Hands on with Intel's Atom tablet and MeeGo

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Posted on 15 Jun 2010 at 15:37

Yes, it's another tablet, this one from Intel uses its brand new ‘Moorestown’ ultra-low power Atom processor and the upcoming MeeGo user interface (and eventually operating system), first announced at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The 10-inch model is the now typical tablet form factor and it’s made by Quanta. It has a glass touch-screen interface and metal edges. Inside, there’s an Intel Atom Z550 processor running at 2GHz and there’s also 2GB of memory.

What was more interesting was the fact that, despite its early "Alpha" build state, MeeGo was actually very impressive. It's a weird mixture of Sony’s Xross Media Bar and the Zune HD’s interface, which will soon appear on Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 Series handsets. The columns dictate the main areas, and the large thumbnail displays can be rolled left or right to reveal more: it's neat, tidy and very visual.

This can then all be switched between an Android/iPhone like interface of little square icons showing off all the installed programs. The touch-screen panel was surprisingly accurate responsive and the pinch-zoom function already works well. Intel showed the tablet running a 720p h.264 video clip smoothly as well.

At the moment the software is just overlaid on top of a Windows 7 installation, but it thankfully it will become its own operating system in future versions. In a roundtable we sat in on right after seeing the device, Intel lambasted most software vendors who are apparently not writing applications that let the processor go to sleep and save power when it’s not required.

This is something it's now hoping to tackle with MeeGo, and we hope will be a vetting feature of its App Up cloud-based application store, which comes preloaded in the MeeGo software.

So far, so good for MeeGo then – we’ll keep you updated on its progress and we eagerly await the first production-quality units to arrive in the Expert Reviews labs in the not-too-distant future.

Author: Richard Swinburne in Taipei