Yesterday Konstantinos Margaritis from Genesi USA was giving out about 40 Efika MX Smartbooks and few Efika MX Smarttops. I had that luck to became owner of one of those Smartbooks.
That’s nice device. Powered by 800MHz Freescale i.MX515 cpu with 512MB ram has enough juice to be used as web/email netbook. After charging I got nice message from kernel’s power supply subsystem: 427 minutes of battery life — nice value for just 3-cell battery (6-cell is an option according to box informations and website). What else inside:
- 10.1” TFT-LCD, 16:9 with LED backlight, 1024 x 600 resolution
- 3D Graphics Processing Unit
- Multi-format HD video decoder and D1 video encoder
- 16GB Nand Flash
- External MMC / SD card slot (up to SD v2.0 and MMC v4.2)
- Internal MicroSD slot
- 802.11 b/g/n WiFi (with on/off switch) - Ralink chipset
- Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
- 2 x USB 2.0 ports
- Phone jack for headset (audio in / out)
- Built-in 1.3MP video camera
- Built-in microphone
- Built-in stereo speaker
That “16GB Nand Flash” in reality is 15GB Flash-on-module connected to PATA controller. According to “hdparm” tests it makes 22-24MB/s which is quite for this type of devices. My class 10 SD card managed to get 14MB/s (compare it with 5.3MB/s in BeagleBoard) so storage options are nice. Ah… there is also MicroSD slot behind the battery but I did not tested how fast it is.
Note one thing: by default Smartbook boots from internal PATA drive but if there is SD card in slot then it is used for booting. This allows to test development kernels without need of getting to U-Boot. I got hit once by that because card which I used to transfer some data had OMAP3 kernels on it… As you can imagine it did not booted properly…
After I think hour or two I got it upgraded from Ubuntu 10.10 “maverick” to “natty” and got hit by some modifications done by Genesi. After copying “/boot/” from other Efika MX I got it working again. Next days will bring me working KDE 4.5.2 desktop (will have to rebuild some packages for it).
My plans for it? Mobile ARM test platform + laptop replacement for events where I do not need more then email + web + IM.