Taipei (Taiwan) - Asus has partnered up with Device VM to produce millions of motherboards with almost instant on technology. Using a Linux-based operating system stored in flash memory, the motherboards will be able to turn on and access common features like Internet and Voice over IP in few seconds.

Asus is rebranding Device VM’s Splashtop operating system into ’Express Gate’ and will be including it on four mothberboard lines: P5Q Deluxe, P5Q-WS, P5Q3 Deluxe and the P5Q-E. The company had included Express Gate in some of its high-end motherboards back on October 2007. There are also plans on including the technology on all of Asus’ motherboards at an unspecified time in the future.

Joe Hsieh, Asus General Manager of the Motherboard Business unit says, "In response to great user feedback, our plan is to proliferate Express Gate across our entire motherboard product portfolio, starting with over one million motherboards per month."

The Splashtop/Express Gate operating system is a light-weight embedded Linux platform that contains common applications like the Firefox browser and Skype voice client. It typically boots in approximately five to fifteen seconds and gives an option to boot into the regular hard drive-installed operation system (this would usually be Windows).

Since Asus sells most of their boards to system builders, it’s going to be up to those companies to take advantage of the Express Gate feature. Hopefully most of them will leave it alone for customers to tinker with, but we can see some companies hiding the OS - perhaps at the gentle urging of some really big company in Redmond, Washington.