Exo what?

Continuing with the tablet theme I think I may have stumbled upon the perfect tablet device!!! (at least for me)

Yay!!!!!

It’s called the ExoPC and surprisingly it’s made by a Canadian company.

If you haven’t heard of it before I can’t really blame you.  I only recently stumbled across it.  It seems that the ExoPC suffers from a lack of publicity and seeing as it’s Canadian I’ll do my bit to spread the word as much as I can.  (Okay technically it’s French-Canadian as in Quebec – Rimouski to be exact - but it’s certainly not France French as some tech-journalists claim.)

The ExoPC is basically a netbook without a keyboard.  What that means is that it runs a full x64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium and therefore can run anything you would normally expect Windows 7 to run including Flash, Java, ebook software like Amazon’s Kindle and the super-cool-kinda-dirty-sounding Windows 7 Touch Pack. 

As far as the hardware goes, unlike most netbooks, the makers of the ExoPC cleverly fitted it with a solid-state hard drive (SSD) which means faster boot times (about 40 sec) and less power consumption although storage space does take a hit with only 32 and 64 GB options being currently available rather than a more conventional netbook hdd size in the hundreds of gigs.  That said I’m curious to see if the hard drive is user replaceable because if it is, one could conceivably replace it with a bigger one sometime in the future when SDD prices come down.

The ExoPC is based on some pretty typical netbook guts including a 1.66GHz Atom-Pineview processor and 2GBs of RAM but what’s really interesting is the stuff that’s different from both conventional netbooks and it’s main rival, the iPad.  The ExoPC sports a Broadcom Crystal HD video processor which enables flawless High-Def video playback and saves battery power at the same time.  Unlike the iPad, the ExoPC actually has a widescreen display so HD movies won’t have the annoying black bars we’ve all just finally gotten rid of on our TVs (HDTV anyone?).  The prototype battery currently lasts a respectable 5 hours but the shipping version is planned to have a higher-capacity battery and they’re shooting for a 10 hour battery life although they’re only promising 5 still at this point.  If it got 8 hours like the iPad which I think is realistic I’d be delighted!

As expected it has a capacitive multi-touch screen, wireless n, bluetooth, USB 2 and mini-HDMI ports, an SDHC card slot, and yes, a front-facing 1.3 Megapixel webcam and mic for your Skype chat needs. (Take that iPad!)  What that really means is that unlike the Apple device you don’t need to buy any stupid adapters to use it with your camera and you can even print from it!  It’s also roughly the same physical dimensions as the iPad according to the website - with the same thickness and width although it’s slightly longer of course because of the widescreen.

What I’m really curious about is the visual layer they’ve placed over the Windows 7 user-interface which you can see in the picture above.  Each little circle is an icon that seems to be easy to touch with meaty fingers although I’d like to see some more reviews before I’m totally sold on that.  The column on the right of the screen seems to act like a taskbar where you can close apps and the whole UI seems to be very Zune-esque which is good.  I think it looks great and it certainly looks like a good answer to Windows’ current touch shortcomings (ie small buttons etc.).  It also looks better than the Apple icon grid a la iPhone and the company says you can even turn off the layer if you want/need to and go straight to the usual Windows interface.

For those interested, the price is planned to be the exact same as the iPad so about $600 depending on whether you’re talking Canadian or US currency.  It will be available (hopefully as planned) on September 7th in Canada, the US and France and I’ve signed up for the early registration email list so I’ll post something as soon as they tell me when I can order one.

Oh, and if you’re worried about missing out on the digital version of magazines like I am (pretty much the biggest part of why I want a device like this) don’t be.  According to the people making the iPad version of Popular Science and the like, their Mag+ format (ie digital) magazines should work in Windows too because they are written in something called Adobe Air which is platform agnostic meaning it will run on Windows, Mac, or iPad.  I already have a program for graphic novels called graphic.ly which uses Air and works on my laptop perfectly and is coming to iPad.

So there you go, an epic post and the ultimate reason to not buy an iPad, at least not yet.  I had decided earlier this week that I’d probably end up buying an iPad when version 2 comes out but now that I’ve discovered the ExoPC it’s looking more and more like I won’t.  And you know what the best part is? I can continue my Apple-free existence!!