Instant-on OS gets Adobe photo-editing support

Phoenix Technologies and Adobe bring instant-on Photoshop editing to Netbooks.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

Back in January, Phoenix Technologies launched a lightweight instant-on platform named HyperSpace. Designed primarily for Netbooks, the little low-power mobile computers that they are, it allows users to immediately access the Web, e-mail, and IM, among other benefits. And thanks to Adobe, it now includes photo editing.

HyperSpace customers will have instant access to Photoshop.com for organizing, editing, storing, and sharing photos. There is also support for Adobe AIR, Adobe Flash Player, and Adobe Reader on the platform.

The Adobe additions follow the March announcement of the Phoenix partnership with ThinkFree for its Office apps, which let users of the OS manage and edit Microsoft Office file formats for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, online.

I'm totally down with these instant-on OSes (though Ackerman maintains that no one uses them). My big issue with HyperSpace is the annual subscription fee attached to it. If you want to boot into either it or Windows it'll cost you $39.95 a year. To boot into HyperSpace and Windows: $59.95 a year. Three-year reduced pricing is available for both, but at these prices you really have to want it.

[ikramerica--2008]

what is so hard about waking from sleep again? on Mac OS X, wake from sleep is instant on. with netbooks and their SSDs, shouldn't even a restore form hibernate in windows be almost instant on?

[freemarket--2008]

I believe they mean instant on at power up, not from sleep mode.

[Vegaman_Dan]

Win 7 time to restore from sleep- 3 seconds to the login prompt. After entering your credentials, 1 second.

Win7 makes the netbook totally usable there. It's no longer an issue.

[joshua.goldman]

Yes, what freemarket--2008 said. This is from off to on, not sleep mode. While you could of course put a Windows Netbook in standby, this allows for better battery life.

[forever4now]

Adobe should develop rudimentary photo-editing apps for smartphones. It would be great to be able to touch up a photo you just took on your smartphone, before emailing it or uploading it to a photo site like Flickr/Picasa. I'm sure they could get a few dollars for the app, in the app stores.

[Mr. Dee]

Sorry, but waiting 30 seconds for your laptop to boot from BIOS to Desktop is not gonna kill you, 8 seconds 10 seconds from hibernation. I think this is just a useless gimmick that will fail in the the next 24 seconds.

[Vegaman_Dan]

I have Photoshop on my Acer Aspire. It runs quite well even on the reduced power of the CPU... but the screen real estate is something you can't escape from. Editing any image from a current camera is painful on the 1024 x 600 resolution. The palettes and tool bars themselves are often much taller than 600 pixels and by the time you get even a couple of the things on the screen, you have very little space left at all for the actual image.

No OS is going to change that basic screen limitation.

[gerrrg]

So, while Instant On gets flash support, the mobile market has to wait? Oh those folks at Adobe are just brilliant, aren't they?

[Drew.0]

Windows mobile has pretty good flash support with flash lite and excellent with skyfire. 6.5 is supposed to have even better flash support.