I’d like to say thanks to the people at Genesi. I was a lucky recipient of one of the many EFIKA MX Smartbooks they gave away at the Linaro November LDS. It’s a nice little ARM-based smartbook with a 10″ screen, decent processing power, decent storage, and a quite good keyboard. My day-to-day machine is a hefty IBM R500 Thinkpad and compared to that the EFIKA is a breath of fresh air.
The CPU is a 800 MHz Freescale i.MX515. The Cortex-A8 core inside has roughly the same performance per MHz as an Atom and about twice what you’d see in a ARM9 and, as it has decent memory bandwidth unlike earlier ARMs, it can much better drive and fill the 1024×600 screen. The internal NAND storage is quite quick (much faster than any SD card I’ve seen). The software stack needs a bit of work as they’re taking the pure approach so things like graphics acceleration, video decoding, and faultless suspend need improving.
Something I find very interesting about this machine and similar ones like the Toshiba AC100 or anything Ingenic based is you stand a chance of controlling every part of your device from bootloader to UI meaning that you really own it, not just use it by someone else’s permission.
Check out their technical blog at http://blog.efikamx.info/.