$199 Freescale Tablet Design Runs Chromium OS 93
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Soulskill
from the proof-of-concept dept.
from the proof-of-concept dept.
Charbax writes "This is an extensive video interview with Freescale's manager of software development about their integration of the Chromium OS onto their ARM Cortex A8 i.MX51-based $199 Tablet reference design. It seems to run smoothly and fast with multiple tabs. There's no touch screen support yet, so input is done through a USB keyboard and mouse for now, but the WiFi drivers are fine. Freescale is also demonstrating Android and Ubuntu versions. Those have a 3G SIM card reader built-in, an HDMI output and 720p video playback. The question is: will they be able to support Chrome browsing at full speed on the most JavaScript- and Flash-intensive websites and support a large amount of opened tabs?"
The demonstration of the Chromium tablet begins at about 11:20 into the video. The Android and Ubuntu versions are displayed earlier.
Flash (Score:4, Informative)
In response to all of the questions of the form "can it play flash". It's up to Adobe, not so much the hardware manufacturer. A manufacturer can included chips to offload video processing, etc., but if Adobe doesn't take advantage of the hardware capabilities, Flash won't play well.
Flash is terrible on everything but Windows. My 3 year old Pentium-M laptop with Ubuntu 9.04 can play 720p nicely using mplayer, but can't play 480p acceptably in flash. The problem is Adobe's exclusive control over the flash player. We need a real standard, hence the debate over html5 video codec inclusion.
So please realize more times than not that the shortcoming is with flash and Adobe, not with the hardware.
Re:Flash + ARM? (Score:5, Informative)
``I didn't think you could run the flash player at all on ARM chips.''
Think again: Adobe and ARM Accelerate Flash and AIR for ARM Platforms [adobe.com]
Re:Question (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Flash + ARM? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Flash + ARM? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:That's missing the point (Score:3, Informative)
It's neat to see that Chromium OS is going to be light. (Yeah, Linux is also. As is mobile version of Windows. But more options is still nice.)
Er, actually Chromium is Linux.
Re:Flash (Score:3, Informative)
My 3 year old Pentium-M laptop with FreeBSD 8.0 plays flash just fine via the linux-f10-flashplugin10 port -- we don't even get a native libflashplayer.so. Sounds like you have an Ubuntu problem, not a flash problem...
Re:Question (Score:4, Informative)
At least the exact same tablets running Android and Ubuntu do. At about 11:34, Mr. Subramanian says "Chromium today does not support touch screen...". So it's not the tablet hardware which doesn't include a touch screen, but the build of Chromium they're using.
Work around Flash (Score:4, Informative)
The best solution to working around Flash video that I've worked out it to use the Video download helper [mozilla.org] Firefox plugin, then play the videos in Mplayer. It has pretty good support for Youtube and its many imitators. Unfortunately, it doesn't handle copy-protected stuff so it won't work with the full length movies on Youtube or anything on Hulu. It is an extra step to download the video before playing it, but the add-on makes it pretty easy, so I find it worth the hassle if I'm going to watch anything more than a few minutes long.
I haven't seen anything approximate ported to Chrome yet. Hopefully it'll get one soon... or better yet the <Video> tag becomes universally supported even sooner.
Re:Why not take the next step (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox supports Ogg/Theora/Vorbis.
Safari, iPhone, Android support H.264,AAC,MP4
Chrome supports all of the above.
http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html#what-works [diveintohtml5.org]
If you're a web site developer, it's probably best to host both, and have your pages detect what the browser supports.