We’ve already heard whispers about an Acer tablet sporting one of AMD’s new Fusion APUs. Now, DigiTimes reports that MSI is cooking up a 10.1" tablet powered by AMD’s C-50, the fastest, dual-core member of the 9W Ontario family.
DigiTimes refers to this upcoming system as the WindPad 110W, saying it will launch at the CeBIT 2011 trade show in Germany early next month. Along with the AMD chip, the 110W is said to feature 32GB of solid-state storage, a "gravity detecting module," a light sensor, Wi-Fi, and Windows 7 Home Premium—more or less everything you’d expect from an x86 slate, except perhaps for a camera.
Now, the question is, how much will this product sell for? HP’s Atom-powered Windows 7 slate costs a whopping $799, and HP makes no excuses about the fact that it’s aimed squarely at business users. Taiwanese firms like Acer and MSI might offer cheaper alternatives, but considering the x86 guts and potentially poorer battery life (at least when compared to power-sipping ARM chips), I’m dubious that we’ll see a $500 iPad killer packing Ontario and Windows 7.
Um, WindPad? Is that the best MSI could do?
Taiwanese companies keep sucking at marketing. Doesn’t take the crown from “rock solid heart touching” Asus motto, though.
Well, Apple launched the “iPad” and inadvertently fulfilled a prophecy that had been foretold by The Onion. Sometimes it’s not a good idea to get too creative with marketing.
No disagreement there. The Onion gave me a good laugh at the time.
Marketing blunders are the exceptions at Apple, though, no the norm. In the Taiwanese IT industry it’s the other way around.
Actually, didn’t [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L68aKVAzwQ4<]MadTV[/url<] (in 2006) beat The Onion to the punchline? Anyway, this is fully in keeping with MSI's aesthetic. Now we can [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7V406XfAaI<]Break Like the Wind[/url<](pad).
I love ma self a C-50 Tablet with WebOs 3.0.
[i<]a "gravity detecting module"[/i<] - this thing's a shoo-in for a huge NASA contract. Damn shame the U.S. space program is effectively being contracted-out to the Russians and Europeans.
Not the best name 110W makes me think it’ll be a power hog :p
My thoughts exactly!
It’s a shame this stuff costs so much. $799 will buy me a heck of a laundry machine – a high-efficiency high-capacity model – that’ll probably last 15 years on average. $799 tablet: probably an average life of 5 years and I don’t think that would include those that get lost/broken/stolen.
Ah well, probably nothing beats the good old automobile for depreciation.
But will this tablet selectively disappear socks? I think not.
Well, you could load up an old OS and with Winsocks the network connection might randomly disappear 😀
*rimshot*
That wouldn’t be a problem if you preemptively covered it with [url=http://www.gsp.com/cgi-bin/man.cgi?section=1&topic=lint<]lint[/url<]