Another big announcement today at CES, this time from Intel, who have obviously noticed everybody has an app store for everything these days and thought they’d better join the party. Their take on the now-familiar app store model is called AppUp, powered by the AppUpCenter (seemingly they’ve given up separating words, too), which they have released to the App-less masses in beta form providing apps for anything running on an Intel Atom.
The interesting thing about AppUp is that it’s the first app store we’ve seen from a component manufacturer that operates in quite a wide ecosystem, and as such Intel is going to let netbook makers essentially “skin” AppUp, so although the Samsung store may look completely different from the Asus store, they will both be exactly the same under the hood. This is also beneficial for developers, who will see their apps offered in any number of different stores, but will know they will run on every machine due to the shared Intel hardware. In many ways it’s a similar approach to Google’s “Write once, run anywhere” mantra for Android.
Intel have announced deals with HP, Asus, Acer and Samsung, all of whom have their app stores in the oven and plan to debut them this quarter.
Intel Chief Exec Paul Otellini explained the slightly more grand aspirations for AppUp if it manages to graduate from Netbooks – ”We’d like extend it to any Intel architecture device in the computing spectrum”, so look out for AppUp on your Intel desktop and handhelds in the near future.
If you’re running Windows on an Atom Netbook and want to give AppUp a try, then go right ahead.
Via Liliputing.
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