Tablet PCs based on Intel’s Oak Trail Processor are likely to be displayed next week in the Computex Trade Show in Taipei.
The name of the processor, Oak Trail, is actually a code name for the Intel Atom Z670 processor designed for tablets. The ARM based processors have grabbed large market share among mobile devices.
The processor has a video decoder and graphics core, apart from the CPU. The Oak Trail processors are likely to offer longer battery life compared to earlier Atom chips.
Fujitsu was one of the earliest companies which adopted this processor and the company is now taking pre-orders for its Oak Trail tablets. The other important vendors that are coming up with Oak Trail tablets are Acer and Asus, but they do not intend to show their tablets at this event.
Acer’s Oak Trail tablet is likely to run on Android 3.0 and could hit the market by July. Apart from tablets running on Android 3.0 Honeycomb, Acer is also exploring alternatives like MeeGo. Another Oak Trail tablet, from Micro-Star International (better known as MSI,) is expected to arrive by the end of 2011.
Intel has been extremely supportive of the vendors launching tablets based on Oak Trail and is also generous with technical support and subsidies as well. Since the Oak Trail tablets will support Windows 7, the tablets built on this platform may be more readily adopted in the security conscious environments of the enterprise segment.
Most of the tablets on display at Computex in Taipei, however, are likely to come from lesser-known Chinese companies, and many of them will look like the iPad but the sophistication within will be missing. However, people will still be able to watch movies and browse the web — which suffices for most entry level users.