Ericsson Red Hat Bluetooth web pad heads for
Europe
Posted: 15/11/2000 at 10:27 GMT
Although the giant halls at Las Vegas are supposed to
be
individually themed, every one lists "Information Appliances" on its menu.
The
term is becoming as ubiquitous as "uses electricity"... and is probably
about as
redundant. Well... if they aren't information appliances what are they
supposed
to be doing, heating the room? In which case what are they doing at Comdex?
We'll give you the full rundown of webpads later but first honours should
go to
the Ericsson device, which will be the first to reach the UK.
It's
a
wireless tablet that shuns the NatSemi and Transmeta chips used in just
about
every other appliance we've seen this week in favour of StrongARM. The
twist is
its use of a small Bluetooth base station as the wireless backbone, and
although
comms are currently provided by a 56k dial-up modem, broadband versions are
planned for Q3 2001. The pad uses Red Hat Linux and the Opera browser,
rather
than Mozilla.
Alas this provided the only glitch in our
run-through, as
it only displayed the masthead of your favourite online IT newspaper, and
got no
further than our vulture logo. In addition to the usual mail and address
book
applets it has a voice note recorder and a scribbling application. As these
minimalist UIs go though, it's very slick and discreet - dropping the
redundant
Mac/PC desktop elements without being insultingly childish, which so many
of
these appliances are.
Ericsson says it will be priced somewhere
between
a "tethered" appliance and a low-end PC. We got hints that subsidies would
figure in the plan, somewhere. The pad should be launched into "five or
six"
European countries and the US in March, although things will start to get
interesting in the second stage. With that broadband version, Ericsson says
the
appliance will become more of an open platform, and Red Hat is working on a
seamless way of downloading appropriate applets, making this the first
Linux
appliance with pretensions to being a platform, rather than somewhere where
the
Penguin remains hidden behind the curtains.
In flusher days,
Ericsson
poured a load of cash into hiring first class industrial designers to
create
lavish, futuristic domestic concepts. Although many of these seem to have
been
axed in the labs, this one appears to be growing rudimentary feet.