Posted on Friday, January 04 2008 @ 2:40 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Apple Insider claims Apple will release new handheld devices this year that use Intel's Silverthorne chip:
That has broad implications for Apple's expanding role in consumer electronics, and holds out the prospect for the company to play the savior for a chip originally designed to power the second-generation of Microsoft's beleaguered UMPCs.
The market for tablet sized computing devices has repeatedly disappointed in the past. Enthusiasm for "pen computing" erupted in the early 90s led by Go's PenPoint OS (below, running on the short lived, early 90s AT&T EO) and followed by Microsoft's Windows for Pen, but the market didn't respond appreciatively to products as delivered. Handheld processors of the day were often designed for more conventional laptops and couldn't really support the performance required for tablet features and the power efficiency demanded by more compact devices with smaller batteries.
