KDE's Plasma Active Shipping On New ARM Tablet

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE's Plasma Active Shipping On New ARM Tablet

A new ARM-based tablet computer has been announced and it will be shipping KDE's Plasma Active as its default tablet UI experience...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTA1MDQ

[Tsiolkovsky]

Awesome

Sounds great. I would very much like to also see a more powerful edition. Oh and I'm wondering what the battery life of this is. A great start/spark and I'm almost for sure buying one anyways. And I hope in the future we see even more open mobile hardware like this with a true Linux userspace.

[darkbasic]

Awesome news

[bulletxt]

I'm impressed! Good job to the kde team!

[e8hffff]

Looks like someone is taking the opportunity to pick up cheaper less front-line tablets and shipping them with Plasma Active on them.

We really need front-line technology, example dual core or better, with hardware gfx and phone ability. Long battery life is also essential,. which isn't found on many no-name Chinese brands.

Being able to phone/3g/4g-data is the now ask for 7inch tablets.

I guess $250 is kind of a nice price entry.

Plasma Active team should really consider making it Android compatibile. Allowing owners of devices to run Android apps. That would be a killer feature that should draw customers.

[e8hffff]

Just looked up Mali-400 abilities and it's not that bad. The ability of the Mali-400 is inbetween the Tegra2 and Tegra3. It's about half the speed of the IPad2 GFX.

http://www.arm.com/products/multimedia/mali-graphics-hardware/mali-400-mp.php

http://www.anandtech.com/tag/mali-400

I may actually buy one of these devices. The only concern now is battery life, lack of dual-core (which could make multitaking slow or stop escape to Android4), and lack of phone ability. I seriously want my next purchase to replace my small phone. Tablets are the way to go in replacing phones, if you're not a blue-colar worker that can maintain the device.

[JantarMantar]

Plasma Active needs to be on Rapberry Pi

If someone were to develop a touch AIO computer based on Raspberry Pi, Plasma Active on such a computer would also be useful to certain segment of population.

[balouba]

Price ain't that bad

A year ago you'd pay 600E for this tablet.
Now its 200 *and* fully open source.

I don't find the price bad. Maybe for the dumb consumer market that doesn't care what the tablet is running.

But for a KDE tablet i'd say is pretty good. You can also see it running: its pretty smooth. Its much smoother than my *dual core* tegra2 tablet that costs *more* that's for sure.

So yeah. It's not all that expensive in fact for such a project.

[devius]

I have my doubts about the usefulness of the "activities" concept in a tablet like this one. Activities seem more geared towards accomplishing goals and performing tasks, while these tablets are more useful for internet surfing and email checking while on the couch. Maybe even watching videos or browsing photo collections. Not really sure about the "using it to plan vacations" part. At least they seem to invest a lot in the activities part of the environment. Even on desktop KDE I didn't found the activities concept very useful.

[Cyborg16]

You can also see it running: its pretty smooth. Its much smoother than my *dual core* tegra2 tablet that costs *more* that's for sure.

Where can we see it running?

Smooth it may be with just the desktop and one or two apps... lack of RAM is what really killed the N900 experience for me though (granted, this has twice as much, but still not enough IMO).