One of my former colleagues and friend, Pranav Peshwe, pointed me out to this company called MPC Data who has developed a solution called swiftBoot.
Using swiftBoot, these people have managed to boot into a fully running Linux OS in under one second.
Take a look at this unbelievable video to check it out for yourself.
The developers claim that there is no other gimmick involved other than optimizations done, as a result of a good understanding of the Linux system.
The demos show that not only does the system soft-boot in within a second but it also function normally after that.
There is a second demo of the same on a TI OMAP3530 based OMAP3530EVM board. This time, they use a stop-watch for monitoring the performance.
I know if makes business sense to use this to provide a service to OEMs and ISVs, but imagine what havoc it would create if they open source their findings and it gets merged into the mainline kernel.
CES 2011 is long over and it was raining Tablets this year.
However, there were a couple of tablets which stood out from the rest (that is not to say that the others weren’t good enough).
One of them and by far the most popular amongst all the Tablet demos was Motorola’s Xoom Tablet with. The Motorola Xoom was crowned the best tablet at CES 2011.
Some of the awesome hardware specs of the Xoom are :
10 inch LCD touch screen with 1280×800 resolution
Nvidia Tegra 2, 1GHZ dual-core processor : This is a first in tablet history
Support for 3G, LTE and 802.11n Wifi
720p capture and 1080p playback
5 MP rear-facing and 2 MP front-facing camera
To complement this, it will host the Android 3.0 Honeycomb OS which is specifically designed for tablets with features like :
Google Maps 5.0 with 3D view
Flash 10.1
New browser with tabbed-browsing
New look and feel for applications like YouTube
Scrollable Widgets on the home screens
So without further ado, here’s the video of the Motorola Xoom with the Android 3.0 ( Honeycomb ) OS :
Panasonic is a consumer electronics company. It’s not a Software company.
So although you would consider Panasonic for all your gadget needs like Stereo systems, projectors, camcorders, etc. you do not expect to find any great user interfaces to it (apart from maybe, the sleek looks and arrangements of the panel-heads)
However, as you will see in the video below, they have come up with a very intuitive and innovative user interface for their HDTV’s
The interface seems very smooth, with bold icons and no clutter. The 3D look and feel adds to it’s graciousness.
To top this, the HDTV comes with a Wii-like remote for gesture-based controls. So, as you will see, the remote control reacts to gestures like “pull” and “push”.
The funny thing is that, Panasonic still feel that this UI is not ready for prime time. Well, if you ask me, instead of displaying a UI which you claim not ready for prime-time, you should make sure it is GA (General Availability) consumption ready and then showcase it at events like CES 2011.
What do you think of the UI ? Too juvenile ? Futuristic ? Or do you wanna play with the bad boy now !!
