Category: Android

ARM Freescale Smartbooks and Smartphones

Posted by – June 5, 2009

Steve Sperle of Freescale introduces the Freescale ARM Cortex A8 powered Smartbook by Pegatron and an Android device by Inventec IAC runing smooth video playback as well.

ARM Director of Mobile Computing about ARM Laptops with Android and Ubuntu

Posted by – June 5, 2009

Bob Morris, Director of Mobile Computing at ARM Holdings introduces the new type of ARM based products such as ARM in Laptops/Netbooks/Smartbooks, ARM based Android smartphones.

Qualcomm Snapdragon at Computex

Posted by – June 5, 2009

Qualcomm Manager of Business Development at Qualcomm for Computing and Consumer Products, Mike Yin, is showing an impressive bunch of what they now call Smartbooks, ARM Cortex A8 based hardware accelerated netbooks runing full Android OS, Xandros ARM or some other Linux OS, launching and navigating in full web browsers, playing back full quality and bitrate videos.

Kinpo Thin Client 7inch Android Tablet

Posted by – June 5, 2009

Kinpo is making a 7 inch Android tablet powered by a Freescale processor. A bunch of engineers happened to come by the Freescale headquarters with this device while I was there filming a whole bunch of other videos. I then convinced them to show it to me and to let me film it. They installed Android on a 800×480 resolution 7″ touchscreen tablet device. It works pretty smoothly though they obviously have some tweaking that they still need to do before such a device can be sold. This device currently has some pretty obvious bugs like the video not playing correctly.

Android laptop: Compal Qualcomm powered Smartbook

Posted by – June 4, 2009

The worlds first Android laptop that runs everything awesomely well already!

Asus has an Android and Qualcomm powered smartbook as well, though Asus is hiding it at this point.

Acer, HP, all Nvidia Tegra based laptops, Texas Instruments based devices and Freescale based devices, all are launching with Android support.

In this video you can see how fast the current implementation of a browser in an Android laptop loads pages, while they still have optimizations to do, and I think they should try to get a full Google Chrome running on these, with support for an unlimited amount of tabs (though no need for all tabs to be active and heavy in the RAM memory).

Nvidia Tegra: HD streaming and Flash support demonstrated by Gordon Grigor, Director og Mobile Software

Posted by – June 4, 2009

An amazing demonstration by Gordon Grigor Director og Mobile Software at Nvidia (the software engineering lead in developing Tegra solution!) of the ways Nvidia accelerates web browsing, flash, HD video decoding, HD video streaming from the Internet and more.

I was very impressed today I interviewing the Nvidia executives and engineers, they are insanely confident about their Tegra ARM implementation, even though the current demonstration of the Tegra technology does NOT use the latest ARM Cortex processor which is 4x faster for things like a browser compared to ARM11!!!! Nvidia is processing many things from the browser using the GPU! Can you believe that? Rendering of browser contents, scrolling, font antialiasing, image rendering, flash animations, flash videos, all are taken care of by the Nvidia GPU! Look for my videos of all that, being uploaded now and filming more the next couple or three of days.

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ARM and Android, the future of laptops

Posted by – April 1, 2009
Category: Opinions, Google, OLPC, Android

The main goal of the OLPC, and thus, of the whole computer industry at this point, is to lower the cost of laptops by lowering the power consumption. The best way to achieve that, is to limit the way applications get full native access to the deep internals of the computer system. Intel’s X86 standard and Microsoft’s Windows OS were designed only for that multi-purpose backwards compatibility where the same unoptimized bloated software would work across thousands of hardware configurations with often full root access to the deepest internals of a computer system. For most of the applications that most people need, you do not need full native code support in third party applications. By limiting full native access for third party applications, you take care in one swoop of all the security problems that one has on Intel and Microsoft based PC and laptops. You basically make spyware, viruses, hacking and all of those problems impossible by design.

That is how Android is made. Android provides a totally sandboxed JAVA-based software layer, which only interacts with the hardware features through totally controllable software-to-hardware APIs. With Android on ARM, you have a complete shift in the way third party applications are run compared to X86 Windows XP/7, MacOSX and even most of those X86 Desktop Linux distributions that have been going around, including Ubuntu and Fedora.

The open source native Android Linux code hacking happens exclusively at the manufacturer stage. Which means, you want to have a manufacturer in control of everything, you want the manufacturer to customize Android for the very specific mass produced hardware in question, providing all the standard and non-standard software-to-hardware APIs for third party software developers to gain access to the all of the devices standard or special hardware features.

What you have backing Android is the worlds absolute best company in Google, comprised of the worlds largest concentration of PHDs and Engineers with the most experience in Web and computer technology. The role of Google with Android is to make sure that the native Android code works in the most optimal fashion with the most optimal hardware configurations that manufacturers are making for it. Google helps manufacturers prepare that Android native code customization for each different System On Chip, for each different variation on the ARM Cortex processor profiles by each of the industry leading ARM processor manufacturers among Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Freescale, Samsung, Nvidia, Marvell and others.

If you want to change the default Android user interface layer and make it look more like the Sugar User Interface layer (which for XO-1 was built on top of an optimized X86 Fedora Linux installation), you definitely can do those changes and customizations. Those would come from the manufacturers, thus in the case of OLPC from the whole OLPC organization, in cooperation with Google or anyone else helping to create a more education-laptop friendly user interface. But Android applications remain the same, and appart from slight porting that can be required, all Android applications are designed to work in full screen mode, and management of multi-tasking, notifications, memory and processing power consumption, all those are managed the same way accros all implementations of the Android OS.

HP has just announced that they are working to support Android in future HP Laptops. Asus has also announced to be working on Android laptops. Look forward to Android ruling over all ARM Laptop implementations, at least for these where the lowest cost and the lowest power consumption levels have been achieved. Look forward to $100 Android ARM laptops. Look forward to the empire of Intel and Microsoft crumbling under the inevitable hardware and software revolution that comes with the XO-2 and with the whole industry’s shift to lower cost, lower power consumption using ARM and Android in all laptops.

ARM in OLPC XO-2

Posted by – January 29, 2009

OLPC is probably looking for a non X86 architecture for XO-2, probably ARM, where several providers can provide the processor. Using ARM Cortex, OLPC can use any of Texas Instruments, Mavell, Freescale, Samsung, Qualcomm, Nvidia and others, all interchangeably, independently of the deals that will be put in place. The idea being that having all these ARM Cortex providers being more or less compatible with each other, enabling minimal changes in motherboard designs to have them all be compatible, this enables competition in the processor market. This will more quickly drive the prices down much further. This is the only way you can optimize the interpretation of Moore’s law which says that you can cut the price and power consumption of laptops by half every 18 months.

There is a basic reason AMD is not too enthusiastic about this whole new low cost laptop market. The reason is written on the wall, everyones can see it coming, cheaper laptops means it will be much harder to find profits in the industry. AMD isn’t exactly having an easy time already as things are today, Intel’s profit margins and overall income have shrinked 90% in 2008 compared to 2007.

I believe OLPC should use Google Android with Sugar on top, and they should increasingly rely on cloud computing such as the recently rumored Google Web Drive service to store and share all the data on. With XO-2, you should much further synchronize the way the school servers synch storage, processing power and contents to and from the cloud. Basically what you get is an overly simplified Internet access terminal, one with a small ARM Cortex processor behind the next generation of even lower power and lower cost Pixel Qi screens. One that just relies on basic Google Gears for local content caching, and let most of the rest happen using the much cheaper cloud.

$100 laptops using ARM are possible today already. Chinese GPS manufacturers are making them already using uber simple Linux and last generation MIPS or ARM processors: http://techvideoblog.com/category/laptops/

This makes it obvious that OLPC can achieve a $75 price point on XO-2, consider also the advantage of using a dual touch-screen, is that ou can even more easilly mass manufacture exactly the same model for the whole world. Since all the different keyboard layouts and all of the local interfaces are simply going to be a software function of the touchscreens. Mary-Lou Jepsen has done it once already. She can do it again.