Engadget's hands-on with Intel's Ruby handheld

[Colin Dunstan]

Once again Peter Rojas is our lucky guy of the day as he got his expert hands on Intel's Ruby handheld. Features include eight hours of battery life, built-in wireless, a QWERTY keyboard, a low-voltage Pentium processor, the ability to automatically change screen orientation when you rotate the device, and an active digitizer display so you can run Windows XP Tablet PC Edition on it.

Sceenshots look gorgeous and I'd be almost willing to trade in my notebook for this gem.

More over at Engadget.

[rlauzon]

Too bad it doesn't run Linux (but someone will probably port Linux to it soon).

The problem with this device is that it doesn't run WinCE. Normally, I wouldn't touch a WinCE device with a 10 foot pole, but running XP on this is just asking for trouble.

Microsoft products are designed to be insecure. Just imagine using this in some Cafe, reading your mail, when - viola - your handheld and is 0wned by the-Microsoft-bug-of-the-week exploited by some virus/trojan/worm.

At least WinCE is far less susceptible to such things.

And don't get me started on Microsoft support of DRM...

[rmeister0]

Originally Posted by rlauzon

Microsoft products are designed to be insecure.

Like most broad blanket statements, this is not true. Nobody deliberately designs an insecure products.

This device would have no security issues other than what every other XP laptop deployment would have. Anyone running XP SP 2 with a decent software and anti-virus installation will have very little to worry about.

The article so far presents no specification for this device. Chances are Linux support will be fairly easy to do with the possible exception of wireless networking drivers, or drivers for a digitizer/touch screen.

I'd like to see what OS X running on this form factor would look like.