New Spark Tablet To Come Loaded With KDE's Active Plasma Interface 114
Posted
by
timothy
from the domain-folding dept.
from the domain-folding dept.
mpol writes "KDE's Plasma Active introduced last Saturday its own 7" tablet. According to Aaron J. Seigo, 'It's the first tablet computer that comes with Plasma Active pre-installed.' The Spark, with its 7" screen, is built around a Cortex A9 with a Mali-400-gpu, 512MB RAM and an SD-card slot. It will have a 800x480 screen resolution and will cost around 200 Euro. It is actually a rebrand of the Zenithink ZT-180 C71, which comes with Android by default. On a personal note, Aaron J. Seigo will no longer be sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks to work on Qt and KDE. He will, however, stay involved with KDE and Free Software, he says."
Android needs some competition (Score:5, Informative)
And this is a start. The recent story around the Asus Prime indicates that Google Video may be the reason that non-phone wifi only tablets have locked boot loaders, so I'm not seeing Android as "open" anymore. Really hope this is good.
plasma active in not a plasma screen. it is... (Score:2, Informative)
Bad tablet (Score:5, Informative)
ZT-180 C71 has a slow single core AML8726-M CPU (despite being based on ARM A9 which is usually found in dual or quad core configurations), low resolution screen and just 512M of RAM. It costs 120$-130$ including international shipping.
There are much better Chinese tablets now (with higher resolution, 1GB ram, IPS screens. Even dual core cpus, though not as good as branded offerings).
Re:KDE on 512MB RAM? (Score:3, Informative)
By the way, they don't just dump default KDE on and call it Plasma Active, a lot of optimization and tweaking has been done for it to have decent performance.
Re:KDE on 512MB RAM? (Score:5, Informative)
KDE can very well run on 512mb of ram. KDE 4 has a smaller memory usage then KDE 3.5 which runs decently with 512mb of ram. Early version of KDE 4 used a bit too much CPU, however, though this may have changed. I'm also sure this has been carefully customized so the QT framework is the only framework. Now it will slow down to a crawl if used for heavy multitasking (apps that don't rely on the framework much) but single tasking or light multitasking usage, which is more tablet like anyways, will be perfectly fine.
KDE has always been large because of it's large library. That means that more functions are shared across programs. Basically a large base footprint with smaller program footprints. The KDE still fits well within 512mb.
Proof:
http://blogs.kde.org/node/3138
http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?22401-KDE4-memory-usage-vs-KDE3-gt-benchmark
http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/applications/414533-memory-usage-11-1-kde4.html
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_desktop_vitals&num=1 (this uses ubuntu which which also includes the gtk framework hence the higher memory usage)
and many others online.
Re:KDE on 512MB RAM? (Score:4, Informative)
I have slackware 13.0 with KDE on my laptop (which I use more than my desktop). It's a 1.4Ghz Pentium M with 512MB of RAM and Nvidia 5200Go gfx.
And it runs great....
Re:And it will suck (Score:4, Informative)
And they work quite well.
Reality is a bitch (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And it will suck (Score:5, Informative)
Plasma active _is_ a tablet-specific UI. The whole point of plasma as a foundation for the KDE desktop was that you got a generic library for making interfaces.
They have a desktop interface, but the also have a netbook interface. Active is their tablet interface. I have played around with it on an asus T91MT, and it works quite well. In fact, it is perhaps the only tablet interface which does multitasking in a clever way.
And yes the on-screen keyboard pops up when you touch a text entry field. And they also provide touch-friendly interfaces for common apps.
Re:GUI? (Score:4, Informative)
As SomeKDEUser pointed out above, KDE has different workspaces (as they call it) for desktops and netbooks/tablets. They don't try to force desktop users to use a tablet UI, as do Microsoft, Canonical & Gnome. Nor do they try to have a desktop UX on a tablet. That way, they can fine tune each workspace to its target platform.
The Active Plasma screenshots [kde.org] show how they've finetuned the interface for a tablet. More details can be found on the KDE website
Re:To bad the specs once again suck donkey balls (Score:4, Informative)
Before the flood I paid $300 for a 12 inch EEE 1215B, that's an E-350 dual core with an HD6310 GPU built in, 320Gb of RAM and I got an 8Gb upgrade on the RAM since it came with Win 7 HP X64 (the RAM was $32 after MIR) and a nice carrying sleeve for it for a final price of $352 shipped. Even after the flood you can still pick it up for $450 [amazon.com] for a dual core that gets 6 hours playing 720p or 8 hours under expressgate. Seriously how fucking cheap do you think they can go? With a little care a unit like that can easily last you 5 plus years and my 17 inch Dell from 2005 last i heard is STILL running just fine with the guy that bought it off me, same as my Athlon dual laptop from 09 I sold to help pay for my EEE.
While i'm sure there is some price fixing that happens luckily enough there is enough companies still fighting for business that prices are pretty damned low. the PC I'm typing this on I built myself for less than $850 if you count the upgrades, less than $700 if you count the fact i got $50 for the original dual core and the board and quad i had after that is now in my GFs PC so I didn't have to buy those, and we're talking 6 cores, 8Gb of RAM, an HD4850 GPU, 3Tb of HDDs, dual DVD burners and a 1600x900 22 inch screen. Dude that is insanely cheap for that amount of power! hell my customers get new triples and quads to hook up to their HDTVs for around $550 and that is with me making a nice profit putting them together, again that is just crazy cheap.
So I really don't see what anyone is bitching about, my first x86 was a whole 40Mhz (I stayed with the VIC and Trash 80 for years past everyone else) and I got a steal on the thing at $500 simply because the guy wanted to get a state of the art 100Mhz to play Hexen with. By the time i got a monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, etc i was out damned near $800 and again i got 'em cheaper than ordinary folks because i knew people. it wasn't a year and a half before the software coming out wouldn't run decently on it because it was too slow and there was ZERO upgrade paths so I was SOL. Now I can build a box and have it run the latest software no problem years later, the nettop i use to surf in the shop is a 2004 Sempron 1.8Ghz with 1.5gb of RAM and frankly it'll do anything on the web I wanna do. My boys are gonna finally have to be upgraded this spring because some of the newer games don't play nice on their Pentium Ds which is a circa 2006 chip but I'll get to keep their HD4850s which I paid a whole $60 refurb for a couple of years back.
dude the amount of power we get for dirt cheap is truly mind boggling and the amount of time it lasts is just nuts. you can buy an AMD E-350 board for like $80, slap a 4gb RAM chip in it for $20, and have a system you can surf with 5 years from now, hell you can even plug it in via HDMI to your widescreen and it'll play 1080p no problem. So I don't know what anybody is bitching about, as someone who has been into computing since the days of the VIC and Trash 80 I'd consider this a "golden age" of computing, where even the throw away stuff is so insanely overpowered it'll do the jobs 90% of the public want to do with them with ease. Hell I've already got a buyer for the guts out of one of the boys boxes so that 2006 Pentium D will just be moved along with the board and RAM from his machine to a neighbor who while having no trouble surfing with his late model P4 has a couple of older flight sims he wants to play online and that Pentium D will be more than enough for that. i wouldn't be surprised if a decade from now he's not still running that 2006 chip and quite happy with it, its a golden age friend, enjoy it.