If you were to see the list of videos and images I’ve got here from CeBIT you would instantly notice a slight bias towards the Gigabyte M528 MID. If I could pre-order, I’d do it because based on what I’ve seen it’s going to give me a great form factor, good style, good battery life, a ton of apps and a fun and useable UI. I predict it will be faster, more productive and vastly more connected than my N810 and could possibly fulfil my Carrypad dream. The M528 is months away from launch so a lot could change but already you can see how far the UI development is. Finger friendly. Kinetic scrolling. Responsive and stylish. The application suite is also much richer than I thought it would be. Open Ofiice was there and we also saw a demo of Fluendo which is a nice looking media player app.
Something is happening behind Intel’s Atom branding that’s more than just silicon development. There’s a software infrastructure building that is big, financially supported and not far removed from the way Apple are doing things with the iPhone. The control is there. The guidelines are there. The restricted hardware set is there. The ISV process seems to be both accessible and well controlled and with 150 people working on the Moblin core and distribution through partners like Canonical and Asianux who are also working on optimisations and UI, you know there’s some big numbers involved. I don’t expect version 1 to be quite the slick application suite that you find on the iPhone but it will close in very very quickly, especially if third party app developers jump on board which I expect them to do becuase the potential market for Moblin is far greater than that of the iPhone. I might be wrong but I don’t see Apple going for the car, kiosk, hifi, set top box, seat-back or fridge market. Blip.tv HQ WMV version here. YouTube version over at JKKMobile.
