Always Innovating Touch Book Announced

Always Innovating is set to release a new convertible slate aimed at changing the way we view both netbooks and tablet computers. The Touch Book has the features of a netbook: 10 to 15 hour battery life, low cost and small size, but the interface of a slate computer with a completely detachable keyboard. The Touch Book starts at $299 for slate only configurations or $399 for slate plus keyboard and is poised to dramatically change our view of netbooks.

The Always Innovating Touch Book fills the needs of a netbook and slate in one device. The platform is entirely open source, including hardware, which works well for consumer use and custom platforms like home theater interfaces. Follow our coverage of the Touch Book on TabletPCReview.com.

 

Very nice!

That's pretty cool...I like the look of it!

And, it has a very, very nice battery life & a cool detachable keyboard!

hmmmm


Cin

 

Sounds fascinating. Not sure as to how useful the detachable keyboard will be though.

 

Looks really cool but I would be worried about the hinge. Also, it can only run Linux due to its arm processor limitation. Promising product still.

 

Great chassis concept. If it offered an Atom or Nano and GPS I'd pay twice what they're asking.

 

I will definitely be picking this up if it has good enough specs.

EDIT: Specs

* 9.4" x 7" x 1.4" for 2 lbs (with keyboard)
* ARM Texas Instruments OMAP3 chip
* 1024x600 8.9'' screen
* Storage: 8GB micro SD card
* Wifi 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth
* 3-dimensional accelerometer
* Speakers, micro and headphone
* 6 USB 2.0 (3 internal, 2 external, 1 mini)
* 10h to 15 hours of battery life

Wow, a lot of USB 2.0 ports, huge battery life, nice res on the screen, and only 2 lbs? I think I'll forego my ASUS 1000 purchase for this. I just preordered the Netbook version!

EDIT: lmao! As soon as I posted this, I got 4 PMs saying that this wouldn't be a good idea at all! What an interesting turn of events!

FINAL EDIT: Preview with Pictures and Video: http://i.gizmodo.com/5162584/always...let-open-source-frankenstein?skyline=true&s=x

 

Not too happy with the ARM processor...

x86/x86-64 is the only thing I'll use in a notebook. Everything else should be relegated to PPC/SmartPhone categories.

 

Dang it! I was momentarily interested until I saw the ARM CPU

Oh well...something like that but with x86 might be pretty great. There's supposed to be some <$500 (aka $499.99 ) slate/PDA-esque device hitting, but I don't know what happened with that.

 

Sweet, I like the idea, first step to interchangeable laptops. As is a main base, everything else is in blocks, keyboard, monitor, optical drive, gpu, cpu, and HD.

 

"Always innovating?" What a name....

 

Actually the fact that it's ARM based is the most interesting to me. Tho not sure I'd actually have a use for a netbook...

 

, bought my MSI Wind too soon.

 

Why? I mean I want an actual computer I can do whatever with, not a low end thing than only runs some special blend of Linux or whatever and a handful of programs.

 

Your statement shows you know very little about Linux. Pretty much everything that's written for Linux is written as open source, which means that all of the software can be compiled for any machine. Do you have any idea how many different CPU architectures are supported by the Linux kernel? (Hint, it's huge, like hundreds...) Do you have any idea how many software packages are available? (Hint, it's huge...)

Google Android is a "special blend of Linux" but that doesn't really mean anything - you can build your own kernel and replace Google's distro on a G1 phone with your own. There's nothing stopping you from running whatever software you want. (And yes, I have a G1 phone, it's ARM based, and yes I install my own software on it all the time.)

I want an actual computer I can do anything I want with, not some low end thing that only runs what Microsoft/Adobe/RIAA/MPAA says I'm allowed to run...

 

Sure, but I don't want to have to try to recompile and/or alter any program I need, and even aside from that I don't want to have to run Linux on something I'm using as a general purpose computer of some sort

 

... uh huh ... 'cause we all know Linux isn't a general purpose computing platform... Thanks for proving my point.


I just pre-ordered one. I'll probably forget all about it in the meantime, and then be completely surprised when it finally gets released...

 

Uh, you proved exactly nothing. I didn't say "this doesn't work for anyone". I was clearly talking about *ME*. *I* do not want to be stuck with Linux for that purpose. *I* do not want to have to recompile and/or alter programs to run them. *I* do want the full range of programs I use available.

*I* am not interested in this because it uses an ARM CPU.

 

Mine arrived today. It says to charge it for 9 hours before use, so I haven't done anything besides plug it in yet...

 

Thanks for letting us know! Can you keep us informed, maybe write up some impressions, plus some pictures? There's a serious dearth of real-world information about this machine.

 

Can you run Windows CE on an arm based machine? If so that be kind of a cool dual boot wince and linux.

 

Lemme see if I can upload some pix...

The first shot is the closed book next to its "User manual" which is just a single folded sheet of paper telling you where all the ports are. Next are a couple shots of it next to my dv5z, and one sitting on my dv5z. The side-on view was important to me because the tablet part is much heavier than the keyboard. It's so top-heavy that if you tilt it back any further than I show, it will tip over backward. The last shot here is the keyboard with the tablet removed. And in the next post, the tablet by itself.

[Please ignore the junk in the background. There is a disassembled Thinkpad T42 behind my dv5z; the fan in the T42 died and the replacement won't get here for another couple days...]

 

Sorry for the picture quality. Without the flash, everything is blurry. With the flash, there was too much glare. One last shot, just the tablet. Notice that the screen orientation rotates 90 degrees in tablet mode. (I've never used a tabletPC before so if this is old hat to you, sorry.)

I'm pretty disappointed with the keyboard; I've already sent AI an email with my many complaints about it. Hopefully they'll do something useful with the feedback. I guess if you mostly just need a tablet, this could be ok. But typing on the keyboard is a real drag. I'll elaborate more later, but the feel is terrible.

I guess I need to try getting used to the tablet and/or stylus. It comes with a stylus but you can also just use your fingers.

Application startup is pretty slow, which I suppose is because SD cards are really not that fast. I may try to get some video to demonstrate...

I'm afraid I can't show you any of the network apps in action yet. My home network is WPA and the current beta OS doesn't support it, so I haven't gotten this thing online yet. I'm going to try to copy a wpa_supplicant config over from my other machine and see if I can make it talk, but at the moment I don't know where all of the right config files are located.

 

http://twitter.com/sfeger

That guy had something about WPA on the TouchBook on his twitter feed, you might want to check it out. It sounds like its a great concept, but the first version is somewhat rough around the edges. They'll have my money if they can smooth them out in Rev 2 or 3 of the device. It kind of sucks that they won't send out review units with the beta software, so I have to wait for them to finalize the software package before I get my hands on one.

Thank you for your pictures and impressions.

 

That is some hot stuff, thanks for sharing those photos. I'd really like to see this one in action, so a Vid as you said so would be great.

 

Didnt Compaq have a design like this years ago?

 

I think one or two companies had a tablet pc with detachable keyboards no?

 

The HP Compaq tc1100, from back in the day, with a PenM and Nvidia Go420. Yeah, it was pretty sweet.

 

Yep. In fact, Windows Mobile is based on WinCE, and most (virtually all) phones with it use an ARM based processor (usually a Marvell (formerly Intel) XScale).

 

For those curious, I used my G1 phone to record a video of booting up my TouchBook.

http://highlandsun.com/hyc/video-2009-08-21-22-10-48.3gp

Sorry for the shakiness, was holding the phone in one hand and trying to manipulate things with the other hand.

I uploaded the video to youtube to save my webserver from the load...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5tLK71YrLw

 

Nice concept at such a nice price.

 

Since this project is all open source, I bugged the AI folks for access to their kernel build tree. They posted it, and I was able to rebuild the kernel and wifi driver to include the missing WPA support. I also updated their Network Manager GUI to support these features. So that's all cool now. http://bugzilla.alwaysinnovating.com/show_bug.cgi?id=8

I guess one of the reasons I got mine early is because they know I'm already a heavy open source software developer. Time to blog a bit about this thing.

I used it continuously today from about 9am, the battery died on me just about 4:57pm. Very close to 8 hours with heavy use (recompiling, editing, testing...), I'm pretty pleased.

 

Hm, well what can i say they are always innovating! Har Har Har!