Samsung ‘Slate’ in 2H10. Why MeeGo and Moorestown are High on the List.

Over the last 4 years, Samsung have consistently produced good quality UMPCs and Netbooks. The NC10 is still a good netbook choice and the Q1 Ultra (image right) was a cracking UMPC. When Samsung announced that they would build an MID or ultra mobile PC back in 2008, we were interested to see what would happen. Unfortunately, not much happened. Samsung were a no-show at IDF08 and all we saw in the end was the Mondi WiMax device on ARM and the rather unexciting Q1 EX on the VIA platform.

You’ll excuse us then if we take the report of a new Samsung slate with a pinch of salt then!

A senior Samsung executive in Australia has revealed that they will be producing a ‘slate’ in the second half of the year. The word ‘Atom’ is mentioned alongside keywords like ‘pc-grade’ , ‘consumer’ and ‘connectivity.’

If you ask me, the timing and positioning sounds right for a MeeGo tablet-style device running the Intel Moorestown platform. Samsung have worked closely with Intel on mobile devices in the past and it would be the perfect partner to go alongside LG for a big Moorestown launch at Computex 2010 or even a separate Nokia/Intel/Meego launch event alongside a new Nokia smartphone. (Sidenote: I doubt we’ll see MeeGo+Nokia at Intel’s IDF or MeeGo+Intel at Nokia World. What do you think? Joint marketing could be quite the challenge with MeeGo.)

We know already that the Moorestown platform runs at 600Mhz with ‘turbo’ features enabling it to run for short periods at 1.2Ghz (video) which would make it far more powerful than the iPad (mentioned in the article.) With ‘power-gating’ bringing it smartphone-like always-on features, HD (720p) video encoding and HD video decoding along with the unique feature of being very USB-host-capable (think docking stations) you can see that Moorestown fits in very well with the keywords mentioned above and offers quite the flexible solution.

Personally I hope that Samsung doesn’t go the Windows 7 route. We’ve learned over the last year that Windows 7 + Atom is not the best solution if you want to enable consumer features like Windows Media Center and multitouch. With the mobile-focused hardware/software partnership of Moorestown and MeeGo, we could see some far more usable and consumer-friendly systems.

Source. APCMag