Otaku Gadgets

For reasons that are quite understandable, manufacturers of smaller portable computers have really taken to making Android devices. The OS is fast, reliable and maintained by an ace-team of coders and engineers. But with the Chrome OS in the works, I wonder how Google feels about this entire business. Nonetheless, we now have another company jumping into the boat after Dell disappointed with their dual-booting D250 (Window 7-Android).

According to liliputing, Asus CEO Jerry Shen has stated that his company will be releasing a Smartbook in the first quarter of 2010. A smartbook is not just a fancy name. It is usually used to differentiate a small portable from netbooks and UMPCs.

In practice, smartbooks are usually devices that are less powerful than netbooks but better equipped than the tiny UMPCs. They are usually meant to be large MIDs with full QWERTY keyboards and onboard provisions (like a 3G modem) for Internet on the go. Essentially, they are something in-between a UMPC and a netbook.

From the news source, it seems like the device will cost something around $184, which sounds like a pretty incredible price. If this thing does get launched outside the Asian market, a lot of people are likely to take an interest in the device.

While the report does not exclusively report what OS the company is going to use, it can be speculated that the best choice right now would be Android. That is because a device of that size will need an embedded OS and there is nothing available for manufacturers to use that can better the Android OS. Windows CE, the usual go-to embedded OS, is no match for Android. [read]

In other news, Asus has announced its latest motherboard feat – a motherboard equipped with the new SuperSpeed standard USB ports and other such high speed ports. SuperSpeed is the new standard that is otherwise referred to as USB 3.0. In comparison to the existing USB 2.0 ports, USB 3.0 can deliver speeds of up to 10 times faster. The motherboard is called the Xtreme Design P7DP55DE-E and is based on the Intel P55 Express Chipset. The interesting point here is that this specific chipset does not actually support USB 3.0. So Asus has gotten third-party help to get around the problem creatively. As a result, you get to have two USB 3.0 ports that will make your USB 2.0 ports look 10 times slower in comparison (quite literally).

As if that was’nt enough to brag about, Asus also includes six 3GB/s SATA ports, two 6GB/s SATA ports, two PCIe x16 graphic card  slots and two gigabit Ethernet ports. Talk about a massive overkill. We do not have consumer devices with USB 3.0 ports yet, so this is a tad bit unnecessary at this point. [Product launchpage] [read]

Also, what about Light Peak? Has everyone forgotten that Apple and Intel are jointly pushing this new standard?