Jolicloud is a Linux-based operating system that’s designed to blur the lines between desktop and web apps while adding a social layer to software by letting you see what apps your friends are installing. The project launched as an operating system aimed at netbooks — but today Jolicloud founder Tariq Krim announced that Jolicloud 1.1 will broaden its horizons with support for all sorts of desktop, notebook, and tablet computers.
Jolicloud includes the Google Chromium web browser (the open source development version of Chrome), and support for Adobe Flash. It has a sort of app store, allowing you to download and install apps, or create desktop icons for web apps such as Gmail or Facebook. And it supports hardware graphics acceleration on some mobile devices — Krim says that a netbook with and Intel Atom N550 processor can handle 1080p HD video playback and 720p HD YouTube video playback. Most PC makers only claim notebooks with that chipset can handle 720p HD video while running Windows 7.
Jolicloud 1.1 also reportedly boots faster, with the entire operating system loading in 20 seconds or less on many computers.
You can find more details at the Jolicloud blog. Unfortunately there’s still one major detail missing: Krim doesn’t say when you’ll actually be able to download Jolicloud 1.1. The download page still points to version 1.0.
Krim says it will be available in November, so the lack of a download link is scarcely a surprise.
I’m questioning the 1080p video playback. Is that 1080p at 1 Mbps? If an N550 based netbook can playback video files directly extracted from a Blu-ray then I’m getting a netbook.
The download link is not available yet so we need to wait and see how things turn out.
Well their 720p claim for version 1.0 was exaggerated so I’m going to assume their 1080p claim is too. 720p did work okay with netbooks that support hardware acceleration though.