Category: Opinions

I’m on Twit Bits with Leo Laporte showing my iPhone 6 Plus clones

Posted by – November 18, 2014

Here’s 21minutes showing my iPhone 6 Plus clones to Leo Laporte at the Twit Brick House just before the This Week in Tech Podcast.

$149 RK3288 Chromebooks from Lenovo and Asus coming soon according to Digitimes

Posted by – November 14, 2014

Potentially released as soon as next month by Lenovo, Digitimes reports that Lenovo and Asus are preparing to release $149 Chromebooks based on the Rockchip RK3288 Quad-core ARM Cortex-A17 with Mali-T764. The rumored screen size is 11.6″ according to Digitimes.

To be seen if those include 2GB or 4GB RAM. I think 4GB RAM would be nice, even if that adds a few $ to BOM cost. Perhaps they can just let consumers choose to double RAM to 4GB if they just pay $10 or $20 more. I think it would also be nice if they also provide a larger $169 13.3″ skew. Both with 1366×768 matte displays would be good I think. At least one, or multiple SD card slots for storage, HDMI output, at least 2 USB3 would be nice.

It was here on ARMdevices.net on June 5th that I was the first post a video about the RK3288 Chromebook and back on April 13th about Chrome OS for RK3288 on the development board.

I think if the performance is smooth, if the keyboard/mousepad/display qualities are great, if the designs by Lenovo and Asus are classy “like a Macbook Air” and not purposefully cheap looking, the RK3288 Chromebooks may become more popular than RK3288 in Android Tablets, and Chrome OS on RK3288 Set-top-boxes may also be more popular than RK3288 Android Set-top-boxes. If priced right, and if mass produced at absolute maximum capacity by brands like Lenovo and Asus, I think this could potentially become one of the most popular laptops in the world, potentially overtaking Wintel laptops faster than anyone can imagine.

4K and Wearables Industry overview by Paul Gray of DisplaySearch

Posted by – October 21, 2014

Paul Gray is director of European research for NPD DisplaySearch. In addition to TVs, he also covers wearable devices, digital broadcast, and semiconductor technology. He is heavily involved in analysis and forecasting of wearable devices, connected TV, and 4K Ultra HD. Gray has more than 20 years of experience in market intelligence, marketing, and product management. His work includes forecasting, product strategy, investment, and R&D decisions. He is also involved in consulting and conferences, and he has been cited as an expert in Nikkei, Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, Financial Times, Korea Herald, and other publications.
Before joining NPD DisplaySearch, Paul worked at NXP Semiconductors as a market intelligence manager and also as a semiconductor product manager. Before NXP, he held positions of increasing responsibility at Philips Display Components (later LG.Philips Displays), including director and international account manager in both Asia and Europe. Paul began his career as a production shift leader in a CRT factory.

My video with Paul Gray from a couple of years ago

ARM Set-top-box industry overview by Informa analyst

Posted by – March 31, 2014

ARM overtakes MIPS in the Set-top-box market as most of the Set-top-box SoC makers are showing ARM solutions, it’s about the ecosystem, about the platform, Android, Google TV, RDK, Wyplay, all of these user interfaces are being optimized for ARM, bringing cheaper and better more advanced and more powerful devices all at the same time. The TV market is bigger than the Web, as people still spend a lot more time watching TV than browsing the web in average. And the new features enabled by ARM, Android and other platforms, enable a lot more video-on-demand and other forms of interactivity on the TV.

2014 predictions from Jeff Orr, ABI Research analyst

Posted by – January 16, 2014

Jeff Orr talks about the latest and upcoming advances in technolgy, what he thinks will be the most interesting trends in consumer electronics in 2014 and beyond. You can find Jeff Orr’s latest articles at http://www.fiercewireless.com/author/jefforr and the ABI Research’s YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7Wm9N2jnbPMI62rVNfwObQ with their “Ask the Analyst” analyst commentary.

You can watch my previous video filmed with Jeff Orr in June 2010 here: http://138.2.152.197/2010/06/30/30-minutes-with-jeff-orr-of-abi-research/

Why CES is important

Posted by – January 5, 2014
Category: Opinions, CES

Check back for my 75+ best videos from the CES 2014 here at http://ARMdevices.net to be posted these next days, CES is an amazing place where 5000 companies all make better value for money and more interesting products than Apple/Microsoft/Oracle/IBM and about a dozen other $100+ Billion US Tech giants who all snub the CES because they don’t like competition. CES is where 5000 of the most interesting hardware startups from all over the world are exhibiting all at the same time in the USA and it’s not to be missed.

Wearables and Internet of Things are huge advances for society once they get implemented right. Sure you can always argue that all tech was invented 20-50 years ago, and that nothing new has been invented since. Yet the CES is really important because it showcases 5000 of the most interesting hardware startups from around the world, all showing their latest work all at the same time. The engineers and even the marketing representatives mostly love their own products and have lived creating them for the past many months, most often for the past many years, most of them are doing their best. And most often you can find absolutely awesome things even if you have a very boring or critical opinion about consumer electronics innovation. Sure tech innovation could go much faster if society was organized differently, perhaps, where somehow efforts were added to each other instead of done in parallel by competitors who kind of hate each other too much. But this is thankfully happening now more and more thanks to Android and the open source hardware platforms (which ARM ecosystem kind of is, ARM designs are open source, anyone can make them, they just have to licence the architecture), those things as accelerated innovation are actually visible and each CES is better than the last, clearly.

Fleur Pellerin Interview, French Minister of IT

Posted by – December 31, 2013

Here’s my quick interview with Fleur Pellerin, she is a politician and minister delegate in the French government. She was appointed Minister Delegate with responsibility for Small and Medium Enterprises, Innovation, and the Digital Economy attached to the Minister for Economic Regeneration (the former Ministry of the Economy, Finance, and Industry) by French President François Hollande on 16 May 2012. After my part in English that lasts 1 minute 55 seconds, I also filmed some of what she said to some other media in French.

My question is about what the Government can do to speed up Technological innovation, from Startups, to established small to medium sized companies to the big Tech companies in society. At the end I also try to ask if there is any chance that the French Government would re-introduce the Socialist party’s idea of Global Licence, an idea of introducing taxation at the ISP-level to finance arts and culture, pay artists, pay musicians/film makers/writers even bloggers and programmers is what I think could be good. Not to replace all existing monetization for content on the web, but to supplement it and to stop trying to put children in jail who pirate content on the Internet or to punish them by cutting off their Internet access.

My opinion is that Government has a big role to play in trying to help speed up Technological Innovation worldwide. Not just to let companies do what they want, where so much relies on the good intentions and good judgement of a few giant corporations like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Intel, I think that Governments should do the most possible to speed innovation forward in the best interest of all the people. That is to enable the usage of Smartphones, Smart devices, Apps ecosystems, etc to improve society for all citizen, to fix certain problems like health, food, education, accomodation, jobs, transportation, the economy, all those can be fixed by clever use of the existing potential of technology. I wonder if all those solutions do appear if Government just sit back and wait for big enterprises or for small new startups to become big enough successes fast enough to decide to develop and implement each of these technological solutions to fix each problem in society when they think it can be profitable enough for them or for when they think they have a good enough reason to provide solutions for each problem.

Here you can see Fleur Pellerin’s keynote discussion Q&A in English at LeWeb 2013:

And there was also another French Minister at LeWeb 2013, Arnaud Montebourg, who did some great performance in his Q&A answering questions from Tech Investors:

Kevin Marks talks evolution of the Web 2003-2023 at LeWeb 2013

Posted by – December 19, 2013

Kevin Marks talks HTML5, Open Standards, Webkit, browser ecosystem, it’s not just text anymore, it’s SVG, video, sound, device access and all kinds of stuff that are being baked into the platforms and that are being translated between the platforms, that is being solved. The difficulty is now we have large silos in Facebook, Twitter and some other proprietary social networks, that is what the IndieWeb is all about, trying to build infrastructure where components are composed on your own website, where you can swap pieces in and out of the proprietary social networking silos.

Here’s a video of Kevin Marks’s keynote presentation at LeWeb 2013:

Intel to make ARM Processors, firstly 64bit 14nm ARM Cortex-A53 ARMv8 for Altera

Posted by – October 31, 2013

Nathan Brookwood is an Analyst and Research Fellow at Insight 64, he is the source for the Forbes article The new Intel CEO has changed Intel’s policy, now deciding that it’s actually OK to manufacture ARM Processors in their Fab. Possibly now Intel is also going to make ARM Processors for Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD or someone else, possibly also even for themselves, possibly releasing a whole range of Intel ARM Processors to launch if Intel cares to have some reach into Smartphones, Tablets, ARM Laptops, Smart TVs, ARM Desktops, ARM Servers, I think Intel doesn’t need to not contribute to each of those ARM categories themselves too and by fabricating for Chip Makers, it depends what the new Intel CEO finds to be the thing to do for them.

My latest Smartphone collection on Android Central Live @ Samsung Developers conference 2013

Posted by – October 29, 2013

Check me on the Android Central show showing off my samples of some of the latest cheapest Android phones out of China. My range of latest phones include MediaTek MT6572 Dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 (512MB RAM) phones at $55 4″ (2G iPhone 5S style), $58 4″ 3G, $65 (3G SGS4-Mini style), $72 (3G SGS4 style), Spreadtrum 2G based at $36 4″ (2G Nokia windows phone style), $43 5.3″ (2G Note3 style), my Onyx E43 E Ink Android phone and Onyx Freescale iMX6 Solo Lite Android 4.0 E Ink E-reader.

Anyone else in the Silicon Valley would like to check out these devices? Let me know! I’ll be video-blogging at the ARM Techcon and Linaro Connect at the Santa Clara Convention Center during these next 4 days, then to spend another 6 days in San Francisco. I would like to visit the Twit Cottage next Sunday and I hope someone at Google invites me to their Mountain View headquarters!

This video was published at: http://www.androidcentral.com/android-central-live-nicolas-has-coolest-toys

My father’s funeral – part 1/3

Posted by – October 24, 2013

I miss you so much. And I’m sorry I never told you. You should have been 73 years old today. I would probably not have forgotten to call you to wish you happy birthday. I was actually seriously thinking about inviting you on a trip with me to China and to see your friend in Japan just in the week before I spoke with you for the last time 5 minutes on the phone briefly probably the day before you died probably of a heart attack in the shower and inundating the whole house. The neighbors only found you 2 and a half weeks later when they saw water leaking out of the house. Phone records show you never called anyone after the day that followed us speaking for the last time. I thought I couldn’t afford inviting you to come with me on your first trip to Asia as my credit card was already maxing out. This video is the first of 10 parts filmed by my Danish high-school friend at your funeral on July 5th 2013 in Switzerland. I hope you’ll like it, and I’m sorry if I don’t speak with my sister well enough yet. This is all still so shocking. You were supposed to see me getting children at some point in the future, you were supposed to see me succeed in business about technology. We were supposed to go to Brazil together next year to see Switzerland play in the World Cup. I’m sorry I never invited you to see your favorite team Bayer Moenchengladbach play in their stadium. I was too busy being lazy when I was not video-blogging these past 10 years! Sorry I didn’t help you more financially, I should have bought you a new car when they possessed yours 4 years ago. Most importantly I’m sorry I didn’t speak to you more politely, that I nearly never sat with you at the dinner table and that I didn’t spend a day without insulting you about stupid things in the last 10-30 years. I’m sorry I didn’t ask you more about our family origins, about your travel stories, about your passion for music, movies, culture, history, women, you could have taught me so much more, but I didn’t listen enough, I should have listened more! I should have scanned all your thousands of slides and pictures when you asked me several times while you were alive so you could have told me stories about who and what is on all those masterpieces that you took all over the world in the 60’ies, 70’ies and 80’ies, many of your photos will have to stay mysterious to me and to my sister forever now. I’m sorry I didn’t ask you more about your mother and about your father, about your uncles, about your brothers! I want to know but now it’s too late! Where am I from? You knew but I didn’t ask. Sorry I didn’t convince you and my sister to see each other more often in the last 20 years, I should have convinced you to visit my apartment in Denmark even though you swore you never again would go to Denmark after what happened to you there. Sorry I post videos about you to my YouTube channel, I never spoke about you to all these people while you were alive! Sorry I don’t follow all the football matches which you have missed since you died. I didn’t watch Basel in the Champions League (although I watched the full rerun of them beating Chelsea later), I didn’t watch Bayer Moenchengladbach in the Bundesliga, I didn’t even watch Switzerland win all their matches in the World Cup qualifiers. I know you would have been disappointed at me not watching all those matches! Time difference with Asia and my busy times video-blogging isn’t an excuse! Sorry I didn’t watch any of your favorite French TV shows since you died. I have no idea if those shows and those TV presenters are still on the air, I guess they are.

Watch My father is dead

My dad, perhaps 45 years ago:
gerard passport

25 million views

Posted by – October 21, 2013
Category: Opinions

Thanks for watching! http://youtube.com/charbax

Charbax 25 million views on YouTube

Planned Obsolescence and IEEE’s new P1874 standard presented by William Lumpkins of IEEE

Posted by – October 13, 2013

IEEE launches the P1784 Standard for Documentation Schema for Repair and Assembly of Electronic Devices for users and the industry working together to make all devices easily repairable by people themselves by just looking up how to fix everything online. Standard for documentation for showing how to take devices apart and fix it one self, without needing to send devices back for repair, but also enabling more repair centers to be opened up everywhere.

William Lumpkins, IEEE Senior Member, talks about Artificial Intelligence in the Home

Posted by – October 10, 2013

William Lumpkins is an IEEE Senior Member, IEEE 1874 Working Group Chair, IEEE Consumer Electronics Society Standards Chair, IEEE Consumer Electronics Society Magazine Associate Editor, here he talks about Artificial Intelligence in the home, Japanese Tech culture/marketing, Tech politics and more.

Techmeme BS Stories 28.09.13

Posted by – October 1, 2013

Unprepared opinions on the BS Stories of September 28th 2013 on http://www.techmeme.com/130928/h1400 filmed in Japan on tour-boat going through caves at Dogashima on Izu peninsula and filmed walking in the Matsuzaki village.

Techmeme BS Stories 26.09.13

Posted by – September 28, 2013

Unprepared opinions at lake by Mt Fuji Volcano in Japan, on 26th September 2013 day’s BS Techmeme stories of the Silicon Valley Tech News blogosphere. Archive of Techmeme from the day I did this video: http://www.techmeme.com/130926/h1400

Guest Post: changing the concept of hdmi tv dongles

Posted by – September 15, 2013
Category: HDMI Sticks, Opinions

This is a Guest Post by Alex Marinho. Do you want to write guest posts on ARMdevices.net? Send me an email charbax@gmail.com and let me know what you want to write about.

I love computers and I am fascinated by them, and the idea that i can mount my own computer with my hands like lego and this has in the 90’s. Now we have mini pcs or hdmi tv dongles small computers that you can put in your pocket but they have some faults.
1-Internal wifi with bad performance, solution for this issue, external antennas that were implemented by the manufactures (see cozyswan s400 hdmi tv dongle and others)

2-A audio combo jack,is  important for people that have lcd monitor’s that dont have speakers, they need the audio combo jack  (see MK806 hdmi tv dongle)

3-A 2-pin connector for a fan and holes to fix the fan into the board, for heating problems.

4-change the usb 2.0 to usb 3.0 for better performance (see hardkernel odroid xu+E)

5-the storage issue, all hdmi dongles have nand flash that is welded and you cannot remove to upgrade, only by microsd card.

People nowadays use microsd cards to install linux and to boot from the card but a youtube user posted that booting from a microsd card is not very fast and the performance is not very spectacular.(30MBps)

So the best solution is using a Emmc card with a connector in the bottom-160 Mbps (see hardkernel)

so with paint and gimp i altered some pictures of hdmi tv dongles that i found in the internet to show you what I considered should be the perfect Hdmi tv dongle
pen usb hdmi 0
In this first picture I added by paint some holes and a 2-pin fan connector to put a “future” fan like this (photo from a russian web site)
pen usb hdmi 2
In the third picture, I removed by paint the NAND FLASH and I added a Emmc connector. And the combo audio connector because a lot of people that I know they dont have speakers in their lcd monitor.
pen usb hdmi 1
In the market there is already a company (hardkernel) selling this emmc cards with connectors, but is very expensive if every company that does hdmi tv dongles adopt this standard i think that the price will come down, and everyone can altered their storage very easy.
eMMC Module 64GB and emmc reader 200 percent faster than a class 10 sdhc card
I am writing this post to show people that they can present good ideas to change the statuos quo of the designs of the hdmi tv dongles or mini pc.

And manufactures could see what can they do to change for a better way the mini pc.

ARMdevices.net Shenzhen Sourcing Service launched


Do you need help/advice sourcing bulks of devices out of Shenzhen? You can now get support and sourcing service from me at http://138.2.152.197/sourcing/ and from my new team of experts in Shenzhen to connect you with the best prices, the best quality, the most reliable Shenzhen factories making Tablets, HDMI Sticks, Smartphones, Laptops, Wearables and any of the other emerging devices from the Shenzhen tech market.

For a fixed fee of $500, you can talk to me on video-chat (Google Hangout or Skype) for at least 1 hour, at a time of your choosing, I’ll tell you what I know for what you want to know, and you get to be connected by emails with my sourcing expert partners here in Shenzhen. We will do our best to get you to the best possible prices/features for the devices that you are looking to import into your country.

Have you been looking at all my videos and checked the business cards visible to $20/year members, but you are still unsure which factory is the best for what you want? Do you want ideas for devices to sell? Do you want my opinions on what may be best for your market? Do you want to ask me questions and do you need my advice on email? This is the service for you.

Check it out at http://138.2.152.197/sourcing/

New video every 8 hours on ARMdevices.net, forever

Posted by – August 10, 2013
Category: Opinions

Stepping up quality, production value, range and reach of the original videos and articles to be posted on ARMdevices.net. Starting now, there will be a new video posted on ARMdevices.net every 8 hours, forever. Posting times will be around 4am, 12pm and 8pm Central European Time (6am/2pm/10pm EST, 3am/12pm/7pm PST). Check back regularly!

This means I have to film 1095 new videos each year to keep up with the rate of 3 new videos per day. I’ll try.

Not all videos are as cool, I’d like to move important higher quality videos to the front of the queue as much as possible. So don’t worry I won’t delay publishing important videos too much.

To post that many new original videos on ARMdevices.net this regularly, I have now hired 2 new bloggers to help me write all the titles, descriptions to all the videos so that I can focus on filming and uploading the videos and they take care of writing the text for each video.

Here are the new writers on ARMdevices.net:

M@ddy

maddy

From Hyderabad Tech city in India. Mobile enthusiast and freelance tech writer.

juliusaugustus

juliusaugustus

18-year old student from California. He’s been following ARMdevices.net for years and now he’ll be helping post more videos here more regularly.

Kevin Sadria

Student, also contributing some content.

And this site can further be expanded to include more bloggers, perhaps even more video-bloggers, the plan is for ARMdevices.net to be bigger and better than Engadget, TheVerge and all the sites on Techmeme combined within months, candidates can apply here charbax@gmail.com

To pay for the bloggers (who I have to pay), to pay for my video-blogging travels, to pay for eventual new equipment, to pay for scoops and stolen iphones, you are welcome, if you want, to donate any amount that you’d like for each new video that is being published here on ARMdevices.net if you pledge a per-view amount at http://www.patreon.com/charbax. For example you can choose to donate $0.10 per video, you can set a donations limit if you’re worried that I may post too many videos. But you can also donate more than $0.10 per video, any amount is cool, thanks a lot! (patreon takes 8% of donations as their fee, but I don’t know of any cheaper alternative to that yet)

ARMdevices.net Hangout Show: Moto X, Chromecast and other Tech News Live

Posted by – August 1, 2013

A few hours before the official unveiling of the Google Moto X phone, here I talk with Thomas Christiansen of http://worldoftommy.com, +Todd Neumann of AT&T and +Rafael Morales of http://AndroidSpin.com

Would you like to participate in the next ARMdevices.net Hangout Show? Leave a comment here or on the Google+ thread with your Google+ Profile link and I will invite you to be on the next show when we record it live!