Bero (Bernhard Rosenkränzer) from the Linaro Mobile Group set out this week as you can see in my previous video to build and bring up his ARM Desktop based on the Quad-core ARM Cortex-A72 Marvell MACCHIATObin development board with a Radeon or Nvidia GPU. Bero also built his own ARM Laptop based on the Dragonboard 820 running Open Mandriva Linux.
Category: Laptops
Purism Librem Debian phone, fully open source, Librem 11, 13, 15 Laptops
Posted by – September 29, 2017
Purism Phone is crowdfunding at https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ ($847’454 raised thus far) runs PureOS based on Debian Free/Libre and Open Source software and a GNU+Linux Operating System, it can run most GNU+Linux distributions, it’s runs many other upstream projects, it’s world’s first ever IP-native mobile handset with end-to-end decentralized communications via Matrix, with a 5″ display, Security focused by design, Privacy protection by default, works with 2G/3G/4G, GSM, UMTS, and LTE networks with an i.MX8 or i.MX6 CPU separate from Baseband with open-source GPU drivers, Hardware Kill Switches for Camera, Microphone, WiFi/Bluetooth, and Baseband. Purism also has a track record of delivering fully open source Intel powered laptops the Librem 11 2-in-1, the Librem 13 and the Librem 15.
$1329 Lenovo Yoga 920
Lenovo launches the Yoga 920 running on the 8th Generation Intel Quad Core U Series. starting with 8GB DDR4 RAM and 256GB PCIe SSD and a FHD display that has 15 hours of battery life but it can go with up to 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD with a 4K display that can have about 10 hours of battery life. It includes a microphone array to support long-range Windows Cortana voice-assistant that responds to spoken questions and instructions in standby mode from up to 4 meters away. The 4K version has a nearly edgeless 4K display, an optional Bluetooth-equipped Lenovo Active Pen 2 digital pen with Windows Ink that is more sensitive than the first version, that they claim to have no discernible lag with 4096 levels of sensitivity. Built with polished CNC aluminum available in Copper, Bronze and Platinum. It uses a sturdy “watchband hinge” design, two 40Gbps Thunderbolt3 enabled USB Type-C ports with multi-display and fast data transfer.
$20/month Laptop Subscription service by INSYS
Posted by – August 24, 2017
Category: Laptops, Smartphones, Exclusive videos, Intel, China Sourcing Fair, Chrome OS, Ubuntu, Windows
INSYS is a Portuguese company that offers electronics as a monthly service. You can rent a small ulraportable laptop for 20 Euros a month. This 12.5″ display laptop has aluminum body and Ultrabook form factor. The devices can be locked remotely using anti theft technology. The device will lock down if subscription is not paid.
LG Display shows 8K 31.5″, Wallpaper OLED, pOLED, Transparent OLED, 4K bezel-less and more
Posted by – July 8, 2017
Category: Tablets, Laptops, Smartphones, Displays, VR, 4K UHD, Cars, Exclusive videos, SID Display Week, Android
LG shows their ultra-thin 77” OLED wallpaper display, the thinnest in the world, displays with speakers built-in, and other leading display technology such as the LG Mobile and VR displays such as a bezel-less 5.5″ 4K smartphone display, Plastic Flexible or Conformed OLED displays for upcoming Flexible Smartphones, 31.5″ 4K HDR narrow bezel PC Monitor, 10bit Curved 37.5″ WQHD+ display, 14″ 4K for the laptop market, 31.5″ 8K Display, in-touch systems on 14″, 15″, 23.8″ laptop displays for the 2-in-1 market. LG also shows some automotive displays such as a conformed 12.3″ plastic OLED display, 12.3″ 60% Transparent OLED for the automobile HUD market, LCD and OLED display as a hybrid 12.3 MLD where LCD can be the background and the OLED can show the needle. A 6.13″ mirror display. They also show a 55″ FHD 40% Transparent OLED Display. Filmed at SID Display Week.
HDMI Alt Mode for USB Type-C
Posted by – June 29, 2017
The HDMI Alt Mode for USB Type-C connector will allow HDMI-enabled source devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops and camcorders to utilize a USB Type-C connector to directly connect to the Billions of HDMI-enabled displays (which is included with 100% of flat panel TVs), and deliver native HDMI signals over a simple cable without the need for protocol and connector adapters or dongles. HDMI Alt Mode will support the full range of HDMI 1.4b features such as 4K, surround, ARC, 3D, HDMI Ethernet Channel (HEC), Consumer Electronic Control (CEC), Deep Color, x.v.Color and content types, HDCP 2.2. HDMI Alt Mode follows all necessary Alt Mode USB Type-C specification requirements which auto-detects HDMI Alt Mode source devices and HDMI-enabled displays, requires no adapters to connect from an HDMI source to an HDMI display, source output is AC coupled for HDMI Clock and Data lanes and other.
Huawei MateBook X Ultra Thin Laptop
Posted by – June 5, 2017
Huawei Matebook X is an ultra thin laptop with a 13″ (2160×1440) display, ultra thin design and dual USB Type C ports. The processor is available with options up to a Core i7-7500, 8GB of RAM, and 512GB of solid state storage. Prices should be around $1399.
Samsung Notebook 9 Pro With 360 Degree screen and S-Pen Stylus
Samsung Notebook 9 pro is a 13″ and 15.5″ (1920×1080) laptop with a 360 Degree screen and a built in pressure sensitive S-Pen Stylus. Laptop features a Intel Core i7-7500U processor, AMD Radeon 450, 8 or 16gb of ram, and 256gb ssd. There is also USB Type c for fast charging.
Lenovo V720 Small Business Laptop
Lenovo v720 is a Windows laptop designed for small business. The v720 features Intel processors, dedicated Nvidia graphics, USB type C for charging, a full array of ports and a matte display.
Microsoft Keynote: Windows 10 on Qualcomm Snapdragon 835
Posted by – June 4, 2017
Here’s the part of the Microsoft keynote at Computex 2017 where they talk about Windows 10 support on Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, announcing that HP, Lenovo and Asus are going to build thin and light ARM Powered Windows 10 devices with built-in e-SIM LTE support.
Full Windows 10 on ARM 64bit 10nm Qualcomm Snapdragon 835
Qualcomm demonstrates a full version of Windows 10 running every x86 application through emulation technology that Microsoft and Qualcomm have worked on very hardly to hopefully be able to show good performance running any x86 Windows app on ARM, as the Snapdragon 835 is the fastest ARM processor in the world, at least the fastest ever from Qualcomm. The marketing angle will also position every ARM Powered Windows 10 Laptop as being with built-in Gigabit LTE through an eSIM meaning you will be able to click and subscribe to any Data plan or with your telco agreeing add your Laptop simply to your existing LTE Smartphone package. Consumers will be able to expect amazingly fast LTE connectivity, very long battery life, always connected always standby functionality (checking emails etc in the background even while the Laptop is closed), compatibility with all x86 Windows apps (win32), it will be interesting to see if apps like GIMP, Adobe Photoshop, Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere and other more demanding x86 Windows .exe apps if they can install and run with decent enough performance through this emulator. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft and Qualcomm are able to utilise all the hardware acceleration such as the GPU and all 8 cores of the Snapdragon 835 big.LITTLE “Built on Cortex Technology” platform to speed up the performance even of advanced apps and games to somehow magically perform well through the emulator. Possibly that Qualcomm even designed a specific area on the Snapdragon 835 SoC that is specifically designed to further accelerate the x86 Windows app emulation functionality? Windows 10 on ARM devices will hopefully start shipping at prices around $600-700 in extremely thin and light form factories to be made by Lenovo, HP and Asus and hopefully released worldwide before the end of the year.
AUO shows Foldable AMOLED, Conformable Plastic LCD, Bezel-less displays and 240Hz Monitor
Posted by – May 31, 2017
Category: Laptops, Smartphones, Displays, Gaming, Smartwatch, 4K UHD, Exclusive videos, SID Display Week
AU Optronics R&D Manager JJ Lih presents some of AUO’s latest displays such as their 5″ 1280×720 Foldable Touch AMOLED, 1.4″ and 1.2″ High Resolution True Circular small bezel AMOLED 454×454 for the Smartwatch industry, 5.5″ FHD Super Narrow Border 0.4mm LTPS LCD, 3.5″ 480×320 Plastic Flexible Conformable LCD to be available on the market within one year. 12.3″ FHD AMOLED for in-car Cluster, 12.3″ Free-form LTPS LCD for in-car Cluster. 9″ 1280×800 Curved LCD. 8.9″ Free-form LCD for Rear-view Mirror. 15.6″ QHD 120Hz LTPS LCD for Gaming. 13.3″ 4K Ultra-low Power LTPS LCD using lower 15hz frequency. 13.3″ 4K Ultra Narrow Border 1.5mm LTPS LCD. 15.6″ 4K Ultra Narrow Border 2mm LTPS LCD. AUO also shows their 240Hz World’s Highest Refresh Rate Gaming PC Monitor.
Sentio Superbook Lapdock using DisplayLink
Posted by – May 8, 2017
Sentio is the new company name making Andromium OS “Android Continuum” and their SuperBook Lapdock project that has collected $2.9 Million on Kickstarter. This DisplayLink Powered Lapdock is a laptop dock that can connect to any Android phone that has USB OTG, it can connect over USB Type C or Micro USB and offers a desktop experience with trackpad and Keyboard. The lapdock relies on Andromium OS to provide this desktop experience. It is not confirmed yet (as far as I know) how many apps will be supported to run as multi-window, they are not changing the Android firmware, they run Andromium OS as just an app. The display is 11.6″ (HD or FullHD) and offers 8 hours of battery life. The Price is to be $100 dollars and up after they start shipping to their backers on Kickstarter.
Onyx E Ink Laptop and 10.3″ Flexible E Ink Mobius Reader, Onyx Typewriter and Onyx 10.3″ Boox Buddy
Posted by – April 15, 2017
Onyx Typewriter has up to 25 days battery life in use (up to 50+ days battery life in standby according to Onyx), it is the world’s first E Ink Laptop. The screen can be perfect to type texts outdoors, during the day in the sunlight, in the park, on your boat, on your balcony, on the beach, to get some natural sunlight while doing work! Of course the E Ink Laptop cannot replace your existing laptop, this is why a smart UI is going to be required. Onyx Typewriter runs Android so a smart app/instance could potentially make this great.
Onyx 10.3″ BOOX Buddy from Onyx (at 7min27sec in this video) is one of the most amazing E Ink devices that I have even seen, amazingly light, thin, the E Ink display is flexible! Flush with the bezels, has a digitizer annotations support and capacitive touch, extremely beautiful and check how quick the stylus input is, it feels nearly like writing with a pen on paper!
These new awesome Onyx devices are two of the coolest new devices in the world. Here are just two, but there is more (check my other Onyx video featuring Onyx BOOX Max Carta 13.3″ 2200×1650 Flexible E Ink device here) could enter mass production and be released in the months to come, when they can be perfected for release. Hopefully the price for these will be affordable, that might depend on the popularity and demand for these special E Ink displays, as the highest cost of these devices is the E Ink display and E Ink prices their displays cheaply only if the volumes are going to be big enough.
Distributors can contact Onyx International here:
Onyx International Inc.
Andreu
andreu@onyx-international.com
Skype: andreu.onyx
Mobile: +86 133 6004 2413
http://www.onyx-international.com/en/
OpenMandriva ARM Powered Laptop at the OpenMandriva Summit in Budapest
Posted by – April 11, 2017
At the OpenMandriva meeting in Budapest with Bernhard Rosenkränzer and Colin Close, President of OpenMandriva, showing off the ARM Powered laptop that could run Open Mandriva at the Open Mandriva meeting in Budapest. This video was taken at the OpenMandriva annual meeting which this year took place in the City of Budapest where the OpenMandriva team met to talk about their plans to workw to move their distro forward. One of the major decisions taken was to move fully to the Clang compiler suite by using lld as their default linker. This is in line with their efforts to create a distro that can be used on more modern architectures. The Clang compiler/linker suite brings with it built in cross-compilers which make the creation of packages for alternate processors such as on their prototype laptop using hardware for 64bit ARM architecture using the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 Extended 96Boards, they have built sufficient core software to be able to provide a distro for it. Recently a key element required for them to bring this project to fruition was the demonstration of freedreno graphics driver running on the latest Adreno GPU. The OpenMandriva team are looking forward to test this new driver alongside the OpenMandriva software compilation. Another major discussion point was the OpenMandriva package management system. A decision was taken to start using the dnf package manager for the core management function, they will however provide a wrapper script so that users will still be able to use familiar command to perform package management. These changes will have a major impact on their distributed build farm as it will require restructuring the repository metadata on their ABF (Automated Build Farm) while they are doing this they will take the opportunity to incorporate a QA system and a method for building multiple dependent packages within a container. They hope these changes will improve the overall quality of the OpenMandriva distribution. If you would like to to join the OpenMandriva Association either as a user or as a developer you can visit their website http://www.openmandriva.org or contract them through the developer irc channel on freenode #openmandriva-cooker, if you have no packaging experience there are plenty of interesting jobs to do that don’t require coding skills.
Speeding up Android boot with Bernhard Rosenkränzer, Linaro Mobile Group
Posted by – April 11, 2017
Bernhard Rosenkränzer, also known as Bero, on the Linaro Mobile Group, talks about some of the latest things Linaro is doing on Mobile, since many of the optimizations that he has been showing over the past years have been integrated by Google into Android, here talking about some of the latest things Linaro is doing to speed up the boot time of Android devices, speeding up all aspects of Android and mobile.
World’s best device: Samsung Chromebook Plus review after 1 month use
My impressions on the coolest ARM Powered Laptop yet, the Samsung Chromebook Plus ($419 top selling 2-in-1 on Amazon.com) that features a Rockchip OP1 dual ARM Cortex-A72 with quad ARM Cortex-A53, ARM Mali-T860MP4 GPU. The performance is great on this device, with the firmware updates from Google also speeding things up regularly, this device is amazingly cool and aweome. But in this video I mention a few things I am hoping Google can improve in the software, mostly to do with improving the Android apps for productivity, I’d like a 4K video editor that works and that is hardware accelerated, I think that Google needs to help PowerDirector and Kinemaster get hardware acceleration and 4K video editing support on this device. Even better perhaps would be if Google could contact the Lumafusion developers and support them to port their 4K60 video editor to Android and optimized for the OP1 processor. Other missing apps in the Google Play store are Microsoft Office, Popcorn time, I don’t want to be setting my Chromebook in Developer mode just to sideload apps that may not even be optimized for the Chromebook yet. Photo editors such as GIMP on Android, Adobe Photoshop need to get supported. Few more other productivity apps for developers, creatives, professionals and students I think need to get ported to this Chromebook Android device. Then Google also needs to improve the features of the stylus touch pen on this device, I’d like the stylus shortcuts and gestures allow to do productive work and study such as annotation collaboration, screen region selector saves to JPG to use as thumbnails in YouTube. In terms of the hardware, I am only hoping to be able to prove that USB Type-C SD card adapter to a USB3 Hard drive file transfers are fully fast enough (as fast as on any Intel Windows machine, hopefully), and also I hope to be able to prove that Wi-Fi performance is just as fast and reliable as with any other laptop. Except the missing backlight on the keyboard and the slightly smaller keyboard than full size, otherwise I think this laptop hardware is pretty much near perfect. It is now my main laptop, I just wish that I could do 4K60 video editing in a good Android video editing app, that the Android and the Chrome OS part get better integrated, for example when I save files in Android apps I want to be able to easily get access and upload these files from the Chrome OS Chrome Browser. I’ll be posting more videos about my Samsung Chromebook Plus in the weeks and months ahead as I expect that it will get better with Google’s full support. Samsung really needs to soon start selling it in Europe!
64GB RAM Linux Laptop by Tuxedo Computers
Posted by – March 31, 2017
Tuxedo Computers assembles tailor-made Tuxedo Linux Laptops and Desktops, with all types of Ubuntu Linux flavors pre-installed with all drivers working, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Cinnamon, Mate and Elementary OS, they try to provide customized higher specs at a lower price than buying a Windows machine. Their desktops and notebooks are assembled in Germany.
HP Elite x3 with Lapdock with 1D and 2D barcode scanner
Posted by – March 5, 2017
HP Elite x3 and Lapdock was my “Best of MWC 2016” as you can see in my video from last year, the HP Elite X3 can be docked into a Lapdock or desktop dock via USB Type C connectivity and be used in Windows Continuum mode offering functionality similar to a full computer. The Lapdock offers a full hd 12.5″ screen and full laptop keyboard.
$799 Lenovo Yoga 520
Lenovo Yoga 520 is a 14″ or 15″ convertible laptop with a FHD display, Kaby Lake processors, and Nvidia GeForce 940MX GPU. There is room for both an SSD and HDD, with ram options up to 16 GB. There is also a fingerprint reader for security. There is an activie digitizer pen. Prices for the Yoga 520 series range from $799 and up depending on region and configuration also with the optional stylus pen input and an optional fingerprint sensor.
