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With the recent introduction of Ubuntu Touch a very interesting change of strategy is emerging for Canonical. As Phoronix and others have discovered, Ubuntu Phone and Touch are using SurfaceFlinger as their compositor. SurfaceFlinger uses OpenGL ES to render applications screens/windows in a hardware accelerated way using the OpenGL driver of the GPU directly.

Based on the events of recent weeks, it very much looks like Microsoft is heading to make Windows a closed ecosystem (a la Apple). They want to make both the hardware and the OS and third-party applications can only be sold with their approval and only through their App Store (with a 30% commission to Microsoft).

I believe that the current market trends make Canonical’s Ubuntu for Android project the most important development in the recent history of Linux.

Strong sales of the iPhone 4S are putting renewed pressure on Android to innovate. Ubuntu for Android could give the platform a key capability iPhone is still missing.

With the recent announcement of Ubuntu for Android we may hope again that full-blown desktop Java applications may become usable on Android devices.

Many have predicted, that tablets will replace netbooks completely. While I cannot agree with this absolute statement, I admit that tablets serve a set of use-cases better than netbooks. The touch-interface and low power-consumption of tablets make content consumption more comfortable (e.g. no heating, no fan-noise, longer battery runtime, less weight to lug around…etc). That said, there are areas where tablets just cannot give enough. For example, any kind of work which requires more serious input while being mobile. The problem of efficient input can be solved with accessories like a bluetooth mouse and keyboard. Usually, when you prepare your tablet for extra-home journeys, you buy a case which also hosts the keyboard.

The Touchpad has been discontinued by HP when the company has changed its business strategy recently (getting rid of the whole PC business arm). A lot of people think that this was an absolutely unnecessary and sorely mistaken step, especially in light of the possible revival of the Touchpad after the PC business has been separated. Not that the Touchpad is a very competitive device in its current form. It has many glaring design mistakes by HP like missing ports (HDMI out, USB host), no expandable storage ...etc but it also has many good features like its high-quality IPS-screen, Beats audio system and over-clockable processor.

The AC100 is an early attempt from Toshiba to create an ARM based netbook (a smartbook) with Nvidia's successful Tegra2 chipset. Although, the AC100 looks like proper hardware design, it became only mildly successful. Some of the reasons may have to do with the primary operating system, Android (see my earlier article about this) but even more can be attributed to the design decisions Toshiba made.

MeeGo is a flavor of Linux, with a similar purpose as Android in the mobile computing space (being a versatile, open-source OS for phones, tablets and other mobile devices). I root for MeeGo because it has a lot of advantages over Android and iOS..

According to this article, Microsoft is pestering Intel to produce low-power Atom-based, x86 processors for server machines. I am wondering why they would force this direction. Do they know server requirements better than Intel? Why do they think that low-power x86 server chips are so important?

Reading about the likely launch of Tegra3 at Mobile World Congress 2011 and seeing this video, one cannot help wondering how big a mistake Intel made when denied Atom hardware interfaces from Nvidia some time ago. Doing that, it practically forced Nvidia to abandon mobile-x86 solutions and pour all of its resources into Tegra/ARM development.

It is not an overstatement that the Motorola Atrix smartphone was one of the bright stars of CES 2011. An often-mentioned, breakthrough feature of the Atrix is its modularity, namely that it can be placed into a netbook dock which gives it work-time (and battery recharge) and a desktop-like work environment (Linux based).

I believe it is high-time that Apache and Google created a new, Java-like programming language, platform and VM which can easily accomodate the ports of the Java base libraries, all of the Apache developed Java libraries/applications and the typical, popular open-source libraries like Hibernate.

Although the Oracle – Google Java lawsuit looks ugly, there is a possibility that something good comes out of it: full Java SE appications running on Android.

Palm’s WebOS (a Linux variant) based phones have been out for a while but I haven’t had the need to consider them until recently (in the form of my Treo 650 broken down).

The Smart Book is an ultra-modular, ultra-mobile computing device, which integrates an IP phone, a tablet and a netbook into one, Linux based machine. Although, there is not enough information (yet) about the exact nature/working of the hardware/software components, the modularity of the device is stunning.

The A100 smartbook, recently announced by Toshiba, has some intriguing features, worth to blog about. First of all, it is built around Nvidia’s Tegra2 system-on-chip (SOC). The Tegra2 is a powerful, ARM SOC with two generic application processing cores and integrated media cores (AV decoding/encoding…etc). The A100 is the most promising netbook form-factor machine with Tegra2 to date.

Smartbooks are an upcoming mobile computing device category built around ARM’s Cortex A8 and A9 line of processors. These devices are awaited with great anticipation because they promise a mixture between smartphone features (ultra-portable, 3G connected, always-on) and the functionality of netbooks/laptops (>9? screen, seamless web browsing, laptop-like computing performance…etc) at a price point lower than that of current netbooks (sub-$300). Some smartbooks will arrive in the tablet form factor, some of them will come in the more traditional laptop form factor. All of them are expected to be comparable to netbooks in processing power.

Regardless of how severe limitations Apple imposes on the iPad, we can expect it to be reasonably successful. I don’t think it will duplicate the success of the iPhone but due to Apple’s strong marketing and its own technical merits, it will sell in significant numbers. How will this affect Linux and the upcoming tablets based on it? When I say Linux, I mean Google’s Android and Chrome operating systems as well because they are all based on Linux.