The Samsung ARM11 chip maybe used in iPhone and the Texas ARM Cortex and many others usually have built in TV and LCD controllers with on chip MPEG and AES engines too.

Some 266MHz ARMs SoC can do SD MPEG4 with no CPU overhead at all.

This could be rubbish or quite good depending on which SoC it uses.

Also if Linux can be loaded (almost certainly via JTAG, but that's not trivial).

My friend has Debian running on an ARM that came with Windows CE.

The new 5" Archos Internet tablet, with 3G /HSDPA, WiFi and same resolution on ARM Cortex has up to 250GByte disk. 7" version too.

It depends a lot on price and what you expect.

I can't see this being used for the same things the Eee and similar laptots. But it is indeed a neat compromise between a small-screen PDA and a laptot -- if it is under £200 pounds. Otherwise, it is just another executive toy.

Forget that chick on the beach with the eee - I think that display of the mighty, er, edifice and whatever-it-is shooting off the end bears closer examination.

Finally someone with balls enough to make one of these things that won't run Windows. Being able to run WIndows is the only real justification for putting an x86 in a device like this so being prepared to dump WIndows allows a different set of solutions.

These ARM-based machines can be made a lot cheaper than x86-based. Not just the chipsets, but things like simpler power supplies, smaller batteries etc.

No it wont run x86 Windows, but worse than that it runs Windows Mobile. That offers a hopeless slow and limited web browsing experience, even if you install the far superior Opera, Firefox on the EEE is going to knock it in to a cocked hat. Microsoft's motley collection of mobile Office format viewers is also vastly inferior to a copy of Open Office shipped as standard on the EEE.

I'm all for the use of ARM over x86 in low power devices, but a 400MHz processor as used in 4 year old PDAs isn't the way to show case it, there are ARM cores with a lot more performance, and unshackled from the horribly inefficient Windows Mobile OS might have a chance against cheap Linux x86 netbooks at the lower end of the market. This device just smacks of being cheap and nasty.

Really, what is the point of windows ce?

It's not compatible with x86 windows apps, and what few apps it does have tend to be rather lousy and limited.

Compare that to linux running on an arm processor, to which the vast majority of existing linux applications have been ported and can usually just be recompiled. The nokia n810 is arm based and works nicely, it has a proper build of firefox installed on it instead of a crippled stripped down browser.

It's supposed to be a 'tablet' for taking notes etc. The slate form factor (lack of physical keyboard) may be useful if you're writing instead of typing but otherwise it better come with good software to make use of the lower hardware.

If it's priced around 100 - 150 quid then it'll might be useful for note taking (with Evernote), web browsing (Opera 9.5), audio/video (Core Player) and simple games. If they include Office Mobile (which can be made part of the CE then they'll have a very useful device...and of course the Linux users would have a fantastic new hardware platform...