Here’s the world’s most powerful smartphone, running an Octa-core Hisilicon Kirin950 quad ARM Cortex-A72 and quad ARM Cortex-A53 in big.LITTLE configuration with the ARM Mali-T880 GPU and also an ARM Cortex-M7 for the sensor hub on TSMC 16nm FinFET+ node. With a 1080p 6″ display with 2.5D “elevation”, 4000mAh battery, dual-SIM LTE Cat-6, 32GB/64GB/128GB storage and 3GB/4GB RAM. Now for sale in China starting at $470 for 3GB RAM and 32GB Flash to $570 for 4GB RAM and 64GB Flash. So for about the same price as a Nexus 6P 64GB you get more RAM, more CPU, more GPU (possibly, I didn’t check performance configuration benchmarks), dual-SIM slots, MicroSD card support (you have to choose between MicroSD or the second SIM card in the same slot as far as I understand) also I hear that maybe that the 4GB/64GB version and above have worldwide LTE/HSPA+ bands and are not limited to either European/Asian or US bands (to be confirmed?) possibly that the Camera optics are the same from Sony as in the Nexus 6P, though it records only 1080p video and not 4K and the display is only a 1080p and not 2K. The battery life, usability benchmarks, connectivity speed is to be tested. This might be the best smartphone in the world today. Rumors are that Huawei plans to manufacture at least 1 Million units per month, they plan to overtake the Huawei Mate 7 sales amount that was over 7 million units over the previous year. I think that if Huawei wants to sell 70 million units of this one, they can do it if they price it $100 or $200 lower and make it available everywhere where people demand to buy it. I think that Huawei should use Google Now Nexus Style launcher as default and full Google designed UI instead of EMUI. I wonder if video output such as MHL works to use the powerful processor with an external Laptop Dock or Desktop Dock and I wish that using MicroSD and Dual-sim at the same time was possible. USB Type-C would have been more interesting.
Author:
Karen Sandler, Software Freedom Conservancy
Karen Sandler Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy offers an inside look of the state of compliance from the perspective of the Software Freedom Conservancy, a nonprofit charitable organization that is the most active in the field. In her keynote Karen gives an overview of where things are with compliance initiatives and insight into the ideological movement behind copyleft.
Martin Stadtler, Director of Linaro Enterprise Group
Working on the Boot Architecture (ACPI, UEFI), members from AMD, Qualcomm, Cavium, Alibaba, all engineers working together to make all the software boot for ARM Servers, leading projects around Open Stack, Big Data, going up the stack, finding things to optimize, such as virtualization, to have Server parity on ARM vs x86.
EYE VR professional VR 42 cameras, 24 microphones
For professional VR TV Show or Movie recordings, EYE VR camera incorporates 42 cameras and 24 microphones in a 3-axis design, that can capture of 3D 360 video, in all 3 axes of head movement.
You can read more at http://360designs.io/
Toradex shows Freescale i.MX7, Windows 10 IoT Core on ARM
Toradex shows their upcoming Freescale i.MX7 based System on Module (SOM). The module is pin compatible with the existing Toradex Colibri Modules based on i.MX6, Vybrid, PXA and Nvidia Tegra. The i.MX7 is a heterogeneous asymmetric multicore system including a Dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 and a ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller for real-time. The Toradex computer module will be available at the official i.MX7 launch early next year. Also first time in public, Toradex shows Microsoft Windows 10 IoT Core on an ARM based SOM which is designed to be used directly in volume. The module is based on a Nvidia Tegra 3 which is pin compatible with the I.MX7 and provides a fully HW accelerated DirectX driver.
Robot Development Kit using Hardkernel ODROID-C1+, VU7 display, ODROID-XU4
Bo Lechnowsky of ameriDroid.com shows the fully-programmable robot kit based on the ODROID-C1+ and controllable through the web. We then moved on to an 8-inch tablet kit for the ODROID-C1+ which includes case, multi-touch screen and battery for less than $100 due to be available this December. After this, we looked at a new 7-inch tablet-style multi-touch display from ODROID called the VU7 that allows attaching an ODROID-C1+ to the backside providing an expandable tablet-like solution for low cost. The ODROID-XU4 was discussed, an Exynos-5422 octa-core ARM Cortex-A15 at 2.0GHz and ARM Cortex-A7 at 1.4GHz ARM board with 2GB LPDDR3 on-board, USB3.0/2.0 ports and gigabit Ethernet along with removable eMMC and microSD storage options. An ODROID-C1+ was shown which is a low-cost but powerful AmLogic S805 quad-core ARM Cortex-A5 at 1.5GHz ARM board with 1GB LPDDR3 on-board with USB2.0 ports and gigabit Ethernet, also with the removable eMMC/microSD storage options. We then moved on to a display from a partner company, Withrobot.com, that showed real-time bar- and QR-code reading from three cameras simultanously through one USB3.0 port on an ODROID-XU4 and a 5MP standalone USB camera processed by OpenCV on an ODROID-XU4. In the background was an ODROID-C1+ with a HiFi Shield and a VU7 streaming high-quality audio to a stereo running Rune Audio. Volumio is also available for this platform. Both distributions are controllable by a smartphone or tablet from anywhere.
You can order these and read more about it at:
http://ameridroid.com
http://odroid.com
UICO duraTOUCH water/sweat/gloves Smartwatches and Phones
UICO duraTOUCH makes it possible to use Smartwatches and Phones in any weather, with sweaty fingers, under the rain, snow, even while wearing gloves in the winter. As people come to depend on wearable devices and use them everywhere, users want touchscreens to work under any weather condition everywhere and anytime. UICO’s duraTOUCH projected capacitive (PCAP) touch controllers enable touch sensing to work in any environment, with rain, sweat, and using gloves also. duraTOUCH out-performs traditional PCAP that is in devices like Moto360 and Samsung Gear Live. It is ideal for wearable and IoT devices with super-low power requirements like 1X charge per week with wake on touch. duraTOUCH products include duraTOUCH controllers, touchscreens, and duraTOUCH Surface, a bendable wrap-able touch sensing surface. Look for this technology in the next generation of consumer electronics and wearable devices, you will now have technology that UICO previously shipped in millions only to customers in the heavy industrial and medical markets.
Flexible Haptics in Smartwatch wristbands by Novasentis
Haptic feedback is one of the most important features of Smartwatches and other wearable devices. The Apple watch with its Taptic engine has one of the best haptic actuators in the industry but at the IDTechEx show, the folks at Novasentis were showing technology that aims to do much better. With traditional haptic technologies like LRA and ERM, they are bulky and provide just a solitary, universal buzz which vibrates the entire wearable device. Novasentis has invented a new technology based on electro mechanical polymers which is ultra thin, when they placed this in my hand, I could barely feel its weight, and the material is flexible. So instead of putting a big haptic device in the body of the wearable device, Novasentis proposes that you embed their haptic film right into the strap of the watch since is is so thin and you could have localized vibration and detect the all important patterns all around the wrist to understand different notification categories without even looking at your smartwatch display. This will enable thinner and lighter smartwatches without a big haptic engine inside. Most importantly, Novasentis material allows to offer a range of haptic feedback from very low frequency ‘taps’ to very high frequency audible ‘alarms’. Their idea is to create a haptic language and a wearable device could have as many as 10 or even 100 different haptic ‘feelings’ that a user can get used to and memorize and could get very useful information before having to turn to the display. Novasentis said that 5 OEM’s are currently designing wearable devices with their material and the company is currently raising funds to get their technology into mass production hopefully arriving soon to awesome Smartwatches and other smart device.
Flexible Smartphones soon possible using Cambrios silver nanowire ClearOhm ink
Cambrios talks about the progress that they are making to build flexible touch screens, to enable flexible smartphones and wearables coming to the market soon, flexible solar cells and flexible OLED lights also. Their material is silver nanowire based ClearOhm ink, it is like spaghetti on transparent films, these are great conductors since silver is the best conductor on the planet. The material is flexible, it is already being shipped into millions of devices made by Lenovo, HP, Toshiba, LG, Samsung, DELL and other big companies. Cambrios can enable ten finger touch in monitors and all-in-one computers with a film that is so thin and light that it can replace ITO.
ARM mbed Smartwatch reference design with 2 months battery life
ARM shows their open source hardware and software Smartwatch reference design with 2 months battery life runs mbed OS on a Silicon Labs EFM32 Giant Gecko ARM Cortex-M3 SoC and memory LCD, it also have an ARM Cortex-M0 for Bluetooth and an ARM Cortex-M4 for the fingerprint sensor. GPS, NFC, 9-axis sensor (accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer), ambient light sensor, capacitive sliders for UI scrolling, buttons and more are on the flexible PCB. The power consumption is around 70microAmps with the animation running on the memory LCD, the battery life should be about 2 month on a compact and light 160mAh battery. ARM is building open source experimental smart wearables to explore the potential of ARM in wearables and IoT, to encourage device makers to use all the latest ARM technologies in combination with innovative display technologies and sensors to to create better concepts, to better use technologies to try to contribute to and improve the internet of things and the wearables market. Some goals for better Wearables can be to last months on a battery, to connect and interact with all devices seamlessly, to enable new forms of trusted interactions and ultimately aim to fade in to the background. These advances are to be integrated into ARM’s open source mbed OS, there might be subsets of mbed OS, less is needed on the Bluetooth chip for example than on the microcontroller of the Smartwatch or other IoT device.
Developing this mbed OS Smartwatch reference design gives ARM the opportunity to get first-hand experience of the realities of building complete and complex physical products – the mechanical design, electronics, software and taking it all through the production process. ARM has taken a complete design from concept through to manufacturing a few hundred working units thus far, and learned a huge amount. This may inspire and encourage device makers to advance and innovate faster to make the Smartwatch market a success.
BBC micro:bit on ARM’s 25 year birthday
1 million 11 year olds in the UK will receive the BBC microbit when they come back to school after the Christmas holiday in January 2016, they can use it to get started with programming and hacking with hardware. BBC micro:bit runs on Nordic Semiconductor nRF51822 16MHz 32bit ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller, Freescale Kinetis KL26Z – 48 MHz ARM Cortex-M0+ core, that includes a full-speed USB 2.0 On-The-Go (OTG) controller, used as a communication interface between USB and main Nordic microcontroller, Freescale MMA8652 3-axis accelerometer sensor,
Freescale MAG3110 3-axis magnetometer sensor to act as a compass and metal detector, 25 LED lights in a 5×5 array and Bluetooth technology, it is given for free to every child in year 7 or equivalent across the UK. You can read more about BBC micro:bit here.
Kent Displays eWriter Boogie Board demos by CTO
The newest trends in various phones, phablets, tablets and laptops is the analog writing ability. eWriting is making a major come back with several OEMs offering stylus inputs in their devices. Yet, the true pen-on-paper experience is rarely found when you write on glass based tablets or phones. Kent Displays solves this problem with their cholesteric LCD writing tablets popularly known as the Boogie Board. The electronic writing experience with their solution is akin to writing on paper, you can even hear the pen scratching on the surface and the experience is truly unique. That would partly explain the success of the Boogie Boards which are shipping in millions of units each year. I met up with Dr Asad Khan who is Kent Displays’ CTO, in San Jose this week. He describes the various products including what is expected from their product roadmap.
IBM Internet of Things Foundation, cloud IoT data analysis from ARM mbed 2.0 MultiTech mdot device
IBM Internet of Things Foundation is a fully managed, cloud-hosted service that makes it simple to derive value from Internet of Things (IoT) devices, be it a sensor, a gateway or something else. Using IBM’s recipes, it can get connected and start sending data securely up to the cloud using the open, lightweight MQTT messaging protocol. From there, setup and managing the IoT devices using online dashboard or IBM’s secure APIs, so that IoT apps can access live and historical data fast. Users can easily start creating applications using device data, within IBM Bluemix platform, another cloud or own servers.
In this video, the dashboard displays an example of some of the analytics which can be calculated using IBM IoT Foundation, such as the impact analysis from the live hits on the hard hat which are then displayed on Bluemix, IBMs cloud infrastructure. This platform allows a “one-stop-shop” for a device developer to get started and make use of the sensor data and connected devices, immediately.
IoT and Wearables Hardware Incubator: Eric Klein of Lemnos Labs
Eric Klein, Partner at Lemnos Labs, a San Francisco based Hardware Incubator, is looking for IoT and Wearables entrepreneurs making new IoT and Wearables designed to change behaviors, to affect change, which he says is the key to unlocking the Internet of Things and really useful Wearables, he encourages startups to have clinical psychologists on staff, like coaches with science degrees, to design devices that can help people grow and get stronger.
faytech industrial PC manufacturer in Shenzhen factory tour
Arne Weber, General Manager at faytech Tech. Co., Ltd., leads us through his factory in Hongmen Technology Park, Shenzhen, China. The tour starts with the presentation of faytech’s 55” capacitive multi-touch solution which can be used as conference table, single POS information display, for industry automation as well as information- and videowall. faytech also presents its new 15.360 x 8.640 pixel interactive information-and videowall with up to 256 simultaneous touch points. Together with the products, Arne presents factory premises with its specialized clean room, and various machines, used in the production and improvement of faytech’s products. Although in the last years faytech has grown significantly, Arne Weber tells the plans of further expansion. Founded in 2010, faytech specializes in Touchscreen Monitors and Touchscreen PCs. Having its roots in Germany the company combines German quality standards with Chinese manufacturing.
You can contact faytech here:
sales@faytech.com
http://www.faytech.com
http://www.facebook.com/faytechtouch
http://www.twitter.com/faytechshenzhen
MediaTek Labs LinkIt One development board demos
MediaTek MT2502 based LinkIt $59 ONE development board demos, including a Weather Station IoT demo which acquires temerature, humidity and pressure data from sensors and then visualizes the data on the MediaTek Cloud Sandbox. A Bike Tracker demo utilizes GNSS features to acquire the position of a bike in real time. The data is then uploaded to the EON real-time dashboard over a GPRS connection using the PubNub LinkIt ONE library support. The EON real-time dashboard provides a visualization of the data on a map.
You can find out more about MediaTek LinkIt here:
Get Started with AWS IoT Services on the LinkIt™ ONE Development Platform: If you have purchased the MediaTek LinkIt™ ONE and Grove IoT Starter Kit Powered by AWS or want to get started with the Amazon IoT cloud using the LinkIt ONE development board, this guide will get you started.
API reference: All the details you need to discover the full range of features you can add to your sketches.
Documentation & Tutorials: In addition to the developer’s guide you can find handy documents such as the LinkIt ONE pin-out diagram, reference design and product briefs on this page. There is also a growing list of tutorials on using specific classes of the API and building full proofs-of-concept.
This document provides you with detailed information on the LinkIt ONE development board, LinkIt ONE SDK tools and an introduction to the LinkIt ONE API.
Projects: Find inspiration in LinkIt ONE projects created by MediaTek Labs maker and developer community.
FAQ: Get answers to the most common technical and business questions about the LinkIt ONE development platform.
Forums: Discover answers to technical questions and, once you have registered your MediaTek Labs account, pose questions to MediaTek LinkIt technical gurus and exchange views with the Labs community.
Partner Connect: When you’re ready to take your projects beyond a proof-of-concept, check out MediaTek’s suggested partners that can help with everything from product design to cloud service.
AMD Huskyboard 96boards Enterprise Edition explained by Jon Masters of Red Hat
Jon Masters, Chief ARM Architect at Red Hat, talks about the AMD Huskyboard, the first 96boards Enterprise Edition, with an open specification for running a lot of the enterprise software including the software from Red Hat.
AMD Huskyboard 96boards Enterprise Edition, SoftIron Overdrive 3000
AMD Huskyboard 96boards Enterprise Edition available soon and the SoftIron Overdrive 3000 ARMv8 64bit server board. AMD also shows what they are doing for NFV Network Function Virtualization, developing solutions to power advanced networking.
Panasonic AG-DVX200, 60p 4K Camcorder
Panasonic finally has released the DVX200 ($4200 on Amazon) which records “real 4K” 4:2:0 8bit 60fps, it can record 4:2:2 10bit with an Atomos external recorder. Built-in 13x zoom lens with wide-angle 28mm, it can record 4K 4096×2160 at 24p, UHD 4K 3840×2160 (60p/30p/24p) and 1080p at (120fps and 24p). The 4K UHD 60p/50p recording is at 150mbit/s and 30p/25p/24p is at 100mbit/s, it can record both UHD 30p and FHD onto two separate SD cards, approximately 160 minutes of 4K/24p or UHD/25p/30p data can be recorded onto a 128GB SD card, or about 110 minutes of UHD/60p data.
JVC GY-LS300, 4K camcorder Super 35mm Sensor with Micro Four Thirds Lens Mount
JVC GY-LS300 ($3500 at Amazon without the lens) features a JVCKENWOOD AltaSens 4K CMOS Super 35 high sensitivity image sensor combined with an industry standard Micro Four Thirds (MFT) lens mount. The single chip CMOS sensor has approximately 13.5 megapixels and achieves a standard sensitivity of ISO 400 with a total of 12 stops of exposure latitude. Super 35 Cinema lenses may be used and will retain their native angle of view. When the camera is used with MFT, Super 16 and other size lenses, JVC’s proprietary Variable Scan Mapping feature will maintain the lens’s native angle of view. This gives filmmakers the flexibility of using widely available MFT lenses as well as high end cinema lenses. It is also possible to attach the camera to microscopes and other devices using a MFT/C-mount adaptor. The unique combination of the MFT mount, the larger S35 image sensor and Variable Scan Mapping give the camera nearly limitless lens options.
