Monday, December 31, 2012

ARM devices coming to the desktop

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 Before computers can be sold in the marketplace they need to be certified for radio and electrical interference levels. This is a good place to find out what is planned for the next devices to be manufactured. They must be the end product not just a prototype.  Giada is a well known manufacturer of small desktop fanless computers in the commercial sector and has just put up an 'ARM' chip (phone chip) computer for registration. It is also listed on their website but no price yet. It comes preinstalled with Android 4.0 but will take Ubuntu or possibly 'Windows 8 RT'. Libreoffice now works on an 'ARM' chipset and I am running the latest version on my 'Raspberry Pi ' without any problems which also uses the 'ARM' chipset. This is not a stripped down version and has the Spreadsheet, Presentation, and drawing packages complete. With the Firefox Browser and VLC media player already working this should satisfy most computing needs. Standard Windows 8 and earlier Windows versions do not run on 'ARM' chipsets, but Windows 8 RT does but will not run standard Windows software. It looks like the cheap phone systems are going to make a push for the Desktop computing area.