Google Android Things launch partner, TechNexion Pico Pi SoM is an ARM Powered Google Android Things IoT development System on Module, the NXP Pico i.MX7D Dual Core ARM Cortex-A7 with ARM Cortex-M4, NXP Pico i.MX6UL and soon also it will be with 64bit i.MX8M Quad Core ARM Cortex-A53 and ARM Cortex-M4. These TechNexion Android Things System on Modules can dock into a Raspberry Pi form factor for development and expansion of advanced IoT projects using Android Things, you can read more about Android Things at http://iot.google.com and https://developer.android.com/things/hardware/developer-kits.html
you can see the TechNexion Android Things SoM at the Google I/O keynote about Android Things 19 minutes, 50 seconds into the video here:
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.
Transcorp robots are advanced voice controlled robots. The Transcorp UU robot is capable of talking, dancing, identifying objects, avoiding obstacles, moving on its wheels and making facial expressions. The UU features D smart scene map generation system, smart deep learning engine, robotic situational awareness system, and smart digital programming.
The Vivant makes Android TV box called enigma with a TV Tuner. The TV box runs on an Hisilicon Hi3798CV200 quad core A43 processor. The TV box includes USB, ethernet, Microsd, space for hard drives, HDMI, and SPDIF output. The Android TV Box sells for $229 available now. Eventually a successor enigma 2 box will be made.
Shiningworth makes several Android TV boxes with voice activation functions. With the voice activation functions information can be found or the TV can be controlled with your voice. There are several models available such as the HF10 is vertically shaped Android TV box with an AmLogic S905X processor.
Yoostar has several models of Android TV boxes containing from processors from Amlogic and Montage. The TV boxes support H.265 playback and have features such as TV Tuners. The TV boxes are ODM products and can be re-branded for other companies.
Measy P300 is a 3D short throw portable smart projector. The projector is Android based can load content from an SD card or from an HDMI output. The price is $500. The P509 is mini projector that can output only 2d Content. The P509 can load content from USB, Microsd or can be plugged in via HDMI. The price is $120. The R9D is an Android 6.0 TV Box with a Realtek RTD1295 processor and support for 4k h.265 content. There is also a bay on the R9d for a 3.5″ hard drive. Measy also has other Android tv box with different features and form factors. Measy makes other products such as a wireless HDMI transmitter.
UMIDIGI shows the cheapest bezel-less phone I have yet found, selling at only $90 in bulk to distributors who order at least 1000 units (if you are a distributor, you can contact them at the contact infos below to enquire about price based on your order quantity). UMIDIGI positionned the phone call speaker hole at the top of the phone (I am not sure if sound quality would be best, I was not able to test it) and the microphone is below the phone on the side. Only shipping HD 720p display for now, but they also plan to have a 6″ version to be called the UMIDIGI Crystal Pro coming as soon as Sharp is providing them with the 6″ display (that one would probably be 1080p).
Distributors can contact UMIDIGI here:
SHenzhen UMIDIGI Technology Co Ltd
Hugo Cui, Business Development Manager hugo@91umi.com
Mobile: +8613751152650
Skype: hugo-cui
IDWELL is showing their D10 and D10 Pro bezel-less Smartphone running on a MT6750 to MT6757 (higher clock frequency version) Octa-core ARM Cortex-A53 with a 5.5″ 720p or 1080p AMOLED display (price difference is $18, 1080p is the Pro), with 3GB RAM, 32GB Flash, with a 4GB RAM and 64GB Flash option also. 5 or 8 megapixel front camera, dual 13 or 16 megapixel back camera, 3000mAh battery, 7.4mm thickness, 4G LTE support. IDWell suggests holding the phone in the opposite way, I suggest that would only be for when doing selfies or when doing phone calls as they positioned the phone call speakers, selfie cameras and back cameras at the bottom of the phone, but the UI I think should be set to flip so the phone can mostly be used in the other way with the bezel lessness at the top for anything else done on the phone.
The price starts at $135 for bulk orders of at least 3000 units, distributors can contact IDWell here:
Doogee presents their 5.5″ Mix phone, with nearly no bezels on three sides, although they squeezed in the phone call speakers at the very top small bezel of the phone for better audio quality compared with Xiaomi Mix 1’s speaker design, they also have the proximity sensor towards the bottom of the phone, where they also have the selfie camera. On the back are dual-cameras, a very thin design with 3580mAh batter, with MediaTek MT6757 with LTE dual SIM card or 1 SIM Card and one MicroSD card slot, 16 megapixel back camera, 5 megapixel selfie camera. They have a front fingerprint and run Android 7.0. To be released by June 1st 2017. The factory price for 1000+ orders will be about $170 for the 4GB RAM and 64GB Flash version, and about $180 for 6GB RAM and 64GB Flash. Thus the retail price for 4GB/64GB could be about $249.
Allwinner launches their new Allwinner VR9 Octa-core ARM Cortex-A53 with Mali-T760 GPU for higher performance All-in-one VR. 6K VR can render about 6000×3000, thus upcoming VR displays with something around 3000×3000 for each eye. Then Allwinner A63 is Allwinner’s new Quad-core 64bit ARM Cortex-A53 with Mali-T760MP2 GPU with support for 2K displays, on a lower power consuming 28nm process, for longer battery life, to come to the marketing within the next 1-2 months from now. At the Allwinner booth is the Seegene.com Allwinner H8 Octa-core ARM Cortex-A7 powered Augmented Reality headset with dual 1280×800 OLED micro-displays reflected through a prism for sale for about $1000. Allwinner also shows some of their latest tablets, kids tablets, AI speakers with Amazon Alexa API support, baby monitoring tablet and camera, panning camera tablet, A64 Powered Tablets and 2-in-1 with Android 7.0 GMS tested. The Aikun Morphus X300 having features like the Nintendo Switch but having been released a while before Nintendo. POS machines, the new Allwinner Y10 quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 for interactive connected photo frames with gesture control support. All-in-one VR. A64 development board by Occocci, LTE connected solutions with Qualcomm, and solutions for the Smart Assistant Speakers market.
Onyx unveils the world’s first 13.3″ Flexible high-resolution E Ink Carta device, for the first time shown to the public, with an amazing 2200×1650 resolution, fast handwriting for annotations and notes, beautiful rendering of A4 documents, pdf, epub and any other formats compatible with e-readers on Android. This is just one of the whole range of E Ink Carta devices shown by Onyx, they also have 6″ devices, 6.8″, 9.7″ and the 10.3″ device and the 9.7″ ONYX Typewriter that I also filmed in this other Onyx video, ONYX also shows that it will be possible to mirror or extend a laptop display (or any other HDMI source) onto an upcoming 13.3″ ONYX device and also ONYX has an amazing 9.7″ ultra-light device with capacitive buttons in the works featured at the end of this video.
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.
Geniatech presents their new Embedded and Develpment board Solutions, with full in-house support and development for customized development for interested customers around the world. Supporting Windows 10 IoT Core, Android and some Linux. Geniatech shows their new Developer Board 4X, the world’s smallest 64bit Qualcomm 410 based board, can be used for home applications, to easily connect everything to advanced IoT.
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.
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.
Linaro CEO George Grey interview on the last day of the Linaro Connect in Budapest 2017, talking about Google joining Linaro as a club member, some of the latest developments at Linaro, the high amount of contributions from Linaro into Linux and open source, IoT, Servers, Mobile, Networking, Kernel, Gateways, Set-top-boxes, Smart TVs, Android, and a lot more. Other new Linaro members are HXT a joint venture between Qualcomm and the CHinese Government, Fujitsu with their new ARM Powered Supercomupter. You can watch George Grey’s opening keynote at Linaro Connect Budapest 2017 here.
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!
Lode Matebot robot is a cat shaped robot designed as a personal assistant that can speak Chinese but it can potentially also run Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. They also have a humanoir robot named ZERO. The matebot robot movements can be controlled using a smartphone. Each of eyes is an individual display. The Matebot Robot can dance and play music. Voice control can be used with any Android voice control system such as Amazon alexa and Google Voice. The robots sells for about $290-500 in China the price can be about 200€. The runs on Allwinner A33. Lode also makes a drone which can be used as an sdk for drone development.
