I am a big fan of the e-reader market, it helps people read again, as TV and the Internet has taken over more and more of people’s time, the e-readers makes it possible to read any book, any article at any time with a quality up close near to paper quality.
I filmed an early Android e-ink prototype at CeBIT that was showcased by Gigabyte, now Freescale is pushing further the use of Android as the software stack for e-ink e-readers with the i.MX51e development board demonstrated in this video. This could mean awesome use of feed readers, where articles, blog posts could also be beamed from the Chrome browser extension directly to your Android based e-reader. The feature of adding text contents from your laptop to your e-reader could become really really powerful.
Featuring pocket size touch demo DEMOMPR031 (4 µA current consumption with ITO pads) and Freescale appliance touch control hob demo. I filmed this at the Freescale European headquarters in Toulouse.
Android usually takes about 30 seconds to boot. Ubiquituous, somehow, has made their QuickBoot solution to work for the Freescale i.MX51 processor, where Android can boot in about 1 second. In this video a full Android OS is demonstrated booting from complete power off in about 1 second.
After my previous video unveiling the Shogo tablet, Daniel Schneersohn, representative of Realease is adressing some of the user comments that were in the youtube video and on the blog posts.
This is the QOOQ tablet, perhaps worlds first commercially available consumer 10.1″ capacitive tablet, has been available only in France since October 2009 (many months before the iPad), it uses a glass panel which is also useful for it to resist the attacks of ingredients in the kitchen as it is water and smudge proof. This product features many interactive recipes, some of them from Frances top chefs, with step-by-step videos. The content is streamed from the QOOQ Akamai servers, over Wifi or Ethernet, with additional recipes being added over the Internet.
The QOOQ is released by the French company Unowhy, the first such customized design released on the Shogo tablet platform from Hong-Kong company Realease, and runs on a Freescale i.MX37 processor with Linux. It currently is sold only in France for 349€.
Here’s a recent build of Chromium OS running on the ARM Cortex A8 Freescale i.MX51 processor platform in a desktop form factor, using a keyboard and mouse on a DVI monitor.
Ubuntu has been working over these past couple of years with ARM and ARM partners such as Freescale to optimize the Ubuntu OS for ARM Processors. Here’s a demonstration of the latest version of Ubuntu 10.4 running on a Freescale i.MX51 development board. In theory this Ubuntu desktop could be sold for below $100 without the screen, keyboard and mouse.
Realease is launching this Freescale i.MX37 (ARM11) and i.MX51 (ARM Cortex A8) based Linux open-source Tablet. With a whole range of customized features, on an open HTML5, Qt, Flash even Android-compatible development platform, customizable designs, 1 external USB, 2 internal USB (for adding internal USB 3G dongle and other), motion sensor, camera, ambient light sensor, and more.
It is meant for software developers who want a platform to develop or port their solutions for B2B usages like medical, planes, hotels, or any niche consumer markets where a closed solution is required (unlike the iPad) check for instance the QOOQ culinary coach, a tablet that is derived from the Shogo predecessor.
This video shows how to leverage a Video processor and a Graphics processor (GPU) to show 3D videos. This is done on the Freescale i.MX51 System-on-chip, that integrates an ARM Cortex A8 processor + a video processor + 2 GPUs.
Freescale is demonstrating Quake 3 on Android 2.1 running on their ARM Cortex A8 Freescale i.MX51 processor platform. It seems to run pretty smoothly with a decent frame rate outputted on this 800×480 medium density screen. This degree of success in 3D hardware acceleration for advanced 3D games on ARM devices with Android, as well as the achievements by the Unreal Engine group (watch my video Interview with Unreal Engine founder of Epic Games talking about Unreal Engine on Android), can give us a pretty good idea of how extremely advanced and fun 3D gaming can quickly become on these new Android devices.
Realize this, Quake 3 and even Unreal Tournament is running smoothly on our pocketable ARM Powered devices!
You may be familiar with OpenGL hardware acceleration in all the recent ARM Processors, but check this recent API from the Khronos group: OpenVG. It is meant at rendering Vector Graphics, where basically the images are stored not in bitmaps (a sum of pixels) but in maths formulaes. Each time you need to re-draw the image, you just have to re-calculate the vectors to show high quality pictures and animations. This is what pdf and postscripts use, and this is especially useful for zooming. All cool user interfaces should use OpenVG at some point, which is easier and more flexible than OpenGL thus for certain graphics and animations to be used in all kinds of user interfaces as well as content.
So far, most processors could support OpenVG on top of the OpenGL hardware accelerator. But Freescale added a second GPU in its i.MX processors. So for instance their i.MX51 has a GPU for OpenGL and a second GPU for OpenVG.
While this specific ARM Cortex A8 implementation performs great on integers, power consumption, heat dissipation, price, floating-point performance still needs some improvement with ARM Cortex designs to come. Consider also that Ubuntu 9.04 used in this test is only the first implementation of Ubuntu for ARM Cortex and that Ubuntu 10.4 which is imminently going to be released will significantly improve ARM performance of those benchmarks.
The ARM Cortex-A8 sample that we tested in the form of the Freescale i.MX515 lived in an ecosystem that was not competitive with the x86 rivals in this comparison. The video subsystem is very limited. Memory support is a very slow 32-bit, DDR2-200MHz.
I guess it’s not yet possible for Van Smith in this test to make an apples to apples comparison as the current ARM Cortex A8 are still oriented at Smart Phones and thin and light Tablets rather than full SmartBooks for full desktop-like performance requirements of the more desktop-performance oriented next generation ARM Cortex designs.
The goal for ARM when reaching the markets of Laptop and Desktop form factors is to reach the level of performance required to run full high resolution Web Browsers at full speed, where the OS with the browser boots instantly, with fast enough RAM where unlimited tabs open instantly, where hardware acceleration of embedded videos functions smoothly and where even the Native Client and 3D features run fully within the ARM Powered Web Browser. Once that level of performance is reached, further performance improvements will be less important than lowering the power consumption and lowering the cost of the next processors. Once everything most users need to have processed on their devices seem to run instantly, reaching the instant browser performance level, why would anyone want to increase the performance of client device oriented processors further?
Freescale is showing their reference design for sub-$200 tablets. The target is that tablets can soon be sold below $200 to end consumers that are able to run any Linux-based OS, including Android or Chromium OS – based on the open-source code available at http://chromium.org
In this video, Freescale’s product manager of Software Development demonstrates the status of their optimizations of running Chromium OS on their i.MX51 based devices, among other form factors is the recently announced $199 tablet form factor. It even supports hardware acceleration of HTML5 based video playback.
This means, full power Chromium OS could be made available in the next few months in Laptop and Tablet form factors to be sold well below $200 unlocked without contracts. The main question is how fast and how smooth will the Chromium Browser feel on ARM Powered devices? This is to be seen and tested very soon! Follow my video-blog for hands-on reports showing performance of Chromium OS running on all the ARM Powered devices very soon. Check also for Chrome browser running within Android, or for Chromium OS modified to add Android apps support, thus merging the two.
I also wonder, how much more does a $65 ARM Powered laptop cost if it uses an ARM Cortex A8 processor like the ones from Freescale instead of the ARM9 or ARM11 based ones from rockchip, VIA, Samsung and others. If the price increase is within $35, then welcome will be all the sub-$100 full power smooth ARM Powered Chromium OS laptops and tablets! Without actually knowing the real price difference between the ARM9, ARM11 and ARM Cortex based cheap laptops, my guess is that the availability of sub-$200 and sub-$100 Chromium/Android Laptops/Tablets is a possibility.
How soon will we see Google sell unlocked Chromium/Android on ARM powered laptop/tablet/e-reader convertibles with 50-hour battery life on Pixel Qi screens at http://google.com/laptop?
Interview with Oleg Naumenko, General Manager of PocketBook about the new PocketBook 601 (cheap Freescale based), about 302/602 (resistive touch) and 603 (wacom touch) e-readers.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=b2943a80-0a69-4c4a-96c2-926ae8831dd2)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=46c593a7-ecdf-4ad7-8098-341aca25dc2f)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=1df108b9-68fc-46e4-b311-a704f84e60cb)
