Microsoft has been kicking off the CES for a number of years by doing a keynote the evening of the event first day. This year, SteveB talked about Xbox, Kinect, Windows 7 new laptops, Surface 2 and Windows vNext running on the ARM architecture. Some of the design of the new laptops showed are quite amazing. This one has a dual screen with no physical keyboard. The image is split between both screens. A software keyboard appears when you place your 10 fingers on the lower screen. This one from Samsung has a sliding keyboard somewhat like numerous cell phones have. What I found the most amazing is that Intel was able to miniaturized a full Intel architecture (CPU, motherboard, memory) in a tiny form factor. Imagine having the power of a full PC running .NET apps in a Zune/iPod form factor! They also showed V2 of the Surface device. This one is called the Samsung SUR40 for Surface PC. It’s much sleeker and it will likely loose the BAT (Big Ass Table) moniker More info here SteveB announced that Windows vNext will run on ARM chips. I’m intrigued by this announcement (you can read about it here) and I have many questions: -In the past ARM devices were slow, what now makes the ARM architecture able to run Windows? -ARM is 32-bit only, I think. -Does this mean that Intel wasn't able to provide such a lightweight architecture or simply that they weren't interested? -From what I understand, apps would need to be recompiled for ARM. Will we need to do that from an ARM PC or could it be done natively on Intel or on an Intel PC running in an ARM VM? VS 2012? Ahhhh, smells like a cool PDC is coming up Clearly it looks like PC have enough power for most of us right now and that the race is now about miniaturization, power consumption and battery life. You can watch the Microsoft CES 2011 keynote here var addthis_pub="guybarrette";
