New Life for Vivaldi Tablet? Improv Takes the Stage

No time today, people, but here’s a heads-up on what rocked me today.

Some eons ago, I wrote about what I still consider the biggest problem with tablets: That they are designed to help you consume media, and you can’t be very productive with them. Yeah, Windows 8 and the Surface tablet is supposed to aid productivity, but that didn’t turn out so well.

I thought then that a tablet called the Spark was going to solve that problem, by putting a full-blown Linux (KDE Plasma) desktop on a tablet. Though production hassles have delayed this product, now called Vivaldi, for some 18 months, the project appears to have new life.

English: Screenshot showing KDE 4.4’s new netbook interface (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The MakePlayLive site, originally built to sell this tablet, relaunched on Monday to sell Improv, what Swapnil Bhartiya at Muktware called “Raspberry Pi’s big brother,” (which is exactly what I thought to call it after seeing the new site–but he got it into print first). It’s a relatively high-powered, but mini board for experimentation. Since the site still promises the Vivaldi is coming, we can probably assume they will build the tablet around something like this board.

I’ve got to learn more about the hardware side of this stuff. While I’m doing that, catch up on this reading:

• My original piece on Spark/Vivaldi
• MakePlayLive: A lot more going on there than motherboard sales.
• Aaron Seigo’s announcement of the Improv board
• Raspberry Pi’s big brother, Swapnil Bhartiya’s Muktware story
• Liliputing’s story on Improv
• The usual interesting discussion at Slashdot
• Some stuff at Reddit

That should give you some background. I want to do more than offer my best wishes to Aaron and his team, but time will tell. In the meantime, tell me what you think!

Related articles

• Improv (notmart.org)
• Improv: An Open ARM Development Board Running Mer (phoronix.com)