Splashtop

We caught the tail end of Dell’s streaming press event. Despite the rumors, an unveiling of the Dell Inspriron Mini did not happen. What did happen is the release of 10 new Dell Latitude business notebooks. Check out our first impressions of the E6400 here.

At the end of the presentation, a Dell rep showed a short marketing video revealing Dell’s Latitude  On, a Splashtop-like, instant-on operating system. According to Dell, Latitude On will be available on the  Latitude E4200 and E4300 and will allow near-instant access to e-mail, calendar, attachments, contacts, and the Web without having to boot the system’s Vista operating system.

Dell Latitude On reportedly uses a dedicated low-voltage sub-processor and OS that can enable multi-day battery life. Really? No images of the user interface were shown.

Seems a lot like ASUS’ ExpressGate and Voodoo’s IOS pre-boot environments that are powered by Splashtop. We will be reporting more details as we get them.

Call it the week of Splashtop (see our Splashtop FAQ). Earlier this week we got some alone time with the Voodoo Envy’s IOS environment powered by Splashtop. Today, an ASUS representative stopped by our offices with the Eee Box and we got some more alone time with a pre-Windows Splashtop based enviornment - ASUS’ ExpressGate.

Though the Voodoo and ASUS Splashtop interfaces have been customized, they work in the same way.

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The Voodoo Envy 133 has a lot of striking features. Its got a more than elegant design, its power brick doubles as a wireless connection point and its got facial recognition software. Oh and its 3.4-pounds and thinner than Calista Flockhart. But what makes our mouths water is that it isthe first laptop to land in our hands with Splashtop’s instant-on mode (see our Splashtop FAQ).

Voodoo calls its Splashtop instant-on environment the Voodoo IOS and instead of having to wait until Vista boots up - in what can be more than a minute on some laptops - the Envy 133 launches users into an environment where they can surf the Web within 15 seconds (verified by our hands-on experience).

We have a lengthy video below of our experience booting up into IOS on a preproduction Envy 133 and a tour of all its Splashtop applications. When you first boot up the system, it will launch a main page with the Voodoo logo on a black background in 5 seconds.

This start page has seven buttons on its bottom dock, including a shutdown, launch Windows, browser, music player, photo viewer, Pidgin chat and Skype shortcuts. You have to click on one of those buttons to enter the real IOS environment. In our testing, when we clicked on the browser button, it took an additional 10 seconds to launch the complete IOS mode and the FireFox browser.

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We are pretty excited to get our hands on the first laptops that have an instant-on mode powered by Splashtop. With the touch of a button, the notebook will boot a Linux-based OS within seconds from which one will be able to quickly get on the Web to check e-mail, visit favorite Web sites, and chat with friends. For more information check out our Splashtop FAQ.

We expect the Voodoo Envy 133 with its Voodoo IOS, an environment powered by Splashtop, to make it into our offices soon. But we have no word as to when we will actually get a peek at ASUS’ ExpressGate notebooks, including the M70T, M5Vr, M50V, F8Vr, and F8Va. ASUS has promised systems that have the instant-on feature in Q3 of 2008.

To tide those eager ExpressGate fans over, I was able to grab this video of the instant-on operating system last month while in Taiwan at ASUS’ TekTrend conference.

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