The Intel Ruby

Hey there,

This has been floating around for a while, but i'm just so impressed,

Bless you

[Listening to: Eyes To The Field - Cre8ive - Breathe Again (5:16)]

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Hands-on
with Intel's Ruby handheld PC

We kicked it at Intel's Destination Innovation event yesterday afternoon, and
while most of what we saw there wasn't Engadget material — we couldn't care less
about yet another way to sort through our digital photos — getting our hands on
the Ruby, a
concept design for a PDA-sized PC that can run Windows XP (or Vista…), made it
all worth while. (The funny thing is that we didn't know this was an Intel
prototype when we
first stumbled upon the Ruby back in April.)

"

The one we played with was a little scuffed up (not by us, we swear), but
James Song from Intel’s Systems Technology Lab schooled us on some of the Ruby’s
features, like 8 hours of battery life, built-in wireless, a QWERTY keyboard, a
low-voltage Pentium processor, the ability to automatically change screen
orientation when you rotate the device (not sure how well that’d work in
practice, but it’s an interesting prospect), and an active digitizer display so
you can run Windows XP Tablet PC Edition on it (or whatever the Vista equivalent
will be). They’re also thinking about developing a stripped down Linux-based OS
to run on Ruby, but it wasn’t clear how far along they might be on
that.




Anyway, you probably already have a
firm sense of whether or not you’d ever want to get down with a device this
size, but Song says that Intel (which obviously has no plans to build the device
themselves) is already seeing interest in the reference design from several
manufacturers and that we should hopefully see the first devices based on the
Ruby platform in a couple of years or so.