Nvidia's wee netbook will be called the Firefly

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

Biggs is the editor of TechCrunch Gadgets. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at john@techcrunch.com. → Learn More

nvidia-tegra-powered-netbook
Nvidia is shopping around a design prototype running their Tegra ARM processor, a chip powerful enough to run Wind CE and power a wee keyboard and screen.

Tegra was supposed to change the way we thought about smartphones a few months ago but the chipset never took off. Sadly, this doesn’t seem like it will make any headway either.

Semiaccurate writes:

The idea is simple, take a Tegra ARM part and saddle it with Wince. You get all the bloat of Windows with none of the compatibility. Throw in Flash Lite, Acrobat Reader, and a handful of other apps, and you have a passable crotchtop. That is what Nvidia is peddling around to ODMs with Firefly.

There are two problems though, first is that it is not a standard chip. The launch parts may have a smattering of accelerated wares, but like all the other purpose built software, as soon as the spotlight is off, you will probably never see another update. Then your widget becomes a doorstop.

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