Propad Android VGA DLP Projector

Posted by – April 11, 2012

The price is $650 for now.

Aotek Mini Retro DV, super small photo/video camera

Posted by – April 11, 2012

I bought a sample cause I think it’s fun, although the 200rmb (with the second fish eye lense) is a bit high.

Wopad Samsung 7″, 8″, 9.7″

Posted by – April 11, 2012

Zhenai A900 waterproof MT6575 smartphone


They are showing it with the MT6573 right now, the MT6575 is ready quite soon for it.

Quicklinkcom payments

Posted by – April 11, 2012

KooGame “Angry Fish” Run Fish Run iPad/iPhone game

Posted by – April 11, 2012

KooGame made a game that looks like Angry Birds but is about Fish.

Shenzhen Tena Smartbox WiFi mirroring


Moreways LCD

Posted by – April 11, 2012

$63 7″ capacitive Boxchip A10 Tablet

Posted by – April 10, 2012

This is getting close to the cheapest price you can find a 7″ capacitive ARM Cortex-A8 with Mali-400 graphics powered Ice Cream Sandwich WVGA tablet. I bought 2, because I want to test this more. Let me know in the comments if you may be interested to buy one of these (I may try to organize some group buy of this through my website if there is demand). Let me know in the comments what I should test about this tablet.

Zopo ZP100 MT6575 4.3″ qHD $174 street price

Posted by – April 10, 2012

The MediaTek MT6575 is out of the gate. ARM Cortex-A9 invades the low cost Shenzhen Smartphones market. http://www.zopomobile.com opened their first store on the Huaqiangbei Shenzhen Smartphones market street, to sell their new ZP100 smartphone at 1099rmb (USD$174). It’s got an awesome 4.3″ qHD 960×540 LCD capacitive screen made by Sharp, a 5 megapixel auto-focus camera/camcorder made by Sony, the MT6575 makes it support Dual-sim WCDMA/3G/Data and GPRS/Voice at the same time. And it’s got a removable 1650mAh battery, MicroSD slot and Micro-USB that does not double as an MHL output. Of course I bought one because I want to test the MT6575 processor. Let me know in the comments what you would like to see me test on this and other upcoming MT6575 Smartphones.

Shenzhen Factory Tour, exclusive video at the Hongda Laptop Factory

Posted by – April 10, 2012

Here is a video filmed in one of the many small to medium sized Shenzhen factories. This one is able to output thousands of laptops and tablets per day. The Hongda factory manufactures for http://www.yooe.com.cn among others.

$142 7″ WVGA MT6573 Dual-sim 3G/2G tablet

Posted by – April 10, 2012

http://www.yooe.com.cn and http://www.runtong.com.hk presents their latest MediaTek MT6573 ARM11 based 7″ WVGA 3G/2G dual-sim tablet with a removable 4000mAh battery. They also plan to provide the MT6575 version at nearly the same price after June.

Boxchip A13 sub-$55 7″ Capacitive ICS Tablet by www.yooe.com.cn, even cheaper ARM Cortex-A8!

Posted by – April 9, 2012

The new Boxchip A13 is designed to provide for even cheaper Ice Cream Sandwich tablets, now reaching the sub-$55 price point. By June, http://www.yooe.com.cn says they can sell this one in bulk below 300rmb which is below USD$47! At that price you get a 7″ capacitive ICS awesome experience! WVGA at that price, I don’t know how much more it costs them to make it a 7″ 1024×600 screen. The AllWinner Boxchip A13 removes the HDMI output, otherwise most seems to be the same as the now very popular AllWinner Boxchip A10 based tablet platform! If you are interested to buy this tablet for sub-$55 (any quantity) let me know in the comments (maybe I can find a way to make it a grouped purchase through Hong Kong on my website).

$285 8.9″ capacitive Windows 8 Intel Atom N2600 Dual-core Laptop/Tablet convertible by www.yooe.com.cn

Posted by – April 9, 2012

http://www.yooe.com.cn presents their new 8.9″ tablet/laptop convertible powered by the Intel Atom N2600 processor, it costs about 1800rmb ($285) in bulk.

$158 5″ WVGA MT6575 Cortex-A9 Smartphone presented by yooe.com.cn and runtong.com.hk

Posted by – April 9, 2012

This 5″ smartphone looks pretty awesome for $158, it’s powered by the new MediaTek MT6575 single-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor, with Dual-sim slots WCDMA 3G and GPRS. If you are interested in buying this phone, let me know in the comments (maybe I can find a way to make it a grouped purchase through Hong Kong).

Huaqiangbei Shenzhen Smartphones Market

Posted by – April 8, 2012

Here is my first 2012 video at the Shenzhen Smartphones Market! This market is so awesome, huge, fantastic, compressed, action packed, full of devices, walking around the Shenzhen Smartphones market is hugely impressive. Check back in the days to come as I’ll post videos of the coolest devices that I can find here.

Smartphone repair at the Shenzhen Smartphones Market

Posted by – April 8, 2012

At the Smartphones market in Shenzhen China, you can find these experts who can open up any broken phone, find out what is broken and fix them. They have screws, soldering irons, volt measuring equipment, cutters, and other equipment to analyse, find the defects and fix the devices.

I’m in Shenzhen and Hong Kong this week!


I’m video-blogging 3 conferences this week, Shenzhen Electronics Fair (April 10-11th), China Sourcing Fair (April 12, 15th) and the HKTDC Electronics Fair (April 13-14, 16th). http://ARMdevices.net is the place to be, in the coming days I will post over a hundred videos of the latest upcoming Chinese Android devices, such as the coolest most affordable newest Android smartphones, tablets, ARM Powered laptops, set-top-boxes, e-readers, http://ARMdevices.net is the website to go to to get the most extensive coverage of the status of those technologies out of Shenzhen and Hong Kong China!

As last year, I’ll try to provide you with some behind the scenes videos showing how the factories, electronics markets, PCB design houses, that is, if I find some companies who invite me in for filming.

Let me know here in the comments of any awesome Shenzhen company that you think I should visit today, tomorrow, on the 9th, and let me know right here and to my email charbax@gmail.com if there are any awesome Chinese companies that you think I should video-blog in priority at the 3 upcoming conferences.

Here are some of the topics I expect to find here and film:

– MT6575 qHD 4.3″ ARM Cortex-A9 ICS smartphones, sub-$140? (also 3.5-5″ at variable pricing)
– MT6573 WVGA 3.5-5″ ARM11 ICS smartphones, sub-$80?
– RK2918 (other?) awesome ARM Powered laptops running ICS and Chrome for Android smoothly today, sub-$80?
– 9.7″ IPS (exact same screen as iPad1/2) Android ICS tablets, powerful Boxchip A10/Rk2918 and faster, sub-$120?
– Super smooth Boxchip A10, RK2918, AmLogic, i.MX53 ICS capacitive 7″ 1024×600 tablets, sub-$70?
– Smooth ST-Ericsson U8500 7″ 1024×600 ICS with built-in 3G, sub-$80?
– RK2918, AmLogic (other?) set-top-box, potentially Google TV ready, sub-$50?
More!

Of course it’ll be awesome to discover all those and much more. Things like flexible E Ink devices may be brewing somewhere in Shenzhen (to be shown already?), can I find some Pixel Qi devices? Which are the other affordable ICS Smartphone, Tablet platforms that are coming out of Shenzhen?

Let me know what you think is coming out of Shenzhen now. Let me know what you know is coming out of Shenzhen now. Give me company names, product names, component descriptions, send me everything and comment, thanks!

FON launches Fonera Simpl with EAP

Posted by – April 3, 2012

FON is the worlds biggest WiFi community, thus far with 5 million users around the world using FON routers to share their WiFi internet with neighbors and roam the world for free. Now they are adding EAP functionality to the WiFi router offering mobile operators a unique way to relieve congested networks. The idea is that you can maybe soon get closer to unlimited data for a very cheap pre-paid or subscription smartphone contract, all the while the carrier tries to connect you on WiFi as often as possible and as automatically as possible. As http://republicwireless.com is trying to do it in the USA, all the worlds carriers should implement FON support and automatically connect to FON WiFi hotspots for transfering the data and voice packets and thus save on 3G and 4G bandwidth costs. Monthly traffic generated via Fon WiFi is over 2 Petabytes, a 20 fold increase in just two years. Today, the size of the Fon network increases by a thousand hotspots every four hours, 100 times faster than in 2008. I’d like to see FON include White Spaces in the routers and thus contribute to create a worldwide free unlimited bandwidth network for everyone!

You can read more in the press release

Apple buys Facebook for $92.5 Billion, investors panic

Posted by – April 1, 2012
Category: Opinions

At 1:13PM Eastern Time, Apple Computers Inc announced that they have been in advanced talks for the past 3 months to acquire Facebook Inc of Santa Clara. The deal is about $69.1 Billion in cash and $23.4 Billion in shares. Apple Computers Inc CEO Tim Cook said:

We love what Facebook Inc has done with Social Networking and find it to be a perfect match to integrate with our iCloud and iTunes. If the European regulators approve of our plans to acquire Facebook Inc, we will integrated it Ping and the App Store. Our goal is to strengthen our position on cloud technologies through acquiring Facebook’s technology and talented workforce and together we plan to build a strong search competitor to Google.

At the news of this acquisition, Apple Computers Inc stock price was down 11.94% in after hours Japanese Nikkei tradings. Wall Street analysts are in shock. Goldman Sachs Group Inc chief analyst George Moignon had this to say:

We didn’t see this one coming. After Apple for the first time announced a dividend just 2 weeks ago, we were very surprised to hear this. We have been valuating Facebook Inc at $102 Billion because we believe in the value of their social graph. Yet we did not anticipate that Apple would spend nearly all of its cash and assets to buy the social network.

Baird Research analyst Colin Fritz reports:

After hearing this announcement, we have decided to recommend shorting AAPL stock. Our calculations demonstrate that over 90% of Apple’s current profits come from the sale of their ARM Powered devices, most importantly the iPhone 4S which currently represents over 80% of Apple Computers Inc’s overall profits. We would have thought Apple would invest their cash in owning Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese and Korean manufacturing capacity and blocking out the cheaper and better Android competition. We would have recommended Apple acquire Foxconn, Pegatron and Wistron, that they acquire Sharp Display Inc and that Apple’s cash reserves could have allowed Apple to own a controlling share of Japan Display Inc and then block out cheaper and better Android competition from getting access to the latest screen technologies and that Apple could have tried to also get exclusives on more crucial hardware components of ARM Powered tablets and smartphones. But instead, we now hear that Apple has planned to spend most of their cash on purchasing Facebook, which quite frankly, we do not estimate to have that much value. We believe users easily can migrate over to competing social networks such as Google+, and that Facebook’s social graph actually is quite worthless.

What do you think of this announcement? Do you think Apple has a chance to build a Google search competitor now that they are announcing the purchase of Facebook? If this is not the right move, what do you think Apple should have done with their $100 Billion? What do you think Mark Zuckerberg is going to do with the $23.7 Billion cash that is his share of this acquisition?