Hercules has introduced its eCafe EX HD and eCafe Slim HD 10.1-inch smartbooks that deliver long battery life as well as mobility. The pair differs from netbooks in that they run ARM Cortex A8 processors as well as a lightweight customization of the Linux OS. This combination helps the eCafe EX HD to deliver up to 13 hours of battery life and a near-instant boot time from standby of only 4 seconds.
The eCafe EX HD is 1.1-inches thick and weighs 2.4-pounds. It centers on a 10.1-inch 1024×600 display capable of 720p playback. Its ARM Cortex A8 processor is fabricated by Freescale and is clocked at 800MHz and is paired with 512MB of RAM. Storage is provided by 16GB of iNAND flash memory. It includes 3 USB ports, an SD/SDHC card reader, HDMI output, and Wi-Fi 802.11n. A wide array of file formats is supported and the EX HD comes preinstalled with OpenOffice as well as Firefox.
The eCafe Slim HD, delivers 4.5 hours of battery life from a similar configuration to the EX HD, but has a smaller battery and 8GB of iNAND flash memory. However, it is comparatively much thinner at just 0.8-inches thick and weighs only 1.9-pounds. It also features always-on access to social networking sites and features the same pre-installed software and files support as the EX HD.
Both smartbooks can be synced with Windows, Linux and Mac OS X equipped PCs using the eCafe Sync software separately downloaded from the Hercules website.
The smartbooks are available this April with the eCafe EX HD retailing for $269 and the eCafe Slim HD is retailing for $229.
