Strange bedfellows
Dell launched its Latitude Z series of luxury business laptops this week and, while it got most attention for pioneering wireless charging, a possibly more significant precedent was established with Latitude ON.
This is a technology that uses an independent sub-system, running on a low power processor, to enable very short boot times and near-instant access to email and web browsing.
Given the growing battle in the low power chip space between Intel and the ARM ecosystem, we were intrigued to know more about this technology and so spoke to Lionel Bohar, Dell's head of commercial notebooks in EMEA.
"Latitude ON is a system within a system," said Bohar. "It's a daughter card with an ARM based CPU - a TI OMAP 3430 chip - a wireless card and 512MB memory. It runs an operating system based on MobileLinux 5.1, developed in conjunction with Montavista. The apps are Dell owned code and source code has been posted for Linux community."
Bohar also reminded us that this isn't the first outing for Latitude ON, having made its debut in the Latitude E4000 series ultraportables, launched last year. "When you turn on Latitude ON, the boot time is around two seconds and you can access emails, browse the web, etc," he said. "We chose Firefox due to its Linux compatibility and the size of the programme."
We asked Bohar what kind of demand he anticipates for this technology. "The additional price for Latitude ON is £119 and we believe there is strong demand from mobile workers," he said.
And before we left the subject, we asked the big question: is Dell thinking of offering ARM-only products in future? "It's not in our short-term plans - we will probably have a mix," he said. "You can use it for single tasks, but it's not really powerful enough to multitask."
Here's a Dell video on the subject.