There’s been a rapid increase in the netbook market over the past 12 months that has been hard to miss. Ultra-portable laptops that carry relatively large capabilities in a smaller package – perfect for travelling, remote or mobile business, kids, etc. All the major players have gotten into the space and made it very crowded, very quickly. Then you have new players like Nokia with their 3G Booklet, who are coming from a mobility-focus and bringing some innovation while staying fairly much in the mainstream (HDMI, 3G … but running Windows 7).
Then you have start-ups like the Boston-based “litl“. litl have gone about to redfine the “netbook” into an “web-book”; stripping away much of the normal “computer”astheics and features though, and bringing web-based content closer to the user (something that reminds me of the One Laptop Per Child program). The device stores all of its data in the cloud, and has multiple viewing modes that improve the experience depending on what kind of content you are browsing.
From a developer perspective, I’m hoping some more details come out shortly, but for now we know that it supports Flash Player 10 in its “browser” and a ported version of Flash Lite 3 in “channel” mode. What this means for developers of Flash content is yet to really be identified, but litl have made a great move in hiring Chuck Freedman, formerly of Ribbit, as their technical evangelist to the Flash and Adobe communities in particular. I’m sure in the coming weeks and months, Chuck will be making more of the underlying platform known to developers and letting us in on the opportunity they believe is there for developers.
Also, the Flash community’s very own gadegt-freak, Scott Janousek, has not surprisingly started a new blog to focus on the litl and I’m sure will be posting his experiences once his device actually arrives 
Here’s hoping we can get one shipped down under as well and have a play around with one!
It’s always fascinating to me to see what innovation occurs in crowded market segments. Look at what the iPhone did in the smartphone market. I’m not putting my hand up and saying that the litl will be the iPhone of the netbook market, but it has some potential to be disruptive in certain demographics which will be interesting to watch, and perhaps even be part of, depending on the develeoper ecosystem that they try and build around it.
hi dale! i’m a channel developer at litl and we are delighted to have chuck on board. also looking forward to sharing more news and tools with developers, stay tuned!
Thanks for your great comments and compliments! While we continue to ready the developer platform aspect of litl, I wanted to point you to a couple of blog posts that litl’s own Kathryn Rotondo has posted:
On litl channels…
http://www.kathrynrotondo.com/weblog/?p=710
On litl using actionscript…
http://www.kathrynrotondo.com/weblog/?p=714
Stay tuned for more details on developer opportunities (http://www.litl.com) and enjoy the amazing litl device!
Awesome, thanks Dale! We certainly see our device and approach as disruptive. Our vision is to build a new platform for web access and the webbook is just the start. We want to get rid of all the claptrap (both hardware and software) that bogs the web experience down for so many users. Channels are a key part of our strategy, taming selected webapps and streaming media and effectively making these a logical part of our card-based UI.
We’re over the moon about hiring Chuck and I’ll make sure he sees this page.
One clarification (quoting litl’s Kathryn): the flash lite player is used by custom channels no matter which view (card/full/channel), whereas the litl’s web browser uses the flash 10 browser plugin.
Thanks Phil for clarifying that point on the use of Flash Lite outside of the litl browser. Looking forward to blogging more about the litl ecosystem and developer opportunity.
Thanks Chuck. This is also for Kathryn, but I believe that hardware accelerated H.264 video and bitmap caching are part of Flash Lite 3.1 for the Digital Home. What was the reasoning behind working with Calsoft on a custom implementation and not working with Adobe on the Flash Lite player implementation (maybe as part of the Open Screen Project)? Was it more to do with fine tuning the player to your custom OS?
I’m not sure if Kathryn was around when that decision was made or not, but please feel free to dive in K. or Chuck.
As I recall at the time it was not at all clear when hw acceleration for Poulsbo would make an appearance in Open Screen.
We had to be sure we would have hw acceleration for channels so we went with this two-flash implementation.
Thanks Phil.