News round-up: another tablet; VIA; Qualcomm netbook?

First on the list is another netbook tablet being powered by the Atom from Arbor (who?). I know I railed on poor Kohjinsha’s upcoming netbook tablet, but this one is a little more interesting to me because it’s a 7″ tablet computer, and it’s been ruggedized. The market may not be the standard consumer market but rather military or other similar “rough” markets where computers need to withstand a beating.

More on the Arbor tablet.

Next, VIA has announced the Epia N700 Nano-ITX board which includes the VX800 media processor. I’ll say that I’m not too familiar with it, but according to VIA, it looks to be capable of video acceleration, so that alone puts it ahead of Intel’s boards for the SFF consumer.

Also, it does feature a mini-PCI slot for pseudo expansion. The interesting thing is they note it supports either the C7 or the Eden CPU, but there’s no mention of the Nano anywhere. Isn’t it elementary to talk up the new CPU with it coming out shortly? Other articles say it’ll work in any existing board, so it should work in this one, right? I’m confused, VIA.

More on VIA’s new board.

Last on the list today is perhaps the most interesting: Qualcomm wants to enter the netbook market. Qualcomm is better known in the mobile phone industry, not the notebook (netbook) one, yet they have a CPU, known as the Snapdragon, that they think is the perfect fit.

The Snapdragon clocks up to 1 ghz and is based off of the ARM instruction set. What’s interesting is that they’ve managed to cram a lot of components onto the CPU, including GPU and 3G modem. A cursory look hasn’t revealed any benchmarks, but Qualcomm thinks the CPU is powerful enough to drive up to a 12″ device. If it works anything like AMD’s Athlon 2000+, it may work.

What’s also interesting is that the Snapdragon only draws .5w of power. Yeah, half a watt. They theorize that one could get eight hours on a “full computing device” in a single charge. I know Asus is trying to accomplish that with the Eee, so I’m interested to see how the two might compare.

Qualcomm says they have a fair number of manufacturers who’ve signed up to use their technology in upcoming devices, so maybe we’ll see yet another surge of netbooks in the future.

I can hardly wait for the showdown of CPUs.

More on Qualcomm’s aspirations.