Rockchip is showing Android 4 Ice Cream Sandwich running smoothly on their RK2918 ARM Cortex-A8 processor.
Category: Rockchip
Rockchip RK2918 Ice Cream Sandwich Smartphone
Posted by – January 19, 2012
Rockchip is showing Android 4 Ice Cream Sandwich running on their 3.5″ 800×480 capacitive sub-$100 Android phone. This phone is on the Chinese market with China Mobile on their CDMA network.
Rockchip RK2918 for set-top-boxes
Posted by – January 19, 2012
Status of the RK2918 for use in Set-top-boxes, it can be done for less than $50, with up to ICS support, Google TV OS support once that is open sourced.
Yitoa $120 9.7″ Rockchip RK2918 Ice Cream Sandwich tablet
Posted by – January 11, 2012
Shenhen Yitoa Digital Appliance Co Ltd shows their Rockchip RK2918 Ice Cream Sandwich tablet to be sold at $120 for orders of at least 1000 units.
I was on Twit!
Posted by – December 10, 2011
You can see me starting at 9 minutes 45 seconds time code in following Twit Live video recorded at LeWeb 2011, I’m interviewed by Leo Laporte and Sarah Lane! This video features some of my talk about Switzerland legalizing piracy, France implementing the global licence to legalize piracy, Archos, my headmounted Kopin Golden-i computer, live stream and augmented video-blogging system.
Source: recorded video on Ustream.tv
I’ll post the YouTube embed if Twit and LeWeb release it separately on YouTube.
Rockchip RK2918 runs Ice Cream Sandwich
Posted by – November 29, 2011
Rockchip is showing Ice Cream Sandwich running on their 1Ghz-1.2Ghz RK2918 ARM Cortex-A8 processor with the Vivante GC800 GPU. This may be one of the first demonstrations of Ice Cream Sandwich running on an ARM Cortex-A8 processor?
Thus expect some Ice Cream Sandwich firmware updates for the cool devices like the $149 Arnova 7 G2, $179 Arnova 8 G2, the $199 Arnova 10 G2 and the recently announced Arnova 9 G2 likely to be sold below $249 with a 9.7″ capacitive IPS touch screen, thus bringing nice single-core Ice Cream Sandwich tablet experiences for the low-cost market.
Related articles
- Arnova 9 G2, 9.7″ capacitive IPS RK2918 tablet (archosfans.com)
- Android 4.0.1 Ice Cream Sandwich source code released, how soon on every SoC? (armdevices.net)
- Rockchip Android 4.0 PAD Coming Soon: First Bite on Ice Cream Sandwich From Mainland China – the First Android 4.0 PAD in the World (prnewswire.com)
- Fuzhou Rockchip teases Android 4.0 PAD, brings Ice Cream Sandwich to the big screen (video) (engadget.com)
Review: N5Zero Tablet, sub-$100 5″ capacitive Android tablet
Posted by – September 28, 2011
This is my world exclusive review of the new Window88.com N5Zero Tablet. A 5″ capacitive Android tablet to be sold for less than $100 (to resellers). It’s using the Rockchip RK2918 ARM Cortex-A8 Single Core processor at 1.2Ghz, the screen resolution is 800×480, it has 512MB RAM, a MicroSD slot, between 2GB and 16GB built-in flash ROM storage (depending on the configuration, mine has 8GB), no Bluetooth, the graphics are powered by the Vivante Gc800 that does up to 57 million triangles per second and full OpenGL ES 2.0 for fully smooth Flash 10.3 (and soon Flash 11) support, it supports smoothly all the latest Android 3D games, video playback support is 1080p with all codecs but there is no HDMI output.
Most importantly, this cool 5″ capacitive tablet is being sold out of China for below $100 USD! Of course, you have to consider that the low sub-$100 price is for resellers contacting Window88.com and ordering large quantities of the tablet, perhaps 100 pieces minimum, or 500, or 1000, that is to be discussed by interested distributors with the Window88.com people. The final retail price can be a bit higher. In China this tablet is being sold for 699 renminbi on the market, that is $109. But if this tablet gets imported to Europe and the USA, expect a pricing that can be around $139 or more depending on how much margins the resellers want to take.
Rockchip claims that their RK2918 processor has a better performance than the Samsung Hummingbird in the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7″, Samsung Galaxy S1 and that it’s also faster than the Apple A4 in iPad1 and iPhone4. That is to be confirmed. Sure enough, this is by far not as fast as the newest Dual Core processors such as the one Samsung promises for the 5.3″ Samsung Galaxy Note, but consider that this Window N5Zero is to be sold to resellers at below $100 and that with software optimizations, with perhaps Ice Cream Sandwich coming, this could be fast enough for many users looking for cheap tablet value worldwide.
Read about more of the specs here: http://window88.com/chinese/pro_show.asp?pid=36&p_name=Tablet%20PC
Arnova 10 G2 for $129 or $99 with 1 or 2 year Philly Newspaper subscription
Posted by – September 17, 2011
The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News are doing a special promotion that can interest people living in Pennsylvania USA and would like to save on getting their daily newspaper and at the same time can be tempted by the combination of a subsidized Arnova 10 G2 Android Tablet for $99 or $129 depending on the length of the digital newspaper subscription that is signed.
video source: technicallyphilly.com
I first reported on the Arnova 10 G2 back in April when it was first announced. It is an awesome value device with a capacitive screen and the new Rockchip RK2918 ARM Cortex-A8 processor that can run at up to 1.2Ghz. It’s more powerful than the Apple A4 in the iPad1 and iPhone4, it’s more powerful than the Samsung Hummingbird processor in the Samsung Galaxy Tab and the Samsung Galaxy S. Yet, the tablet is now being released named Arnova 10 G2 with a retail MSRP pricing probably between $199 and $229 (to be confirmed in the coming days).
Sure there has been some delays for this capacitive RK2918 tablet, I do not know why. Maybe Archos spent a few months selling the RK2818 tablets before ramping up production capacity and perhaps also having Rockchip try to have Honeycomb working on it. But more likely, Rockchip will try to use Ice Cream Sandwich directly for those, depending on the compatibility and ease of porting of that next version of open source Android with these ARM Cortex-A8 tablets released now.
This makes sense. The idea of the $99 10.1″ capacitive tablet is awesome. Here are some of my suggestions though for Philly to make this work in the most positive way:
- The $10/month subscription needs to include unlimited free access to all the worlds newspapers and not just the 2 newspapers. The economics are that people will not necessarily read more articles if they get access to more content.
You have to think big. I know it may be hard or impossible for the people of the Philly newspaper to reach out to all the other newspapers of the world and agree on some kind of Netflix-pricing to include full access to all the newspapers.
The idea is that you make it more attractive to more people inside and outside of your target market to want to subscribe to this idea. You write content in English. I think it makes no sense to limit yourself to a limited geography. You can write regional news in your current edition, but you can partner with all the other newspapers and let people read those other newspapers if they want.
Make the cake bigger together with others and your slice of the much bigger cake will be much bigger than your small cake.
Logically, the digital access subscription does not have to exclusively be consumed on that tablet. I guess that any other device can login and access that subscription plan. Simply build on your current Android app, and simply let it search and access the real format newspapers from all the other newspapers that you can partner with.
Here is Philly’s calculation and the customers options today:
- $199 or $229 is the unsubsidized Arnova 10 G2 price likely going to be when released within a few days from now.
- $99 with 2-year $10/month subscription = Total $339 for the Arnova 10 G2 with the 2-year digital newspaper access = $229 Tablet and $55/year digital subscription
- $129 with 1-year $13/month subscription = Total $285 for the Arnova 10 G2 with the 1-year digital newspaper access = $229 Tablet and $56/year digital subscription
- No tablet digital subscription price today = $3/week = $156/year
- No tablet normal paper newspaper by mail subscription price today = $7/week = $364/year
This can be a huge success for Archos and for newspapers but they have to continue on this plan and they need to pick up the phone and make some national and international agreements with all the other newspapers, join forces, subsidize Awesome ARM Powered Android Tablets to make people understand the value of technology and of the content.
Related articles
- Philadelphia Newspaper Publisher Bundles $99 Tablet With Newspaper Apps (shoppingblog.com)
- Sound Familiar? Philadelphia Newspapers Subsidize A Tablet To Sell You A Subscription (wired.com)
- Let the Bundling Begin! First US Newspaper Publisher Offers Bundled Tablet Deal (geardiary.com)
- Newspaper company launches its own Android tablet (technicallyphilly.com)
- Philadelphia newspapers offer $99 tablet with Gingerbread to subscribers (digitaltrends.com)
- Philly newspapers’ cheap Android tablets up for grabs, and they’re cheap (geek.com)
- Philly papers offering subscribers $99 Android tablet (news.cnet.com)
- Philadelphia Media Network bundles ARNOVA Android tablet with digital subscriptions to Inquirer and Daily News (intomobile.com)
- Subscribe To Philly Newspaper Apps, Get A Tablet (paidcontent.org)
- Philadelphia papers to offer discounted Android tablets to subscribers (teleread.com)
RFTech $89 Telechips capacitive Android Tablet
Posted by – September 3, 2011
RFTech presents $89 Telechips ARM11 tablet and the $111 Telechips ARM Cortex-A8 tablet. You can find more information at http://rftech.com.cn
Toshiba Stor.E TV Pro, Rockchip RK2918 Linux based Connected Set-top-box
Posted by – September 1, 2011
Toshiba is using Rockchip RK2918 ARM Cortex-A8 processor in this new low cost Internet set-top-box.