The Rocker uses Windows CE to provide the smallest form possible and the longest battery life you can get in such a thin and light form. It has a 7-inch screen running at the ubiquitous 800×480 resolution, WiFi, Bluetooth, web cam and SD slot. The Rocker comes with a cradle making charging and connections easy to do and overall it’s a clever form factor and one that Windows CE should be very appropriate for. Maybe the Rocker would make Kevin’s "web-only quest" easier to do?
(AVing via jkkmobile)
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Only if Opera for WM has improved even more than the last time I tried it.
I really want to like this thing, but my memories of Windows CE are making it really hard to get behind this product
A couple of things I would need to have:
1. Inking. Like James, I seldom convert my inked notes to text so I don’t need handwriting recognition. I do need to be able to search my notes and back them up. (After thought – Can the handwriting to text conversion take place on the desktop this thing syncs to and only at the request of the user?)
2. Web Apps. Can I run web apps on this thing? That means Flash, Java, etc capabilites.
3. Multimedia. Music and video.
4. 2 way video communications, ie. Skype or something like it.
5. Flawless, no effort, wireless syncing
6. Full workday battery life without tweaking
Give me all or most of these capabilities and the Motion M1400 might get retired.
It’s CE. And CE isn’t WinMob, right? So this is a whole different stripe for developers.
I love the form factor. That’s what the Samsung UMPC *should* be — and just a tad over the EeePC’s price (say $600 tops). Samsung became an apostate and lost the Let’s Do It Cheap UMPC religion. They could have sold millions and no one would have ever heard of Asus.
This is really, really close to something I want very much.
Don’t care much about what OS it has.
Mike, great comment. I was wondering why they didn’t slip Windows Mobile Professional in there. It would have been a slimmer HTC Advantage.
WinMo Pro already does handwriting recognition and there are a slew of apps for it.
What continues to confuse however is how much Microsoft actually charges for their various flavors of OS.
Maybe CE is significantly cheaper than Windows Mobile?
Windows CE is the core for Windows Mobile/Pocket PC. Being a modular system it’s used in lots of things like information terminals and embedded systems. A lot of us will have used earlier verions of this in HP and Philips Handheld PCs before PPC became more popular.
It is likely this will support a lot of current WinMo apps, including Opera 9.5 which will mean Java yes, Flash no, but I’m sure I read that the next version of Pocket IE will support flash and be much more Web 2.0 friendly.