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Mobinnova Changes the Name of the Elan To "Beam", Still the Same Ol' Smartbook

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Yes, Mobinnova has changed the name of their Elan smartbook to the "Beam." Besides the name change it appears to be the same old smartbook with its Windows CE And all. The internal Nvidia Tegra chipset will allow you to watch 720p video and will feature graphics-accelerated Flash. They have kept their claims of a long-battery life, so they mentioned that it'll last 24 hours of audio / 5 to 10 hours of HD video - I'll believe it when I see it. Below is Laptop Mag's one-on-one chat with Mobinnova's CTO, Mark Anderson.


What’s the benefit of having Windows CE as the backbone of this device?


What Windows CE brings is a pretty mature embedded OS, so you have a pretty large development community you can tap into. It has good sleep modes, so the power savings is better than what you’d get on a (full) Windows device. This was something that Nvidia and our manufacturing partners really drove.


Will there be an app store?


Initially, no, there won’t be an app store. We’re really defining the experience in terms of what apps are included and which ones are not. It’s really more of an appliance than an open platform. But there will be some apps online that you can buy. There will be some games that you’ll be able to download.


If this device can play back 720p video, where are users going to get the content from?


You’ll be able to stream, download, or sideload. There’s a video and music player built in that supports DRM. It supports Windows Media. We’ll have announements about content partners at CES as well.


What sort of flexibility are you giving the carrier to support and promote their own services on this device?


Those are discussions that we’re having with our partners and it’s something that we definitely encourage in the sense of being able to plug into an existing ecosystem. So we’ll just have to wait and see.


Will the Beam have integrated GPS and can you use it as a navigation device?


We won’t have navigation software on it so I’d say no. You could go to Google Maps and navigate that way, but GPS is really there to add location to something you might be doing like Facebook.


60 bucks a month is a lot to pay for something that doesn’t run full Windows. Will there be other pricing plans for this device?


We should wait until the announcements are made. But I agree in general that there should be more flexibility in pricing plans. And I certainly expect that to happen.



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