Cheeky Taiwanese manufacturer Albatron has come up with a compact UMPC ready to take on Asus' Eee PC. Why cheeky? The new machine's called the Tee PC. Or maybe it's aimed at golfers, we don't know. What we do know is that it's based not on the usual x86 processor type but on a 400MHz ARM 926 running Windows CE 6.0. It has …

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Monday 25th August 2008 12:01 GMT Mage

It all depends

The Samsung ARM11 chip maybe used in iPhone and the Texas ARM Cortex and many others usually have built in TV and LCD controllers with on chip MPEG and AES engines too.

Some 266MHz ARMs SoC can do SD MPEG4 with no CPU overhead at all.

This could be rubbish or quite good depending on which SoC it uses.

Also if Linux can be loaded (almost certainly via JTAG, but that's not trivial).

My friend has Debian running on an ARM that came with Windows CE.

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Monday 25th August 2008 12:03 GMT Mage

Alternatively

The new 5" Archos Internet tablet, with 3G /HSDPA, WiFi and same resolution on ARM Cortex has up to 250GByte disk. 7" version too.

It depends a lot on price and what you expect.

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Monday 25th August 2008 16:03 GMT Torben Mogensen

Neat, but no Eee rival

I can't see this being used for the same things the Eee and similar laptots. But it is indeed a neat compromise between a small-screen PDA and a laptot -- if it is under £200 pounds. Otherwise, it is just another executive toy.

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Tuesday 26th August 2008 05:52 GMT Charles Manning

Have Balls

Finally someone with balls enough to make one of these things that won't run Windows. Being able to run WIndows is the only real justification for putting an x86 in a device like this so being prepared to dump WIndows allows a different set of solutions.

These ARM-based machines can be made a lot cheaper than x86-based. Not just the chipsets, but things like simpler power supplies, smaller batteries etc.

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Tuesday 26th August 2008 05:53 GMT Trix

Finally some pr0n for gay/bi men and straight/bi women to check out

Forget that chick on the beach with the eee - I think that display of the mighty, er, edifice and whatever-it-is shooting off the end bears closer examination.

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Tuesday 26th August 2008 09:33 GMT druck

Re: Have Balls

No it wont run x86 Windows, but worse than that it runs Windows Mobile. That offers a hopeless slow and limited web browsing experience, even if you install the far superior Opera, Firefox on the EEE is going to knock it in to a cocked hat. Microsoft's motley collection of mobile Office format viewers is also vastly inferior to a copy of Open Office shipped as standard on the EEE.

I'm all for the use of ARM over x86 in low power devices, but a 400MHz processor as used in 4 year old PDAs isn't the way to show case it, there are ARM cores with a lot more performance, and unshackled from the horribly inefficient Windows Mobile OS might have a chance against cheap Linux x86 netbooks at the lower end of the market. This device just smacks of being cheap and nasty.

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Tuesday 26th August 2008 10:12 GMT Joe Montana

Pointless...

Really, what is the point of windows ce?

It's not compatible with x86 windows apps, and what few apps it does have tend to be rather lousy and limited.

Compare that to linux running on an arm processor, to which the vast majority of existing linux applications have been ported and can usually just be recompiled. The nokia n810 is arm based and works nicely, it has a proper build of firefox installed on it instead of a crippled stripped down browser.

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Tuesday 26th August 2008 12:18 GMT Anonymous Coward

T is for Tablet

It's supposed to be a 'tablet' for taking notes etc. The slate form factor (lack of physical keyboard) may be useful if you're writing instead of typing but otherwise it better come with good software to make use of the lower hardware.

If it's priced around 100 - 150 quid then it'll might be useful for note taking (with Evernote), web browsing (Opera 9.5), audio/video (Core Player) and simple games. If they include Office Mobile (which can be made part of the CE then they'll have a very useful device...and of course the Linux users would have a fantastic new hardware platform...

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