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Once upon a time a group of developers working on the open source KDE Plasma Active desktop environment for mobile devices figured it’d be cool if there was a tablet designed specifically to run the software. So they tried to find a device maker to offer truly open hardware with no proprietary components. It would be called the Vivaldi tablet.
That was hard… and every time it looked like things were moving in the right direction the project suffered setbacks.
After two years of development, the Vivaldi tablet project was canceled earlier this month. If you’ve been wondering what exactly went wrong, the folks at LWN have put together a great summary with plenty of commentary from project leader Aaron Seigo. (via reddit)
Here’s a roundup of tech news from around the web. You can keep up on the latest headlines by following Liliputing on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.
- Inside story of how the Vivaldi KDE tablet failed to make the leap from idea to product
Dealing with overseas manufacturers is hard, especially when you’re only placing orders for a small number of units and have little bargaining power. [LWN] - EA Access lets Xbox One owners play a handful of games for $5 per month… or just $30 per year
Right now there are only 4 games included in the package, but if the beta proves popular, we could see this become a sort of Netflix-for-games service. [EA] - BlackBerry Messenger apps for Android, iOS to get makeovers so they look more like native apps
Sure, it’s nice to be able to use BBM on a non-BlackBerry device. But wouldn’t it be even easier if the apps didn’t have a BB10-style user interface? [N4BB] - Google begins shipping Android TV developer kits to… developers
The first smart TVs and set-top-boxes running Android TV software are due out this fall. But in order to ensure that there are actually third party apps that can run on the devices, Google is trying to get developers working on the platform… by sending them boxes that are already running pre-release builds of Android TV. [Android Police] - Swatch is reportedly working on a watch with fitness tracking features
Because what good is a watch that only tells you what time it is? [Reuters] - Ouya Everywhere brings the Ouya game store to the Wikipad gaming tablet
Ouya continues to move beyond its roots as a provider of hardware and software by partnering with other companies to load its game store and user experience on gaming tablets and TV boxes. [CNET] - Apple updates Retina MacBook Pro laptops with more RAM, faster CPUs
The good news is that you get more for the same amount of money… or less. The less good news is that the cheapest model still costs $1299. [Gizmodo] - NVIDIA effectively quadruples resolution of cheap LCDs by stacking 2 together (and applying some software magic)
Theoretically this could be cheaper than producing a single quad-HD display… although it doesn’t look *quite* as good. [ExtremeTech]
I’m surprised that there are basically no tablets running one of the popular Linux distributions. Canonical seemed like it wanted to do it, but I haven’t seen anything from them lately. I’ve seen Linux based OSes move toward being tablet friendly, but no real push to make it really happen. Perhaps the existence of Android has satisfied people’s hunger for Linux since Android is open source.
Any new mobile OS would have to offer something compelling over and above Android and its open source variants, otherwise, what’s the point? Linux distros on the client are still very much a niche market.
The headline “Google begins shipping Android TV developer kits to… developers” makes that sound like a bad thing. No early dev access means fewer apps on launch.