Todays & Tomorrows Technology

We can’t say we looked at the Sharp Mebius NJ70A netbook – with its nifty touchscreen trackpad – and thought “what this needs is a second touchscreen”, but then we’re not SKY at UMPC Fever. After unboxing the N270-based netbook, he loaded up Windows 7 and then installed a touchscreen layer so as to use handwriting recognition direct onto the 10-inch display.

Interestingly, while he had the NJ70A open, SKY discovered that the optical trackpad actually has its own processor and RAM, meaning it doesn’t rely on the netbook’s own Atom CPU. He’s now trying to identify exactly what those mysterious components are.

Other hardware details include two RAM slots inside, which makes upgrading from the standard 1GB straightforward. XP will only recognize a maximum of 2GB; Windows Vista will recognize 3GB; and Windows 7 will recognize 3GB but only allow you to use 2GB.

Earlier in the month we heard that Atom N270 based netbooks and nettops would be unlikely candidates for inclusion in the Windows 7 Upgrade Program, and that’s looking to indeed be the case. ASUS have announced details of their program, including which models will be eligible, and only two of the company’s sprawling Eee PC netbook line are included: the 1101HA and the 1005HA.

Neither of these use the N270: the 1101HA adopts Intel’s Z520 CPU, while the 1005HA has the N280. You’ll also need to have a particular model in order to be eligible: the 1101HA must be running Vista Home Premium, while the 1005HA must be running either XP Pro or Vista Business. Considering most of these netbooks are bought with Windows XP Home, that doesn’t bode well for existing customers.

There are also a few Eee Top all-in-ones and the Eee Box EB1501 nettop, but it’s generally a poor showing for the company’s budget range.

Microsoft have announced official pricing for Windows 7, their next-gen OS which will arrive on October 22nd. Both upgrade and full prices have been revealed, the latter being $199.99 for Windows 7 Home Premium, $299.99 for Windows 7 Professional, and $319.99 for Windows 7 Ultimate.

Those upgrading from Windows XP or Vista will pay slightly less: the Home Premium upgrade is $119.99, the Professional upgrade is $199.99, and the Ultimate upgrade is $219.99. From Thursday June 26th, Microsoft will be offering cut-price pre-orders to those in the US, Canada and Japan, where buyers will be able to get the Home Premium upgrade for $49.99 and the Professional upgrade for $99.99. Similar deals will start from July 15th in the UK, France and Germany. However availability at these discounted prices is limited, though Microsoft are keeping quiet as to how many licenses they’ve set aside.

As HP have already announced, there’ll also be a Windows 7 Upgrade Option Program, which will begin on June 26th. Participating retailers and OEMs will be offering free (or reduced cost) upgrades to Windows 7 for machines bought between the 26th and October 22nd.

HP have announced a new range of consumer desktop PCs, together with an update to their MediaSmart Server software for TouchSmart PCs. Slimline, Pavilion and Elite desktops have all been announced, together with a new Compaq Presario desktop. In addition, HP have announced that select consumer PCs bought from today onwards will be eligible for their Windows 7 Upgrade Program.
Both AMD and Intel processors are available across the ranges, and Blu-ray is also an option on some models. The Pavilion Slimline kicks off with an AMD Athlon single-core LE1660 CPU, 2GB of RAM and 320GB hard-drive, climbing to a Pentium dual-core CPU, twice the RAM and a 500GB drive. As for the Pavilion, that kicks off with an AMD Sempron LE1300, while the Pavilion Elite starts with a dual-core AMD Phenom II X2 and rises all the way to an Intel Core i7-920 with 6GB of DDR3 RAM, 750GB storage and a 1GB ATI Radeon HD 4650 graphics card. Finally the Presario machine has an Athlon X2 dual-core CPU, 3GB or RAM and NVIDIA GeForce 6150 SE graphics.

The HP Pavilion Slimline s500 series begins at $289, while the Pavilion p6000 series starts at $269. Meanwhile the Pavilion Elite e9000 starts at $599 and the Compaq Presario CQ5000 is $379.

The latest batch of new laptop and ultraportable rumors are spilling out of the Far-East, tipping new touchscreen models running Windows 7 and at least one ultra-thin from LG. According to industry sources, HP, Acer and Lenovo have all placed orders with Taiwanese capacitive touchscreen manufacturer Cando; meanwhile MSI are said to be supplying LG with an ultra-thin notebook that will ship in the second half of 2009.

The Cando touchscreens in question are the company’s 12.1-inch model, which have recently become the first such panel to receive Windows 7 compatibility certification. That means Microsoft agree that the panels will work with Windows 7’s extensive multitouch technology. Shipments are expected to begin in August, with Cando currently capable of producing 400,000 to 500,000 panels per month, rising to 1m per month in 2010.

As for the LG ultra-thin notebooks, no hardware specifications are known but according to the Chinese-language Economic Daily News report the company is in talks with telecom providers regarding bundling WWAN connectivity. That would imply that the notebook will have integrated 3G.

Windows 7’s native support for multitouch is well known, but if Microsoft thought that would be another knife into Linux then they should prepare for disappointment. A French development group at ENAC have developed native multitouch using Linux 2.6.30, supporting the usual swipe, flip, rotate and pinch-resize gestures.


While multitouch can be baked into Linux using the MPX system integrated into X.Org server v7.5, which offers multiple independent pointers at the windowing system level, the ENAC version actually sends events from the OS kernel. The ENAC code is also more flexible, using general libraries so as to be usable in more Linux versions: co-developer Mohamed-Ikbel Boulabiar expects it to be included in Google’s Android stack.

The upshot of this is that netbooks, nettops and notebooks that have multitouch-capable touchscreens won’t be limited to Windows 7 for their functionality. Linux’s market share is already down to a small minority of netbook/nettop implementations, and analysts suggested that Windows 7’s arrival could have squeezed that even further. With native multitouch support, Linux could well fight back against that prediction.

Two Gartner analysts have lent their weight to ARM processors and the Google Android platform as potential players in netbooks and smartbooks, tipping the pairing as possibly headed for prime time. While they recognized that Android still needs fettling for the larger displays and broader usage patterns of a netbook-style device, Christian Heidarson and Ben Lee, analysts at Gartner, nonetheless praised its “snappy” performance on ARM-based sub-notebooks.

The various Android netbooks and smartbooks demonstrated at Computex 2009 are held up as examples of the development from smartphone to larger device for the platform. Of course, it’s not only ARM that Android can be adapted for; Acer have been working with a Linux developer in Taiwan to port Android to x86 processors, such as Intel’s Atom, for their upcoming netbook.

Of course, there’s a big leap from snappy performance to an appealing platform, and that’s something that Linux still needs to address for mainstream users. Sales figures of Windows and non-Android Linux netbooks suggest that buyers are willing to put up with slower performance in return for the familiarity and app-flexibility of Microsoft-based devices. Internet browsing, while perhaps the netbook’s primary purpose, is not all the budget ultraportables are used for; similarly, the absence of Flash support for ARM processors could prove a major stumbling block for an audience used to streaming video content.