Intel’s AppUp Center is move to capitalize on the success of Apple’s hugely successful App Store for it’s devices.   The difference is that Intel’s Apps will focus on software that’s designed to play well with low power computers with Intel Atom processors, integrated graphics, and 1024 x 600 pixel or lower resolution screens. The company first unveiled the AppUp center in Beta form in January, but Heise reports that the company will remove the beta label at the Game Developers Conference in September.  There are currently about 500 apps in the AppUp Center.

Intel hopes to have the app store preloaded on netbooks before they ship.

via Netbook News.de

Apple pioneered the concept of the ‘App Store’ for it’s iPhone and iPad devices and now HP wants in on the concept.  The HP Download Store is a place to directly download software – especially useful for HP (and Compaq) netbook users download and find software without having to buy a DVD drive.

Purchases are a little more expensive than what you can find elsewhere, are re-downloadable for up to two years.  There’s a current campaign to start things off. You’ll see the coupon code LAUNCH20 on the website which takes $20 off until the end of May.

Visit the HP Download Store

Source: Notebooks.com

Intel is preparing to launch apps designed for netbooks at the Mobile World Congress in Spain next week.  They have been created to show off Intel’s new Intel Atom Developer Program and, taking a page from Apple, their new AppUp Center application store for netbooks. The idea is to offer programs for Windows and Linux netbooks that are optimized for devices with small screens and Atom processors.

Some of the first apps that Intel plans to highlight are a media manager called Fluoh (from Fluendo), video editorJayCut, VoIP and chat software Fring, and and internet radio playerVagalume.

via PC World

FPS Compared on Netbooks with Flash

Adobe released a pre-release version of its Flash Player 10.1 last night which adds  hardware support for HD Flash video.    That means, if you have a supported video card, it will now be able to assist in decoding flash video on the web.  That translates into more frames per second when watching Youtube, Hulu or any other site utilizing flash video.  Now, watching 720p, or even 1080p on netbooks won’t be such a choppy affair.  Two popular grahics chipsets on netbooks are supported – namely the Nvidia Ion chipset and Intel’s GMA 4500MHD.

Read on for the real world test results.

Laptop Magazine put Flash Player 10.1 beta on  their HP Mini 311 notebook with NVIDIA ION graphics, and an Acer Aspire 1810T with GMA 4500MHD graphics.  Playback of a 1080p HD video on YouTube went from an unwatchable 0.6 frames per second to a perfectly acceptable 22 frames per second when using Flash 10.1 . Not as dramatic on the Acer Laptop, but the same HD YouTube video doubled its framerate,  from 11 fps to 22.

AnandTech also ran a series of tests with a NVIDIA ION chipset and produced similar results and also noted that CPU utilization also dropped dramatically as a result of the video decoding processes being offloaded from the processor to the graphics processing unit (Nvidia Ion). AnandTech also noted that AMD had yet to release the drivers necessary to take advantage of Flash Player 10.1.

A mockup of what the announced app store

Photo credit to Sascha of Netbooknews.com

Intel has announced a developer application program for Intel Atom based devices such as netbooks.  We already know and love Apple’s ‘App Store’ for iPhones and iPods, and now it looks like Intel wants to create something similar for netbooks and other ultra portables.

The apps will be created by developers, who will profit from applications specifically through a 70/30 revenue split by Intel.  The applications themselves will run on run-times like Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe’s Flash / AIR platforms.

No firm information yet on when, but definitely exciting news on the netbook software front.