14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that Intel's MeeGo initiative is not the only means by which the company hopes to score big on the tablet market, as the outfit is said to also be working on things that will have an effect sooner instead of later.
As end-users know, Intel has been doing its best on the tablet market ever since companies decided to not let Apple's iPad reign alone.
That said, the Atom platform, which was and is still mostly used in netbooks, was the only one Intel could offer for this segment.
Now that more convenient ARM technologies have arisen, however, and with the Android OS running rampant, the Santa Clara, California-based company, naturally, has to adapt.
It is already known that the Oak Trail Atom CPUs will be more power efficient and generally better suited for tablets than existing solutions.
Also, Intel has been collaborating with Nokia on the making of the MeeGo OS, which should start showing up on slates as soon as June 2011.
That is still a long-term solution, however, and Intel has to make sure its presence persists in this field on the short term as well.
To this end, according to yet another report, the outfit is working on a version of Google's Android 2.3 OS, also known as Gingerbread, optimized for the Atom platform.
No doubt Intel will make many optimizations of its own to the OS, since it is (or will be). after all, open source.
The second quarter of 2011 is the current time frame for the release of this modified gingerbread, though delays may or may not happen if Google takes more than expected in delivering the OS's open source version.
Later, Honeycomb open source tablet software should also come out of Intel's labs, obviously optimized for Atom. What remains to be seen is how this affects the CPU maker's tablet hardware share.