Some more thoughts on IDF Taipei from one of our customers: One of the things that I like about IDF is people are really making things happen here. Or at least they are trying hard. For example, the battery life of your notebook. As much as its advantages to carry around just like your cellphone, there is a single one thing that bug me most. You have to conserve on your power consumption for every little thing you do. Either you have to turn down the back-light and squirm, or you have to pull down and close the LCD lid right after you’ve finished the job. You never have the luxury of keeping it on for at least an hour without doing anything:) Just look around at the IDF conference. Where do people sit in the blogging area? They would sit close to where there are power sockets. Also, attendees who use their notebooks on the rest area would keep their power cord on.
That’s why a session called Realizing the Vision of “All Day and Beyond” of Battery Life for Mobile PCs would be attractive to me.
What’s Intel’s role here with regards to long battery life? A faster chip like Penryn would surely helps, according to Andy Keates, the speaker of this session. A faster chip would complete a computing task faster, and turn the notebook into low-power mode.
I don’t think the “all day and beyond” thing would be achieved soon, but as I can see from this session that things are making progress. That’s simply great.
And the talk of town today. Asus announced the prices for its new line of Intel-based low-cost notebooks Eee PC, a counterpart to Negroponte’s OLPC, or XO. Asus is in the camp of Classmate PC led by Intel.
At USD$250, I think the notebook is simply affordable enough to cause a stir in the local market.
what a piece of garbage that thing is. I’d like to see that thing try to compete in countries without power outlets, and with a suite of non proprietary software. Yet, that will never happen, huh.
It is a shame Intel chose to try to compete with the OLPC and violate its fiduciary duty as a board member. As a direct result of this, Intel lost at least one order and I bought 4 OLPC XOs instead. I will be using AMD as much as possible until this behavior is offset by something more positive.
If Intel choses not to compete technologically against AMD in this instance for business reasons, that is understandable, but this infiltration and undermining of a non-profit with such lofty goals (and to whom Intel owes certain explicitly agreed upon obligations as a board member) is simply unacceptable and will be punished in the market for higher end products where nerds with ethics are making purchasing decisions. (I am in HPC for example… think Beowulf clusters. Although I am not currently looking to buy hardware, I have problems with relying on companies that act this way.)
Please tell anyone who will listen at Intel that they need to watch the company’s ethics a bit. I love what Intel does technologically for the most part and would love to continue to be a customer.
Folks,
Thank you for your comments. Dave Stangis is Intel’s Director of Corporate Responsibility. You may be interested in his take on the subject — see Dave’s latest entry on Intel’s CSR blog.