Category: Laptops

I am going to film 50 videos at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona

Posted by Charbax – February 10, 2010

Mobile World Congress 2008
Image by Mark Wiewel via Flickr

Olé! I am going to Barcelona for the worlds biggest and most influential conference on Mobile phones, mobile Internet devices and future technology in the mobile world. This is going to be my first Mobile World Congress, so I am really looking forward to it.

Please do subscribe to my RSS feed or follow be on http://buzz.google.com/charbax to keep updated with my latest video posts in real-time just as I upload them in HD quality to Youtube and post them here to this blog.

You can follow me through Buzz on my Google profile http://www.google.com/profiles/charbax

If you enjoy any of my videos, please do “Like” them in Google Buzz, please do submit them to influential blogs and other sites so more people watch my best videos.

I am looking forward among other things to film videos of amazing new products and technologies among these:

- ARM Cortex A9 powered stuff, I expect Texas Instruments will have awesome demonstrations of this, and for sure more Nvidia and I wonder who else will show this technology.

- Nexus Two, Three and Four. What I mean by that are alternatives to HTC in making at least 3.7″ WVGA AMOLED, Android 2.1 and 1ghz ARM Cortex A8 or faster smart phones. Those are likely to be on display by manufactures among others that are Samsung, Motorola, Acer.

- ARM Powered laptops are getting even closer to worldwide release. I would like to film more demonstrations of awesome looking Android laptops like the HP Airlife 100, Quanta manufactured prototypes, Marvell reference design prototypes and many more. It would be nice to see some of them run smooth Google Chromium OS and fast and smooth web browsers.

- May this be a perfect opportunity for big manufacturers to officially announce and launch Pixel Qi screens in new Laptop and Tablet form factors at affordable prices and with amazingly long batterz runtimes.

- I expect to see huge things from Google and from all the Open Handset Alliance and ARM Solutions Center for Andriod providing new amazing hardware acceleration solution in new software updates, demonstrating next generation Android solutions, showing more high resolution large screened Android solutions.

- Chrome OS demos, show those. Anything that is ARM Powered and that runs Chrome OS smoothly will be very interesting to see and interview software engineers about the status of running a full speed Chrome browser on ARM devices, what they plan to do and how soon it will be released and for how much. Can they run unlimited amounts of tabs on a $150 ARM Powered laptop with only 128MB RAM inside?

- How cheap can the cheapest Android phones be at this point? Will we see huge amounts of new manufacturers from around the world demonstrate cheaper Android phones and that still perform pretty well? Can we see $100 unlocked Android phones already, or at least below pointing at well below $200?

Please do contact me or post comments here if you hear about any specific awesome ARM Powered devices that I should film at the Mobile World Congress, I will try to film all the requests that I get in comments, by email and to my Google Buzz threads.

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ARM Powered Linux laptops to dominate the world

Posted by Charbax – February 8, 2010

ARM Holdings
Image via Wikipedia

According to ARM CEO Warren East, the Netbook category is expected to explode to cover 90% of the laptop market over the next several years.

And that if Microsoft doesn’t want to provide a version of Windows 7 or Windows 8 for ARM Powered laptops, then that Linux based OSes will do just fine.

I’m hoping to see following specs in mass market ARM Powered laptops soon:

- ARM Cortex A8/A9
- All screen sizes from 4″ to 15″
- Android and Chrome OS combination, provide optimized Chrome browser yet still support Android notifications and applications
- HDMI output
- Pixel Qi 3Qi screen for outdoors readability and 50 hour battery runtime
- Capacitative touch-screen Tablet swivel form factor
- Less than 1kg weight
- Pricing: less than $200 unlocked without any contracts needed

I’m really looking forward to see more of these hopefully as soon as during the Mobile World Congress from February 15-18th in Barcelona, where I plan to go an film 50 videos to be posted here on http://ARMdevices.net, so please do subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up to date.

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ARM Powered OLPC XO laptops coming within a year

Posted by Charbax – February 8, 2010

When the OLPC project’s XO laptops are used in schools, the results are transforming education around the world. It’s getting children excited about school. It’s getting attendance to increase by 100 percent, which it does in most places where OLPC has deployed laptops, where more girls go to school, where the truancy drops to zero, where children take laptops home and teach their parents how to use them.

The One Laptop Per Child engineers are working on an ARM Powered XO 1.75 laptop which is going to be released within a year from now. My guess is that they might be optimizing it for using the Marvell Armada 610 or 510 processor.

The OLPC’s official power consumption target is 2W of power consumption. Though I wonder, is 2W of power consumption really the goal? Not even lower?

For example, the Pixel Qi screen is supposed to consume only 0.1W when backlight is turned off, once Pixel Qi has optimized refresh rates and other details which they have said they will be able to do over the next few months. The whole ARM Processor System on Chip should not consume nearly any power at all when nothing is moving on the screen, when the student for example is just reading an e-book. Then how low really can the power consumption go? Shouldn’t 0.2W power consumption in offline e-reader mode be a realistic goal? Thus shouldn’t the child get 100 minutes of use for 1 minute of cranking?

Since most of the children served by laptops from the OLPC project live off the grid, and may not get electricity for many years, getting the power consumption down on the laptops is one of OLPC’s main engineering goals. This and lowering the cost of the laptops to below $100 per laptop are the main goals of the OLPC project.

I’d like to see all the major ARM Processor makers announce that they will support OLPC in that goal, so that the XO 1.75 may not only be based on the Marvell processor, but that other processors will be optimized for it as well. All ARM Powered laptops shall point towards the same goals in my opinion, also in terms of software optimizations. We need fast and smooth web browsers, have Google and everyone else focus on optimizing the web browsing speed using the Chrome browser. While having everyone focus on one OS for all ARM Powered laptops may be a good idea eventually, until we figure out which OS are the best for which use, having easy multi-boot menus work and utilizing a minimal of extra storage space to ship laptops with multiple choices of Linux OS such as shipping ARM Powered XO laptops with Fedora based Sugar OS, with a Gnome desktop alternative, and with eventually an alternative based on a combination of Android and Chrome OS may be the best solution.

Free wireless broadband is also a priority. Sure a combination of existing cellular, ADSL, Fiber and WiFi Mesh networks of the OLPC project can already achieve a lot. But perhaps the generalization of use of 700mhz spectrum for wireless broadband all around the world will help lower the cost of deploying ubiquituous wireless broadband, especially in countries that deploy the OLPC project without having pre-existing broadband infrastructures in place. The TV spectrum needs to be used for free wireless broadband for all.

Rich countries need to prioritize the OLPC project in deploying revolutionary education using computers and Internet technology all over the world.

Source: smartplanet.com

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Chromium and Firefox within Android

Posted by Charbax – February 3, 2010

The default Android web browser is really awesome in terms of speed, it even works amazingly fast on the ARM9 Powered web browser of the Hivision PWS700CA that I tested in my video-review a few days ago. Though for Laptop form factors, also known as ARM Powered Netbooks or Smartbooks, and for Android Tablets like the Archos 5 Internet Tablet that has a HDMI output and supports USB and Bluetooth keyboards and mice, the default Android web browser might not be enough.

This is why the support of the full desktop-like experience using Chrome and Firefox web browsers within Android are really going to be nice. Perhaps the June 2009 release of the Native Android SDK can help developers reach this goal.

The Mozilla team is showing this screenshot of Firefox running within Android (check also Mozilla’s wiki entry on Android: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Android):

Since Google is now working on releasing the full Chrome OS for ARM Powered devices, perhaps it would make sense to take the source code of that Chrome web browser for ARM, and make it into an Android application. This way on a Pocketable Android tablets or phones the default Android web browser would still be used, but when in HDMI output mode to a HDTV and when using USB or Bluetooth keyboards and mice, the Chrome browser or Firefox would thus be the browser of choice.

I think it would be nice as well if it was possible to provide a full speed browser experience even on cheap ARM Powered Android devices that come with little RAM memory such as only 128MB or RAM, still enable the use of unlimited amounts of opened tabs by somehow perhaps saving the state of each tab into ROM memory and be able to quickly in few milliseconds be able to pull that back into RAM memory when the specific tab is selected.

On the other hand, I also think it would make sense to support all Android applications within Chrome OS, thus this might mean that eventually Android and Chrome OS will merge.

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Android Laptop Review: Hivision PWS700CA

Posted by Charbax – January 29, 2010

This is the world’s first video-review of the Hivision PWS700CA ARM9 Powered Android Laptop, find more info at Hivision’s website. (Hivision, which I previously video-Interviewed about cheap Laptops from the trade shows at CES 2010 and IFA 2008)

Hivision Android Laptop

The Hivision PWS700CA is based on a Rockchip RK2808 600mhz ARM926 processor, 128SDRAM, 7″ 800×480 screen, 720p Video playback support, WiFi, Ethernet, audio input/output and weights only 650grams.

The price has not yet been announced officially because Hivision is looking for worldwide distributors who will then decide how much it will be sold for to end consumers. But you can understand that if Hivision was able to sell those types of laptops for $98 to distributors more than a year ago (when I filmed my popular video from IFA 2008), then surely the mass manufacturing price has not gone up since then. My expectation is that if a giant consumer electronics reseller such as Walmart or Best Buy approaches Hivision today to order huge quantities of this laptop, it could be sold below $100 to end users.

I’ve seen those kinds of cheap laptops running Windows CE or some less optimized Linux distribution at Buy.com (2), at Amazon.com, at Kmart.com and plenty other places for even cheaper. The point of this video is to show that Android can make all these cheap laptops much more usable when it comes to browsing the web. The Android browser is much better than the one in Windows CE or the Mozilla-based ones used in other Linux distributions. More usable web browsing means more people will want to buy it, which means even cheaper prices.

Click on the thumbnails below to see the full sized pictures at Picasa:

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Tim Sweeney talks about Unreal Engine on ARM Powered devices

Posted by Charbax – January 25, 2010

Tim Sweeney is the founder of Epic Games, he is in charge of the Unreal Tournament, Gears of War and plenty more very famous game franchises. But not only does his company make games, Epic makes the most famous and most popular 3D game engines on which hundreds of other games all over the industry are based on.

Now the Unreal engine is being launched for the Nvidia Tegra2 processor and has been showcased to run on other OpenGL ES based ARM Powered devices like the ipod touch.

In this interview, I ask when we will see Android devices with support for the Unreal Engine, and how many games does he think will work on all these ARM Powered devices that have the advanced 3D acceleration built-in.

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HP Compaq Airlife 100 hit the FCC

Posted by Charbax – January 21, 2010

Wow, so HP is likely going to be pushing the awesome looking Qualcomm Snapdragon powered Android laptop on 3G networks! See my previously posted video of it:

Source: engadget.com

See more videos of this product from CES:

Netbooknews.com‘s video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIm5BQhvhgk

JKKmobile.com‘s video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5RdVAEXqCc

Liliputing.com‘s video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o3T5w9NDvA

HP’s official CES video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXMl0XISYnY

Andy Clipsham, Product Manager on the HP Android Smartbook, unveils it at the Qualcomm keynote at CES 2010: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSvGhXa6RdY

GNB 7″ $140 Android Laptop

Posted by Charbax – January 17, 2010

GNB at http://g-netbook.com does $140 or cheaper 7″ Freescale iMX31 533MHz ARM11 Powered Laptops that run Android. Check out this video to see the Android in action where I also try to browse on some websites.

Lenovo Skylight at CES 2010

Posted by Charbax – January 17, 2010

An ultra slim awesome looking ARM Powered laptop shown by Lenovo at the CES 2010. It is ultra slim and light, they are currently running a version of Linux customized by Thundersoft to provide basic applications.

$109 Tablet by Menq at CES 2010

Posted by Charbax – January 16, 2010

They have Windows CE on it for now, but they plan to have Android running on it soon. Check also my previous Menq video review of the Menq EasyPC E790 which is based on the same hardware as this Menq Tablet.

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