Nvidia: Tegra Smartbooks* playing 1080p, Flash
I dropped by the Nvidia suite at the Hyatt today to talk to Bill Henry about Tegra powered smartbooks. It was the first chance for me to get to play with these amazing devices. Looking at them you wouldn’t guess that these small smartbooks could play 1080p movies and do a good job on Flash content – judge for yourself. Next year they expect to have devices with 4x the compute horsepower – that is going to be amazing.

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WiMax: Fujitsu camera/internet device
Later I went to the WiMax area to check out how this technology was progressing. Most of the major WiMax semiconductor companies were there, including Sequans, Fujitsu, Picochip, Telecis and Comsys. Greater integration of the baseband chipset seemed to be the theme. Ssome were migrating to 65nm and integrating RF whilst others were integrating multiple radios (so called combo chips) or reducing the overall chip count and cost of building in WiMax. There’s a keen interest to get WiMax built into consumer devices rather than just PC dongles. Fujitsu showed me a camera/internet device that demonstrated this capability. The WiMax chip integrates an ARM9 whilst the main apps processor was from Samsung and integrated an ARM11.

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Samsung’s S5PC100 with Android and ThinkFree
Got back to the ARM suite before the next meeting and played with Samsung’s new S5PC100 Cortex-A8 based chip. The dev board was running Android and was very responsive. One of the installed apps was Thinkfree, which hails from Haansoft in Korea. I had heard of this Java app that enables viewing/editing of Word/Excel/Powerpoint files but I had never seen it. The demo version I saw was viewing .ppt/.doc/.xls files and running on Dalvik VM. It was surprisingly fast.

"Browse Me" by Opera
My colleague Rock had a chance to check out Opera’s latest browser and see their interactive demos. Opera as you know has been on the leading edge of browser technology for PC and mobile devices. See how Opera has taken their browser technology and adapted it for different devices, for example using the dual screens of the Nintendo DS. This is another great example of how the ARM ecosystem creates innovative diversity and how it will take the Internet beyond the PC.

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My first time
This was my first time at Computex. It was exciting to see first-hand the slim and cool smartbooks being shown to enthusiastic crowds. I wondered what others found interesting at Computex so I typed “Computex” into YouTube. Can you guess what was video #1?

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Wow! I think ARM has arrived at this show. Next year will be the year of Cortex-A9 and SMP devices – that’s going to be fun.

Rob Coombs, Director of Mobile Marketing, ARM, focuses on mobile gadgets that can fit in your pocket and is excited about the next wave of Smartphones that promise to be smarter and wow us with stunning graphics. This new class of Smartphone, which will focus on personal Internet and user experience, will change the industry and delight users. The ARM mobile marketing team are at the centre of the mobile industry and this provides a great place for Rob to look at the trends, and comment on the news that drives the industry and our business.

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* In the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany, the use of the term "Smartbook" in connection with portable computers is reserved exclusively to Smartbook AG, Germany.