Pegatron: a Netbook Powered by the same Chip as the Palm Pre

Posted on 28 July 2009 by Juventino Quinones
Tags: android, google, netbook, Palm, Palm Pre, webOS

There has been talks about Android OS or Google Chrome OS may power netbooks. And back in the first week of May, there was a rumor here in our forums about Palm trying to revive the Foleo as a Netbook. This rumor was based on a post at Barrons.com that did not make many waves at that time. Fast forward to the end of July.

pegatron&Pre

Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with Global Equities Research, asserts in a note to clients on May 1st, that Palm intends to produce a $399 netbook that will run the Palm Web OS that powers the Prē smartphone. Chowdhry said the device would use Qualcomm’s Gobi 3G wireless chip, ARM chipsets and have 8 10 hours of battery life. And back in April jkOnTheRun had a post about why Palm Should Revive the Foleo as a Netbook.

Now, like I said; fast forward to this month and we have a post at Crave UK that has a lot of people talking Netbooks and WebOS:

Atom-powered Netbooks may be the flavor of the month, but all that will change if ARM gets its way. The chip company visited the Crave UK offices to show off an exciting concept Netbook that’s powered by the same architecture used in the Palm Pre. Yes! We said “exciting” and “Netbook” in the same sentence!

The unnamed demo unit built by Pegatron, which is owned by Asus, uses a Freescale iMX515 CPU – a product that in turn uses the same ARM Coretex – A8 chip used in the Pre. In the Pegatron the chip is clocked at 1GHz, and in mobile phones, the chip is clocked somewhere in the region of 600MHz. While the clock speed is lower than that in the majority of Intel Atom-powered netbooks, the 65nm Coretex-A8 is capable of running 720p high-definition movies and 3D gaming.

Energy efficiency is one of the benefits of the system, as the two-cell battery is apparently good for up to 8 hours, with a minimum of 4.5 hours. Otherwise, the netbook sports two USB ports, a VGA output and a memory card reader.

It’s all fairly redundant, however, since the Pegatron is merely a concept device. If Pegatron or indeed Asus decides to build a final model, it’ll almost certainly endure some major tweakage.