Category: OS

Pricing speculations on cheaper Samsung Galaxy R, Tegra2 4.2″ Super Clear LCD Smartphone

Posted by Charbax – August 14, 2011

Arguably, the Samsung Galaxy S2 is the best phone in the world today. Samsung now also brings what looks to become a lower cost similar smartphone experience using the Tegra2 Dual-core 1Ghz processor instead of the 1.2Ghz Dual-core Exynos and using an LCD touch screen instead of the more expensive and harder to manufacture Super AMOLED Plus screen.

I played with the Samsung Galaxy S2 for a few days as I was able to borrow it during Computex, it’s a very impressive phone, the screen is amazing and the processor for now seems unbeaten in terms of performance (until 1.5Ghz Dual-core OMAP4460 devices start coming out next month).

In Europe, I cannot find the Samsung Galaxy S2 sold below 458€ and in the US it seems to cost $629. Clearly, that’s very expensive. But I guess, many people still consider that the normal going rate for high-end smart phones?

What is really the true manufacturing cost for Samsung on the Samsung Galaxy S2? My guess is they spend less than $200 to manufacture each phone (which is probably a bit higher than Apple and other LCD based Android smart phone makers pay per phone). Which means they are making upwards 200% profit margin on each phone. Sure enough, Samsung spends extra on making the Super AMOLED Plus screen, which they also are in the process of using their new multi-billion dollar Super AMOLED Plus factory to try to ramp up mass manufacturing to keep up with demand. But I guess that’s just how things are for getting a Samsung for now. I’d find it cool if they decided to sell the Samsung Galaxy S2 for $250 unlocked or 250€, it may allow them to not loose money and gain huge market share as they increase their mass manufacturing even much further, but that may be too disruptive for the whole smart phone carrier business model yet.

Anyways, Samsung may save with Galaxy R compared to S2 (according to my pure guess) about $20 on the LCD, and perhaps about $10 on the processor and other electronics that come with the Tegra2 package. A $30 savings in Bill of Material, may translate to upwards $100 cheaper retail price. So I expect Samsung will sell the Samsung Galaxy R below 399€ and below $499 as unlocked. I do not consider the carrier subsidized pricings as I consider those more expensive, they can sometimes add up to $2500 over the 2-year contracts, which I do not consider a pricing advantage over buying the phones unlocked and then using cheaper data and voice SIM cards in there.

What do I recommend geeks who want the best regardless of the price? If you can’t wait, get a Samsung Galaxy S2, don’t look too much at the price tag, consider all competing big brand Android phones cost about the same. If you can wait, maybe in 1 or 2 months, the rumored Samsung Nexus Prime might be coming with Ice Cream Sandwich. I do not know if the rumors of a 720p Super AMOLED Plus 4.3″ screen are realistic, or if Samsung will use the 1.5Ghz Dual-core OMAP4460 or perhaps overclock their own Dual-core Exynos platform to 1.5Ghz. I would not be surprised if the rumored Nexus Prime is more or less the same as a Samsung Galaxy S2, with very minor design changes and it just running vanilla Ice Cream Sandwich, just like the Nexus S is a copy of the Samsung Galaxy S1 and the Nexus One is a copy of the HTC Desire. The OMAP4460 Ice Cream Sandwiches might be used by LG, Motorola and other companies which may have more history in working with Texas Instruments, but who knows, maybe Texas Instruments is doing huge efforts to provide attractive package deals to all the device makers and that they all feel they cannot afford to miss the non-exclusive TI OMAP4460 based opportunity.

TheInquirer recently quoted analysts saying that Samsung has now overtaken Apple and has become the worlds biggest smart phone maker.

Samsung might have sold more smartphones than Apple and Nokia during April, May and June

With phones like the Samsung Nexus Prime, Galaxy R, cheaper Galaxy phones (2, 3) targetted at pre-paid and developing countries (including focus on BRIC, Brazil, Russia, India, China), the new Super AMOLED Plus factory being ready for increased mass production, Samsung’s rise in smart phone market share is likely to only increase. Consider that with just Samsung’s Android smart phones, there are more sales than the iPhone, consider how much more Android smart phones sell overall compared to iPhone when all the other many growing Android smart phone makers are put together. I think it is not ridiculous to expect a 1/4 ratio in daily sales to be demonstrated pretty soon, likely before Christmas, regardless of how many current iPhone owners decide to upgrade to the iPhone5.

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Windows Phone General Manager leaves Microsoft

Posted by Charbax – August 9, 2011

Charlie Kindel, Windows Phone Developer Ecosystem General Manager, quit his job at Microsoft to start a new (Android?) startup in Seattle. Windows Phone is kind of a failure and is rapidly losing market share to the superior Android platform in the smart phone and tablet race. To remain a fair competitor in this market, will Microsoft stop suing Android companies for bogus patents and bogus licences, stop charging licences for Windows (give it away for free!) and even open up the source? How can anyone (fairly) compete with open source and free?

Here is my video interview with Charlie Kindel filmed at last year’s LeWeb conference in Paris:

Found via: techmeme.com

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Acer to release an ARM Powered Laptop next week!

Posted by Charbax – July 23, 2011

x86 is becoming more and more problematic for Laptop makers as the retail prices are lowered, component and manufacturing costs remain high, profit margins are lowered and the overall Laptop market growth is being slowed by consumers using gradually more and more of their consumer electronics budgets on ARM Powered Tablets and Smartphones instead of x86.

Acer’s previous CEO got fired about 3 months ago as their board of directors were angry at them not investing enough of their potential into releasing more ARM Powered devices, those that can maximize profit margins and enable real growth.

The big question for this ARM Powered Acer Laptop is to know if this will run the Tegra2, does that provide enough memory bandwidth for a good multi-tab web browsing experience, if they somehow have been able to provide a version of the 1Ghz Tegra2 with more memory bandwidth for Laptop use, or if performance is simply going to be similar to the awesome ARM Powered Toshiba AC100 released last year.

The other big question is do they run Chrome OS, Ubuntu, Android Honeycomb or all of the above? Wouldn’t it be awesome if Acer came forward and said something like “Hey, we will support more than 1 OS, even Windows 8 when it comes out, simply choose your OS in a multi-boot menu and we will provide updates for each OS over the Internet or they can be updated through the SD card”. I think multi-boot multi-OS support is the key to enable a successful ARM Powered Laptop product for convincing the early adopters now while the whole Linaro software is being optimized and worked on, while memory bandwidth on ARM Powered laptops may or may not provide a fully smooth multi-tab full javascripts and Flash web browsing experience, and while so many nice OS are competing with each other to provide the best most hardware accelerated web browsing experience. I would for example very much like Chrome OS on this, but the look of Android Honeycomb on a Laptop sure is nice and Ubuntu on ARM is becoming awesome!

The news arrives by way of company chairman and CEO J.T. Wang as he addressed concerns about the company dropping from the second world’s largest PC manufacturer to the fourth largest during the second quarter of 2011. He said that to regain its lost market share, the company plans to adopt a new strategy to create “more value instead of pursuing volume growth.”

This is Awesome! ARM Powered Laptops are CHEAPER, use much lower power, thinner, lighter, would be perfect in a $199 ARM Powered Acer Chromebook, this is a perfect way for Acer to introduce something new to dominate a market.

Finally, instead of simply pushing out x86 powered reference design laptops based on Intel and AMD x86 chips, now Acer is investing to differentiate, improve, optimize, customize and design awesomeness through ARM Powered laptops that run embedded software.

Acer is not the only one!

Last month, Digitimes reported that Several vendors plan to offer ARM-architecture notebooks.

Several vendors, including Samsung Electronics, Toshiba, Acer and Asustek Computer, plan to develop ARM architecture notebooks, with products possibly to be launched as early as the end of 2011, according to industry sources.

Samsung may release Exynos 4210 Powered Chromebooks! Toshiba is probably doing an AC200! Asus is also rumored to be preparing a 13″ ARM Powered Android Laptop similar to its Asus Transformer!

Look forward to A LOT of FUN TIMES ahead in the ARM Powered Laptop market. Which ARM Processor with how much memory bandwidth and which software OS would you like to run on your next ARM Powered laptop?

via: liliputing.com and tomshardware.com

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Best Tablet in the World: Archos 80 and 101 G9, my first hands-on

Posted by Charbax – July 13, 2011

I got lucky enough to be able to play around with the new Archos G9 tablets for a few minutes (as I am the admin on http://forum.archosfans.com), they are awesome. Here are some of the features that I think makes this probably one of the best tablets in the world when it comes out in September:
- 50% faster than iPad2/Xoom/Transformer/Tab101/etc, 1.5Ghz Dual-core OMAP4460 ARM Cortex-A9 vs 1Ghz for the others (Quad-cores such as Nvidia Tegra3 are rumored to come at 1.2Ghz so this dual-core may be 25% faster for some things that are not too parallel and perhaps about 20% slower on other more parallel processed things)
- Optional unlocked $49 3G Dongle slides in the back
- Built-in kick-stand
- HDMI-out (1080p All Codecs High Profile High Bitrates) with most powerful Video/Audio/Photo apps on any device with automatic meta-data and Upnp/Samba streaming support
- 2x USB Host (one is dedicated for 3G Dongle)
- Honeycomb 3.2 with official Google Marketplace pre-installed
- Most importantly, starts at $279 for 8″, $349 for 10.1″, there will be all kinds of options though, 16GB Flash or 250GB hard drive (the 250GB version is likely around $100 more than the 16GB flash version, to be confirmed) don’t worry about hard drive speed/failures, all the Android OS and apps are on 4GB Flash based ROM cache so the OS feels 100% as fast as on a Flash based tablet, the HDD only spins up when loading big video files into memory while you probably are not likely to be running around with it anyway.

This is my first video showing how those tablets are. Look forward to many more videos that I will post about the Archos G9 if I can get some review samples at one point in the next few weeks until and after they are released in September worldwide.

I would have liked to see them do 5″ and 7″ G9 tablets as well to be more pocketable (pants 5″ or jacket 7″ pockets), but for now, Archos has nothing to announce regarding more sizes for the G9 series, it’s open to speculation, my speculation is that it may be the reason for them to have to wait for Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich to come and support more screen sizes officially and also it may be a question of production capacity and limiting the amount of skews they release.

The OMAP4460 that comes in the Archos G9 series is quite amazing. It can do 1080p at 60 frames per second, for sure all codecs high profile high bitrates at 30 frames per second. It’s got an awesome overclocked Imagination GPU for advanced 3D graphics making HDMI out 3D games smooth and totally making this a potential up to N64/PS/DC emulator console replacement on your HDTV. HD Netflix can be supported. You can easily do 720p video conferencing, even 1080p video conferencing can be supported if a 1080p USB Webcam can be made to work on this Android.

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Freescale i.MX50 processor series for e-readers launched

Posted by Charbax – July 11, 2011

Freescale is expanding their line of processors that are customized for e-reader type of applications with the i.MX502, i.MX503, i.MX507 and i.MX508 processors. Compared with i.MX51/53, i.MX50 is built to lack GPU for 3D acceleration (unnecessary on e-readers) but they can do 2D and have the option (i.MX503 and i.MX508) to hardware accelerate vector graphics through the OpenVG accelerator. This series is the first processor on the market to combine ARM Cortex-A8 with an EPD controller. Those are in different configurations to be used for e-ink (i.MX508 with OpenVG and i.MX507 without) or LCD e-readers (i.MX503 with OpenVG and i.MX502 without). Read the full press release here. Find more info at freescale.com

Android for cars using COQOS by OpenSynergy

Posted by Charbax – June 27, 2011

They have Android running on the Freescale i.MX53, but it’s running virtualized using a separation micro-kernel they call COQOS offering the real-time features that are required in a car running the industry-standard AUTOSAR software also at the same time, thus this solution is fully secure. You can find more information at http://www.opensynergy.com/en/Products/COQOS

AllGoConnect for Auto Head-unit to smart phone connectivity

Posted by Charbax – June 25, 2011

Last year, AllGo presented the $35 tablet idea, which they are still working on. This year they are focusing their FTF presentation on their Android powered in-car interactivity features, with Nokia Terminal Mode and USB/MTP/iPod playback.

Microsoft Windows at the Freescale Technology Forum

Posted by Charbax – June 25, 2011

Microsoft is preparing Windows 8 on ARM, but until then, there are Windows CE solutions in use and in the works such as these solutions demonstrated in this video. What do you think about Microsoft’s positionning in this embedded software market? Paul Wright offers his opinions on Windows in the second half of this video.

Archos 80 G9, Archos 101 G9, official presentation video

Posted by Charbax – June 23, 2011

Archos 80 G9 and Archos 101 G9, just unveiled. This is the official presentation video. Find more informations at http://www.archos.com/products/gen9/index.html?country=us&lang=en

Kobo Touch, $129 i.MX508 WiFi infrared-touch e-reader

Posted by Charbax – June 23, 2011

This may be the best e-reader on the market today. If it does run Android, if Kobo decides to open up the access to those Android features and not lock it down to only be about buying ebooks on their ebook store. Right now it may not be running Android at all, at least Kobo is not taking advantage of the potential Android openness yet. Hopefully Kobo updates their firmware for it to run a fully open Android, they can monetize e-readers in other new ways not only by locking it for a e-book store.