Tablet Acer Iconia W500, anyone?

[Craig White]

On Wed, 2011-11-30 at 18:34 -0200, fernando at lozano.eti.br wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 
> > It's my understanding that Google has released the complete source
> for the latest Android. Someone please correct if I'm wrong.
> > John
> 
> Releasing the sources is not enough for me. Android is developed at
> closed doors, and the source released afterwards, or not released at
> all, like it happened wth 3.0 / Honeycomb. I don't know how hard is to
> do something usefull with those sources. Sometimes you find "complete"
> sources available but an incomplete/not documented/not automared build
> process, and the sources are pretty useless without a huge effort.
----
Probably worth considering that the early versions of 3.0 (Honeycomb)
were tailored to specific hardware in order to accelerate the
development and bring a specific product to market (Motorola Xoom).
Subsequent versions were more generalized and allowed a greater variety
of hardware choices which is when Google released the source. I think
Google's decision to prevent Honeycomb fragmentation was reasonably
prudent - evidence the Windows 7 phones all require a Snapdragon single
core processor so there is virtually no product differentiation.

Their whole intent to merge the telephone version (ie Gingerbread) and
the tablet version (Honeycomb) is now realized (Ice Cream Sandwich) and
in an amazingly short period of time - evidence the total lack of
Windows tablets despite the amount of resources Microsoft is throwing at
development as they become increasingly irrelevant in mobile technology.
----
> Not mentioning that all android devices on the market use ARM cpus.
> Maybe the current sources need significant porting effort for x86.
----
I gather that Canonical has been pushing hard at this.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM
----
> Current Android requires programming for their specic APIs: no X, no
> LibreOffice, no Gimp, no Inkscape...
> 
> 
> A tablet like the Acer Iconia W500 has the same specs as a current
> netbook, so I could use it sometimes as a tradicional netbook and say
> edit ODT documents, and sometimes as a tablet, using the touch
> interface for multimedia and web browsing. It even helps that by
> providing a doc with keyboard, full-size usb and vga ports. So today I
> could do with it things I cannot do with a tablet.
> 
> 
> My question is, on the tablet side, anyone has tried Fedora on the
> Iconia, and found it nice to use with touch-screen only?
----
Good question - not me

I think that a tablet device and a tablet computer scratch 2 different
itches and wanting to have that scratched by the same hardware device is
probably impractical, if nothing else. Given the relatively low cost of
the hardware these days, it's much more realistic to simply buy both but
of course there's always some people who just want to do things just to
see if they can.

Craig



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