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HyperSpace

Phoenix Technologies’ HyperSpace software is a quick-booting software environment that can coexist on a PC with Windows or other full featured operating systems. In other words, you have a choice when you hit the power button of waiting 45 seconds or longer to boot into a full desktop operating system, or you can launch HyperSpace in just a few seconds and quickly go online with a web browser, access media stored on your PC with media players, or perform other tasks.

Yesterday Phoenix announced a partnership with Intel to work together on Moblin, a custom Linux distribution for netbooks. The press release is a little vague, but as far as I can tell, this partnership means two things:

• Phoenix will work with the Moblin team to bring fast-boot, power management, and other HyperSpace features to Moblin
• Intel and Phoenix will promote the inclusion of the HyperSpace fast-boot option to PC makers putting together Moblin-powered netbooks

It doesn’t sound like HyperSpace and Moblin are becoming one. In other words, you’ll still have a choice of booting into one operating system or the other. But I kind of have to wonder what the point is. If it took a half hour to boot Moblin and 10 seconds to boot HyperSpace, that’d be one thing. But we’re talking about the difference between 10 seconds and maybe 30 or 40 here. Not to mention the fact that most people I know tend to put their computers to sleep more often than they completely power them down, which means you can probably resume from sleep faster than you can boot HyperSpace.