While some folks have taken to referring to this year’s Computex as Tabletex, thanks to the prominence of slate PC-style devices on display at the trade show, it’s not all about tablets. Asus is also showing off a handful of netbooks, and even though we’ve already seen the Asus Eee PC 1018, 1016, and 1015 at trade shows before, the company does have one new trick up its sleeve: An App Store for netbooks.
The Asus App Store is basically a branded version of the Intel AppUp Center. It’s designed as a place where netbook users can go to find software that’s guaranteed to work well on devices with Intel Atom processors and small screens. Asus will preload the App Store software on all Windows netbooks starting in the second half of 2010.
Tucked away int he press release was another juicy tidbit: Asus will also be loading the App Store on netbooks running MeeGo Linux “when it launches in 2011.” So while it’s been a while since Asus released a netbook running Linux, it looks like the company does plan to at least give MeeGo a try next year.
Having taken MeeGo for a test drive recently, I have to say it’s a lot more fun to use than the custom Xandros Linux software that Asus shipped with its earliest netbooks.
Hurry it up Asus, I want one (or two) of those, badly….
It sounds like every manufacturer is starting to put up their own app store. Don’t think this will work well on the PC side of things but then again many of them will just require re-submitting an app to a different store. . .ten times.
Novell has been helping with MeeGO. So, sadly, MeeGo is full of MONO (.Net clone), and so the OS is affected by Microsoft Patents on MONO. Can’t risk Microsoft sending around BSA to enforce their software patent licenses.
So, we can not afford to use it at all.
Question – also at Computex we shall see at least a dozen devices with Pixel Qi screens.
sweet, maybe i’ll finally upgrade that 900 i have here somewhere.