Computex Day 0. Mobile Roundup

Day 0 is over, Day 1 has started and in a few hours, the doors open but before we get into that, let’s go over the Day 0 news from my point of view.

It stared with an interesting leak press conference with ARM which highlighted cloud services, a changing market and Android. Lots of Android!

You’ll see ‘Eagle’ on that second slide. Eagle is the next gen, high-end core from ARM that I expect to filter in in late 2011, early 2012 based on the timescales we’ve seen with other ARMv7 products. Expect it to be a refinement of Cortex A9 spanning the same territory as Moorestown and Medfield from Intel. There was an interesting comment from Bob Morris about ‘other’ CPUs that hide behind screens meaning that screen power drain is relatively high right now and as soon as that drops (with products like PixelQi) the other processors will then get exposed as the biggest power drain. Clearly he’s talking about Intel’s platforms here.

Next-up on the agenda was Nvidia who disappointed me with their ‘have patience’ stance on Tegra2. Come-on guys, you’ve been talking this up for many many months now and it’s time to start talking about products. What is holding things up? Is it the software stack? (Quite likely. Who wants to put out an Android stack without Google elements or a WinCE-based system?) We left quickly after that statement.

The craziest press event of that day was with ASUS who come across as a company that tries to be cool. Clearly, if you try to be cool, you’re not! Loud music, graphics, colors, girls. It was all rather tacky really but we did get to see the Eee Tablet, an e-ink, touchscreen (magnetic I understand) device aimed at what seems to be the high-end reader market. Pro-level e-reading? I’m not an e-reader fan but it did appear to have some interesting features. Fast page turn was being hyped.

More interesting was the announcement that Asus will support the AppUp store. Expect two or three more of these announcements (Dell, Acer perhaps) as Intel moves into the deployment phase of AppUp. Once it starts to get out there (in the millions in 2010) then interesting things could happen.

Asus followed-up with two Eee Pad devices. These two tablets (confused) don’t appear to be quite ready yet and based on the technology we saw; a demonstration video of what could be a CE-based Win7 ‘compact’ OS on a high-end ARM platform and a non-working Win 7 build on an extremely thin ‘CULV’ platform, we suspect that these products are not for Q2 or Q3. No prices, no specs. The 12 inch tablet is interesting as it comes with a docking station. If it offers full laptop-level power (or at least laptop-level) in a 1KG tablet, it becomes a nice grab-and-go productivity slate. It’s not something you might want to have on the sofa or use on the go (or even in a coffee-shop) for too long but I can see it living on the coffee-table as a second home.

So that’s it for Day 0. There were a few more snippets but I’ll have to feed those in as I go because it’s not time to hit the shuttle bus and head to Nangang exhibition hall for doors-open in just one hour!

Here’s a video of the Eee Pad. And a girl!