Today Dell is launching a new technology for laptops called Latitude ON. This technology puts a small-board computer into a laptop case, sharing the keyboard and screen while it is running and the host machine’s OS is hibernating. Latitude ON has access to the laptop’s network as well as its own cellular-based network, and provides Exchange-capable email as well as web surfing with Firefox. This configuration can provide email and browsing for up to 17 hours.

A few bloggers have erroneously surmised that the OS could be SUSE Enterprise Edition, or some other off-the-shelf distro. Around here we know better—it was actually developed in-house by MontaVista. We call it Montabello. I provided a Montabello demo at the CELF Embedded Linux Conference this past spring. It was running very well on a TI Beagle Board, which gives some indication of its flexibility.

What is most innovative about Montabello is not actually the technology—after all, single-board computers have been running variants of Linux for a long time, and certainly there are other MID packages available. The exciting aspect of Montabello is the hybrid arrangement, putting two separate computers in the same case. In the course of a normal business day, I know I spend far more time on email and browsing than I do on pretty much any other task, and it is getting to be more that way as more of my activities are handled in the cloud, sometimes our private cloud here at work and sometimes out in the world. It makes no more sense to run a full laptop for that activity than it does to take a dump truck to the grocery store. Latitude ON is more like a Tesla: not a lot of hauling capacity, but it gets you where you need to go quickly and extremely efficiently. Like a cell phone it is literally always on, so boot time is immaterial.

Check out the video demonstration that puts Montabello through its paces. It’s interesting, innovative stuff, and I predict there will be many more products using this arrangement in the future.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 11:26 am and is filed under General.