Amiga Tablet?

[Gravytub]

Depending on how old you are, you have probably heard of Amiga, the computer from the early 90's. Well recently they are trying to make a comeback, and on their website they are advertising amiga tablets.
My question is does anyone think they could be half decent?

[Ads]

[elronnightshade]

i really like the look of them, and the new slimline k/b included machines, i have a couple of amigas, and the specs are good too

[OffWorld]

It's really a shame that Commodore imploded in the early 90's. I loved their stuff, and the AmigaOS was waaay ahead of it's time. But it looks like these Amiga tablets are running Android, which is a shame because I'd think AmigaOS would work great on a tablet (given that it is some heavily vector based). I'm guessing that they are using Android because the rights to AmigaOS actually belong to another company called Hyperion Entertainment.

It's an adventure in cyberarcheology just following what happened to all the bits of Commodore after the breakup, but suffice it to say you can find one company has AmigaOS, another has Amiga.Inc, and the new Commodore USA has apparently licensed the name Amiga for a new line of computers.

AmigaOS also spawned the closed-source MorphOS (arguably as pretty as MacOS X is), the open-source AROS (and the Icaros distro of it), and inspired aspects of DragonFly BSD, AtheOS/Syllable, BeOS (and it's open-source offshoot Haiku). Frankly it would be great to see any of them - or AmigaOS itself (still actively developed btw) - ported to a tablet.

[haranguer]

Don't be fooled. That tablet is not running AmigaOS. It'll be an Android.

Which website did you see that on, Gravytub? Was it Amiga.com? (That's Amiga, Inc's website), or was it iContain's site? Or perhaps Commodore USA?

None of these organisations have anything to do with AmigaOS.

Hyperion Entertainment (Hyperion Entertainment) own the rights to AmigaOS 4.x (the current version). Unfortunately, they don't appear to have plans at the moment to port the OS to either a tablet or phone. Indeed, there isn't any halfway useable hardware for the desktop yet - the existing motherboard is so last millenium.

There were some long, ongoing legal issues between Hyperion & Amiga, and Amiga lost, so they are attempting to dilute the market by selling licences to anyone who wants to sell any product and call it an Amiga. THe tablet you've found is one of them.

A-EON Technology (http://http://www.a-eon.com) are going to release a motherboard soon (hopefully - there have been a lot of people over the decades that were going to release new Amiga hardware) which is almost modern - or at least it would have been if they'd released it when they announced it. I doubt anyone but fanatics (like me) will be remotely interested in it, despite the built-in XMOS processors (32-Bit Event-Driven Processors, Real-Time Multithreaded Architecture | XMOS).

I don't expect AmigaOS will ever be available on a tablet or phone.

AROS (an open source equivalent that runs on computers you can actually buy), however, may very well be. Eventually.

To be honest, much as I love the Amiga, I'd reccommend sticking to Android.

Hope that'ss been of help.

[OffWorld]

The AROS folks are working on a port to ARM architecture.

However, some device manufacturers are demo-ing new x86-architecture tablets at electronic shows, which (with proper drivers of course) could run the current x86 port of AROS/IcAROS.

So I think you will see an "Amiga family OS" capable of running on such devices, but aside from nostalgic hobbyists probably nobody will bother.