Thursday, May 29, 2008

Asus launches first laptops with Splashtop

Five new laptop models from Asus will incorporate DeviceVM's Splashtop, the company announced Thursday at the Computex show in Taipei. The Asus M70T, M50V, M51T, F8Va, and F8Vr will be the first laptops on the market to include the company's "rapid-start platform."

We've seen the technology, which Asus has licensed from DeviceVM and rebranded as Express Gate, before. It was first introduced last fall on a single Asus motherboard, and recently expanded to the full P5Q series of motherboards.

Splashtop differs from the intant-on media players already found on many laptops, because it's actually an embedded Linux OS with both Firefox and Skype. The advantages are threefold: The quick on/off feature means you don't have to wait to load Windows when you want to hit the Web--a boon for travelers who just want to hop online for a few minutes while waiting to board a flight. It also means you can turn off your laptop while in transit, instead of wasting battery life on hibernate mode. And the Linux base means the Splashtop browser isn't vulnerable to viruses that target the Windows OS.

The laptops announced today are expected to become available at the end of June or early July. More laptops featuring the Splashtop technology are expected in the coming months, though a detailed release schedule is still unknown.

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