14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that the fabled Intel Oak Trail tablets are finally getting out into the open, even though most of them are still prototypes that probably won't debut before the month of July 2011 comes around.
Intel and ARM didn't really have any means of trying to steal each other's market share until the tablet market appeared.
After that, the former started making more power-efficient chips, while the latter focused on performance.
Now, the Intel Oak Trail CPU, the newest in the Atom series, is battling the likes of Tegra 2, Qualcomm Snapdragon etc. over tablet design wins.
Turns out that the Atom Z670, as the current Oak Trail is named, actually did land inside quite the number of slates, many of them now on show at Computex 2011.
No longer confined to the Windows 7 operating systems, all the prototypes on display run a version of the Google Android OS, particularly Honeycomb (3.0).
There is the Intel Carrot, Intel Marco Polo 2, Intel Green Ridge, Quanta QXZ1, Foxconn F150 and another slate from Compal which, unfortunately, has not been given a name.
All of them feature a screen size of 10 inches and may or may not start coming out in July, although the later part of the year is the more likely time frame.
This is because the Intel-Android combination is far from fleshed out, as evident from the fact that none of the prototypes have access to the Android Market.
Granted, apps are already supported by the hardware, but build quality is still not on par with that of ARM-based honeycomb models.
Of course, considering that the Santa Clara, California-based CPU maker wants to speed up Atom development, it remains to be seen if the ones in charge of software move fast enough to resolve all existing issues and then keep up with the platform.