As mentioned earlier today in Holiday Surprise, the next products we are going to release will be based on the i.mx6. The i.mx53 board is now in production. We will license this board. It is suitable for many form factors and use cases. For customers that need decent volume, samples are available. The software is ready to go. We will be at CES.

Looking ahead and to the Power Developer Home page on the left, we will shift the target for the upcoming Project Program to the i.mx6. As seen in the blog, we have the first reference design from Freescale and our development is underway.

R&B :)

Hi R&B, can you please clarify (merging this thread with http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=15569) if the next smartbook, if any, will be based on the MX53 or MX6. In the latter case it is not clear what the point would be to develop on the MX53 anymore. Are you still making smartbooks based on the now obsoleted mx51 and how long will you support them? I think some people (me) will be a bit confused if it is worth waiting for the next device or not. Thanks and I hope I made myself clear.

Hi Octavio, thanks for the questions. We will do our best to answer them. We will continue to support our current i.mx51 based products. We sell them today. Our intention was to transition these products to the i.mx53, but the development process for a number of reasons has taken too long. by way of illustration, Freescale was already showing the i.mx6 at FTF 2011 in June just as we were finishing the first i.mx53 prototypes. Staying up with the pace of technology can be a task! In the mean time, we have customers that will take the i.mx53 design and use it to develop products of their own. Our customers will use the i.mx53 design in their own form-factors and for their own use-cases. There will be smartbooks using the i.mx53, but they will not be branded or sold by Genesi. Does that answer your questions?

Our next branded Genesi products will feature the i.mx6. Until then, we will support our current products based on the i.mx51. We use our i.mx51 smartbook every day. There is no reason to wait. It is a solid product and it works well.

Best regards,
R&B :)

Thanks R&B, my questions have been answered but some others may pop in my mind but I'll stop there for now.

Dear genesi santa

i wish a imx6 top with gigabit ethernet, sata for HDD/SSD and at least 1 Gb of Ram and hdmi hdmi
Of course i don"t expect it fr my 2011 christmas, patience is a virtue :D

Thanks a lot

That's good news! :-)

But when are you going to get rid of that terrible "mosaic" layout on your blog?

Merry Christmas! :-)

Here is the workaround I use: http://bbrv.blogspot.com/view/classic or use the "classic" link on the left side of the black band at the top of the page.

Great news !
Merry Christmas to all the Genesi's Team ...

I noticed that the i.MX53 board at FTF 2011 didn't have any internal storage expansion like the Smartbook's microSD slot. Could some sort of internal mSATA/SDXC/USB storage expansion under the keyboard make it into the next smartbook?

Does this mean that support for the current crop of products will stop? I have recently purchased an Efika MX smartbook (based on the mx515?) and am understandably curious.

Hi.

Support for the current products will continue. We're using them also internally for development purposes for the new products.


Johan.

This is a tremendous news ... can't wait,

thanks for the good work and for being so open

Thanks for replying to my question. It has helped allay my concerns.

I'm in a couple of minds about the next smartbook using the i.MX6. On the one hand, I've been putting off getting one until the i.MX53 version became available, so having to wait even longer is a bit annoying. On the other hand, knowing he next version it will be even more powerful looks like a win.

So, I have a couple of questions. How long do you think the i.MX6 version will take to become available? I know you don't know exactly, but a rough idea would be very welcome.

The other question is would you make board kits available so that people could upgrade their existing smartbooks? This is especially relevant because Ubuntu no longer support the i.MX51. Of course, I don't know if the cases had had to undergo modifications for the i.MX53 board, or if there will be any further modifications for the i.MX6 board. Either way, providing an upgrade path would be really cool. It would certainly encourage me to get one as soon as I could.

Will this cancel the i.MX53 developer program (in favor of i.MX6) or will there be i.MX53 boards made available to developers?

I hope you can put the i.MX53 design to good use, it seems to me an engineering job well done. Will you make the boards available to commercial customers, or only the design?

Thanks,

Leon.