New Spark Tablet To Come Loaded With KDE's Active Plasma Interface 114
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."
To bad the specs once again suck donkey balls (Score:5, Interesting)
There have been a few other linux tablets and so far they just don't compete on specs. They seem to think that going linux means going budget but I am a Linux user and have no interest whatsoever in going budget.
This thing seems to have a single core CPU... the new asus tablet transformer prime has 4.
A 800x480 resolution, my 2 year old MP3 player has that, on a far smaller screen. The tablet after the prime, the TF700T, will have a 1920x1200 resolution.
Yes, these are larger devices and cost three times as much but geez whiz, where are you more likely to find people who will appreciate having a full OS at their disposal with real desktop quality applications instead of fart apps, at the bottom budget market or at the high end cutting edge?
MS must be loving this, there tablets are not going to be underpowered rebrands of yesterday model, so if an average consumer is browsing for a tablet, they will see highend sexy devices as being Android/iOS/Windows8 and Linux in the bargain bin... and gosh, wanna bet that people who bargain hunt will still want Android/iOS/Windows8 and just get an older device?
Evidence? The total and complete failure of previous linux tablets that pulled such braindead stunts as using a resistive screen... Save a few pennies and make your device basically unsellable.
It is basic economy, niche markets exist at the high end not the bottom end. You can't sell handmade fiat panda's.
Re:Android needs some competition (Score:5, Interesting)
Media sales via the Android Market in general, more like it.
And it echoes a statement made by Nokia regarding Maemo/Meego, where they said the then upcoming phone would have a dual mode boot loader. One mode would check signatures on vital OS components, but would allow media purchases via the Nokia Ovi store. The other mode would allow people to tinker with the OS internals, but would lock them out of the mentioned store and any media bought from there.
I wonder if this is why we see the hoopla about UEFI cryptographic boot in Win8, because MS is trying to set up a Window online store themselves and big media is demanding "trusted computing" before they put anything into the store.
Re:To bad the specs once again suck donkey balls (Score:5, Interesting)
1. this is a enthusiast project and so is likely bootstrapped on a shoestring budget.
2. they are trying to get all drivers into the kernel proper, no blobs and similar. This means finding a supplier that can go along with that.
Android have none of these issues, and so can get the latest and greatest.
In the end one have to decide what is more important, principles or instant gratification.
And it will suck (Score:3, Interesting)
I have been down the Linux, Gnome,KDE tablet road several times. and they dont have Handwriting recognition or on screen keyboard as a part of the window manager. It will suck unless they built those into the WM.
All the Linux UI's need to have tablet specific code in them. Make them rotate orientation smoothly without wierd artifacts or location issues,etc...
Linux Tablets have a future if the UI devs stop with the eye candy crap and focus on adding in Tablet specific features that 90% of the UI users(I.E. non tablet users) will never use.
Re:Spark != SPARC (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And it will suck (Score:4, Interesting)
and none of them pop up the second you click on a text field. It's an epic fail that I have to go hunting for it or take up 1/5 of the screen all the time with it.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)