The original concept of Splashtop was that it was intended to be integrated on a read-only device and shipped with the hardware, rather than installed by the user.
Its popularity quickly declined after announcing an agreement with Microsoft and most vendors who included it eventually started using a version that required a Windows installation and later simply dropped it.
[12] Splashtop OS shipping in HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, and other OEMs was based on Mozilla-based web browser.
Installation from CD requires a Windows partition to store 500 MB of files, which has to be a SATA drive defined as IDE (no support for AHCI).
[15][self-published source] As of June 2010, Splashtop, as supplied for Asus motherboards, had no support for add-on wireless hardware such as PCI cards.
A proprietary core engine starts at the BIOS boot and loads a specialized Linux distribution called a Virtual Appliance Environment (VAE).
[19][self-published source] The MD5 checksums of the various bootsplash bs-xxxx.sqx and Virtual Appliance va-xxxx.sqx files (including a special Firefox configuration) are noted in splash.sys\version for a simple integrity check at the Splashtop start.
[22][23][24] DeviceVM owns various patents around instant-on techniques, including being the first OS to leverage on-board flash for enhanced performance, and intelligently cache hardware probing info so next boot will be faster.
Asus distributed Splashtop in various motherboards and laptops, including select products from Eee family, under name "Express Gate".