Month: December 2010

Pixel Qi partners with CPT for mass manufacturing dual-mode screens

Posted by Charbax – December 21, 2010

Pixel Qi and CPT are preparing 3 different screen sizes to be mass manufactured in 2011, including a 7″ 1024×600 design that will be shown early January at CES in Las Vegas.

CPT has a monthly production capacity of 40 million LCD screens. That’s 480 million LCD screens per year. How much of these are going to be Pixel Qi types is to be seen. CPT is the worlds second largest manufacturer of mid-size (4.8″-11.6″) LCD screens (behind CMI).

I’m hoping that the 3 sizes that they are working on are 4.8″ or 5″, 7″ and 10.1″, sizes which I think are the best for Tablet and E-reader use. 4.8″ or 5″ being the largest to fit in normal pockets (passport sized), 7″ the largest to fit in jacket pockets and 10″ being current top Tablet and about the size of an A4 page. But I also think 11.6″ or 12.1″ screen size like the one Google wants for Chrome OS notebooks could also be a good size.

This alliance started early last summer when CPT showed a transflective screen of its own design at a Taiwanese trade show. Discussions between the two companies at that show made it apparent that Pixel Qi and CPT should work together to bring stronger product to market faster. A close alliance was formed and the teams have been working together quietly all fall. They have created samples of a 7” 1024×600 screens scheduled for mass production in early Q2 2011, which will be first publically shown at the CES 2011 exhibition in Las Vegas in early January 2011. This represents an expansion of Pixel Qi’s manufacturing strength beyond its first LCD manufacturing partner who has been shipping Pixel Qi’s 10” screen.

These dual-mode reflective and transflective LCD screens are crucial to realize the combination of Tablet and E-reader into one product. Without this type of screen, I don’t believe tablets can be used for reading books as backlights are not meant for reading, and for e-readers to use LCD also makes them more versatile thus also including all the tablet functions into one same product. Most importantly, this screen technology improves battery runtime for ARM Powered devices considerably, as in a 10″ ARM Powered tablet or laptop, the backlight probably consumes about 80% of the devices overall power, consider thus a screen that can work without a backlight or with a lower backlight intensity, and you have a battery runtime multiplied by as much as 5x in that same product. Thus an ARM Powered Tablet or Laptop that had 10 hours battery runtime on a regular backlit LCD may have up to 50 hours using this type of screen. Thus also making this screen absolutely crucial for projects like OLPC and the Indian education $35 tablet project if they want to make it viable that these devices can be used places where there isn’t a lot of power.

Source: pixelqi.com/blog1/

Google TV devices “delayed”, may not show at CES

Posted by Charbax – December 20, 2010

The New York Times reports Toshiba, LG, Sharp, Samsung and Vizio have Google TV projects going, that they may have been all planning to unveil those at CES but that Google may have asked them to delay their unveiling until next software update including full Google Marketplace support is ready. Samsung may still show a couple Google TV devices at CES, Toshiba has confirmed they won’t, Vizio might show some Google TV stuff but only privately and maybe not to be blogged about.

So Google faces challenges in getting American TV networks to agree to allow them to stream TV shows from the web on the Google TV platform. I have estimated that if Google and Adobe wanted, if the negociations with US TV networks wouldn’t lead to a solution, that they could unleash a software update to present both the browser and the flash plugin as “User Agent: Generic” making detection by US TV networks impossible and thus forcing them to either remove online TV streaming completely or just regard Google TV as same user terminal as any “normal” laptop or desktop computer.

So let’s assume Google TV will have only a limited showing at CES, perhaps Google is trying to coordinate a giant unveiling of second phase of Google TV at CeBIT in March, by that time, more of the major manufacturers could present boxes, Google would present not only Google Marketplace and smoother software integration, they could launch world wide Google TV support (not limited to US anymore), they could also, as suggested by Tudor Brown ARM President last month, present cheaper ARM Powered Google TV devices such as the concept of a $99 ARM Powered Google TV box.

The $99 ARM Powered Google TV set-top-box is an important target, as that makes it affordable enough that everyone will buy one, providing full performance for 1080p YouTube streaming and the HDMI pass-through and IR blaster features, it would provide for the perfect platform to revolutionize TV.

anandtech.com: Benchmark of top ARM Cortex-A8 SoC GPUs

Posted by Charbax – December 19, 2010

Check out this interesting GLBenchmark 2.0 at anandtech.com, they compare the performance in benchmarks for following devices:
- Nexus S and Samsung Galaxy S using SGX540
- myTouch 4G and T-Mobile G2 using Adreno 205
- iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPad using SGX535
- Nokia N900 and Motorola Droid using SGX530
- Nexus One, Optimus One and HTC EVO 4G using Adreno 200

Not in the benchmark, Droid X, Droid 2 and the Archos Gen8 Tablets have SGX535.

It will be interesting to see what will happen once possibly more competition comes with ARM Mali-400 in the upcoming ARM Cortex-A9 dual-core processors and where its performance might be. Also I’d like to know what kind of performance Tegra 2 does for this 3D stuff. What Qualcomm Adreno 220 is cooking for its upcoming dual-core Snapdragons. And what 3D on-die GPU Marvell is going to use (supposedly does 200 million triangles per second) in its upcoming 628 Tri-core processor.

Find the full GLBenchmark 2.0 article over at: anandtech.com

Related articles

netbooknews.com: Kinpad i600 7″ Android Tablet

Posted by Charbax – December 19, 2010

Here’s a Freescale 800MHz 7″ Tablet with AMD z430 graphics. AMD z430 may be the same graphics that Qualcomm Snapdragon uses called Adreno 200, that is for example in the Nexus One and HTC EVO 4G. This 7″ Kinpad i600 is being sold at $399.

This video was released at: netbooknews.com

Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com at LeWeb 2010

Posted by Charbax – December 15, 2010

If you have an idea to create a competitor to Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia or Google, but you lack the programming talent, you can still do like Kevin Rose did to start Digg.com, what Steve Jobs did to start Apple and what Bill Gates did to start Microsoft, you can just have someone else do all the programming work for you for cheap! Now that we have the Internet, why not hire someone to do it for those $500 or so that you have been saving up?

Digg.com was started for $200, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer bought DOS for $50’000 from some guy which basically founded Microsoft, Steve Jobs convinced his programming friend Steve Wozniak to code the Apple OS inspired by ideas they got from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center for “free”, some claim Mark Zuckerberg was hired as a freelance programmer for $1000 to program facebook (then possibly to have been called harvardconnection) before he decided it was too good and kept it for himself (something like that).

What do you think of the potential of outsourcing work using Freelancer.com or other such online freelancing sites? Can those sites also be used to connect freelancers in your local areas if you want to actually meet the freelancer face to face? What do you think is the potential to create a successful startup based on a small investment through freelancer.com or such site? What do you think is the value of an idea compared to the programming talent necessary to build it? What do you think is the risk of you potentially loosing your idea to a freelancer (like Mark Zuckerberg) if they find out that the idea is too good and they decide to keep it or duplicate it?

Chrome OS brings $99 laptops

Posted by Charbax – December 14, 2010

Chrome OS greatest achievement will be the disruption of the whole Windows/Intel/Apple business models of artificially increasing prices of Laptops year after year, as those old silicon valley giants are always frightened to see their multi-hundred billion dollar industry disappear.

What the One Laptop Per Child successfully initiated after 2006, forcing Intel to introduce the Netbook market segment, thus lowering the average price per laptop consumers would purchase by $100-200 overnight, Google is attempting to do even more aggressively with Chrome OS.

These past 2 years, I reviewed several ARM Powered $99 Laptops already, from such Chinese as Hivision, MenQ, Firstview or Indian AllGo Systems, powered by VIA’s Wondermedia or other of the affordable ARM9 or ARM11 platforms that are available to these manufacturers for affordable implementation at that time. Sure enough, ARM Cortex A8 and A9, more RAM, faster SoCs are more appropriate for full laptop performance. Every 18 months chips are twice as fast or twice cheaper. How much more do you think that a new ARM Cortex-A9 SoC platform with a larger higher resolution LCD screen costs today compared to an ARM9 from 2 years ago? $30 more? The same? These cheap ARM Powered laptops are interesting because they are early products that have been giving us a taste of the ARM Powered laptops that are coming.

Sure the Cr-48 that Google are beta testing is Intel powered. That is just a question of beta testing of software. ARM Powered Chrome OS probably needs ARM Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 processors to be optimized for large screen laptop computing. The Chrome Browser requires a lot of RAM to be fast. All the I/O and memories on the SoC need to be accelerated to the point the Chrome web browser in a laptop form factor feels 100% as fast on ARM as on Intel.

It may be that the current generation ARM Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 are more suitable for Tablets and Smart Phones than for Laptops and Desktops. More likely, it is that Google has enough to beta test on Intel that they cannot advertise simultaneous beta testing on ARM at this moment as well.

In any ways, it might still be months before mass market Chrome OS laptops are sold to consumers. So clearly the Cr-48 being Intel doesn’t have to be an indication of ARM being “not ready” but instead might be simply a question of Google focusing their beta testing program on Intel for now. ARM and Intel based Chrome OS may still actually be released simultaneously to consumers next year.

Also consider the fact Intel CEO Paul Otelinni is also on the board of directors of Google, mysteriously. And that pressure from Intel on Google might convince Google to do such things as Chrome OS and Google TV with Intel first, all the while Google knows that ARM is the best platform eventually for both projects. Although Google TV is released to consumers, it’s still limited in size to one similar to beta testing, it’s like when Google releases a Nexus phone, they don’t do it to sell many Nexus phones, they do it to push their software platform forward, which always turns out that the industry combined sells more Google based devices than all other.

This is what I think Google plans to achieve with lower hardware pricing:
- $99 Google TV -> turns YouTube into larger share of people’s daily 5-hour TV watching, 10x increase in YouTube bandwidth when succeeded, changes outcome of elections brings more visionary high-tech favorable politicians to power
- $99 Chrome OS laptops -> realizes cloud computing dream, more ads served per user, enterprise all adopt Chrome OS for speed, security and price, brings in ecosystem for pay-per-web-app.
- $99 Pixel Qi Tablet/E-readers -> platform for Google e-books, full web experience on-the-go, more reading, outdoor use, more personal connection to the web
- $99 Gingerbread Smart Phones -> Google Voice true VOIP replaces telcos, eventually White Spaces is brought in to provide free wireless broadband. Google pushes Local services, location-based advertising brings in next hundred billion in revenues.

It only makes sense Google’s platforms will have the absolute largest market share in all these market segments. In all these segments, Google never plans to make profit on hardware, the hardware business is outsourced to manufacturers and brands, Google just plans for their platforms to dominate.

Price of Chrome OS laptops is the true revolution here.

As Google isn’t yet announcing the price, it may be hard for analysts to grasp the potential here.

How can a Google Chrome OS notebook be sold at $99?

1. ARM Powered laptops cost half the price to manufacture compared to Intel, even the Intel one can be sold $199, deduct at least Windows licence and Hard drive costs compared to a “regular” netbook, that’s 5-10 times cheaper than the Macbook air.

2. Removing hard drive, simplifying motherboard lowers cost.

3. Google makes money later on ads. Seriously, do a calculation how much advertising money Google makes on each of their users, divide their yearly reported revenues by the number of users, Chrome OS users will see even more Google ads than other.

4. Google and Telecoms make money later on selling on-demand 3G/4G wireless data. Even as this should be sold without compulsory subscription plan, the pricing and ease of use should be so tempting, a large share of users will potentially spend hundreds of dollars for on-demand wireless data service. This should be built-in, perhaps not even a SIM card slot, allows Google to also negociate 3G/4G bandwidth deals in all countries worldwide. If prices change in other countries, simply click boom to accept and you’ve got on-demand wireless bandwidth.

5. Google and Developers will make money later on selling apps. Eventually monetization of web apps will be more than just ads. Even enterprise stuff like Google Apps, Citrix stuff and other Virtualization of Windows/Mac x86 apps, those kinds of services could generate up to thousands of dollars per user in the enterprise.

Critics of Google’s Chrome OS based cloud computing need to understand a few things about where it is and where it’s going:

- HTML5 apps can work offline and don’t have to be slower because of connectivity. Including Google Docs and potential cloud assisted video and photo editing, all can work offline.

- Native code and powerful 3D will be part of it. This means basicaly all apps you can imagine that are on Windows and Mac can also work here. I expect new cloud based versions of http://youtube.com/editor means even video editing professionals will rather want to use this type of cloud based apps for instant encoding and rendering using the power of thousands of grid processing servers on the cloud.

- WebGL and other advances in web browser technology increases potential complexity of web apps.

- A 32GB SD card costs less than $49, a 500GB 2.5″ external USB hard drive costs $49, both work in Chrome OS, I even envision a Chrome OS laptop design with available slot to insert a 2.5″ hard drive and have it only powered when accessed.

- You can backup and sync your cloud easily on a $49 ARM Powered NAS such as a pogoplug in your home, connect any $99 3.5″ 2TB hard drive to that.

- Citrix has demonstrated, any x86 app you want can be virtualized in Chrome OS to actually run faster thanks to cloud grid app hosting than any local PC.

Super-Marmite.com is a Social Marketplace for homemade Meals

Posted by Charbax – December 13, 2010

What if you could buy a cheap meal from someone cooking extra portions of some healthy meal in your neighborhood instead of having to go to an unhealthy fast food restaurant? This startup won the “1st Prize for Originality” at LeWeb 2010 in Paris. The public also likes the idea a lot.

Renault Twizy electric car presented by Matthieu Tenenbaum at LeWeb 2010

Posted by Charbax – December 13, 2010

This compact french-design electric car is to be released about a year from now, it has a range enough for use in cities, and the size is in between scooter and small car, easy to park, it’s actually a two-seater. It can even be configured to be driven without a drivers licence. This is an interview with Matthieu Tenenbaum who is Renault’s deputy program director for all of Renault’s electric vehicles including the Twizy.

Pierre Chappaz on what is going on with Wikileaks

Posted by Charbax – December 13, 2010

At LeWeb 2010 there was an interesting Media Panel about the status of Wikileaks. This video features more from the point of view of French entrepreneur Pierre Chappaz who founded Kelkoo and Wikio.

netbooknews.com: Asus Eee Note EA800 Unboxing

Posted by Charbax – December 13, 2010

Also see my interview with the product manager at Computex here. Asus has chosen to release this reflective based grayscale 8″ wacom touch LCD based e-reader. It has a user interface based on Qt and embedded Linux on a Marvell processor.

This video was released at: netbooknews.com