Thursday, 17 November 2011 22:41

FXI shows us some Cotton Candy

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cc-01Ok, now this is something that looks like it is going to be very cool. Today we got word about something called Cotton Candy. We know you are probably wondering what Cotton Candy is (outside of the real cotton candy). Well, it is a new twist on an old technology. When computer networks first started the screen that was in front of you did not do much processing. In fact, most of the time it did not do any processing. All of that was taken care of by a single powerful mainframe computer and what you saw was the displayed results. Now, as we move more and more into Cloud Based computing we are returning to that style of work. Someone else does all the heavy lifting and you get the results.

Now, as we move more and more into Cloud Based computing we are returning to that style of work. Someone else does all the heavyCotton Candy brings this concept to a new level. It allows you to use ANY display device (TV, Laptop or Monitor) and turn it into a computing device. With a simple screen you can setup your smart phone as an input device (for use as a joystick, keyboard or mouse), but you can also use any Bluetooth input device. You could actually use this to play Angry Birds, or any number of games without the need to install anything. The Cotton Candy device (don’t worry they are going to give it a real name) will handle all of that. You just need to plug this into either an HDMI or USB Slot to get it going. With the HDMI slot you will need some USB power, but not much more than that.
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If you choose to run this on a PC or laptop it actually runs a thin client that is able to transfer the inputs from the keyboard and mouse into the new environment.  It is pretty cool really.
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The product is not slated to hit the real market until 2012 and will command a price of $200, but we can see the potential of this already. We are looking forward to hearing more about this and hope to get some eyes (and hands) on this at CES.

For now we will leave you with some additional information straight from FXI;

“If you look at the evolution of personal computing, or computing in general, you have seen a continuation in the shrinkage of form factors. We see ourselves as the end of that evolutionary path. We believe it is fair to say that Cotton Candy packs the most computing power per cubic inch of any consumer wrapped packages out there, and we have a roadmap that will take us into the micro-SD form factor into the future.
What drives this roadmap for us and why we think it will be successful both in the consumer space as well as industrial space, is that we are at the beginning of a world of Cloud computing. In order for a Cloud computer service to be useful, one obviously needs to have a client that can run at least the code close to the user interface, i.e. the pixels. A fully HTML5 compliant browser will rely on serious local computer power, especially graphics computing, while the other parts of your applications will execute in the Cloud. This means that the future of computing will depend less on GHz and MBs in your hand, but more on connectivity, flexibility of use and integration with screens. We propose a device and form factor that will take us to the next step of computing.”

Now for some technical specifications;
Dual Cortex A9, 1.2 GHz with NEON extensions
Mali-400MP Quad-Core, 266MHz OpenGL ES v2.0
1080p video multi-format decode (MPEG-4, H.264, H.263 ) 802.11 b/g/n Wifi
Bluetooth v2.1
USB 2.0
HDMI 1.4

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Read 3271 times Last modified on Thursday, 17 November 2011 22:53

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