Category: OS

Pixel Qi tablets can run on solar power


A quite small modern solar panel can produce 1W of power, enough to power both the Pixel Qi and the whole ARM Powered tablet motherboard behind it. Think for a second how amazing this is. They can put solar panels on the bezel and the Tablet could basically be fully solar powered, have a bigger solar panel on the back of the tablet if you want to just charge it and not use it. This compact 1W Solar panel is $3. OLPC could be using this for the upcoming OLPC XO-1.75 Laptop and the XO-3 tablet.

ZTE Light Tablet with Pixel Qi screen

Posted by – June 3, 2011

While this is not yet with the anti-glare anti-reflective coating and the reflective mode for touch is not yet implemented in this ZTE sample, this is how the ZTE Light with Pixel Qi might look like, the fully optimized version should be shipping in the third quarter of this year.

UDM.tw Q101 compact TI DM3730 Cortex-A8 module PCB design

Posted by – June 3, 2011

UDM provides a full Texas Instruments ARM Cortex-A8 module to integrate in tablets or any other device.

Cupp Computing turns any Laptop into an ARM Laptop


Cupp Computing is now launching as a product their module to replace the hard drive in any Laptop, add an SSD, up to 2 MicroSD cards (one for the ARM Powered OS of your choice), and with a keyboard shortcut you instantly go from the ARM Powered OS to the x86 OS, and back while the x86 goes to sleep. The ARM Powered Laptop runs up to 40 hours on a battery, if you have just 10 minutes left of battery, switch to ARM mode and you’ve still got 1 hour of use to finish your work. In ARM Mode it can run Android, Ubuntu, Chrome OS and other. They are currently using OMAP3, they can use OMAP4 also soon for more ARM Performance. They also plan to work with motherboard manufacturers to add the whole ARM Powered laptop module right onto all motherboards so ARM Powered laptop mode becomes a default option in all laptops.

Nlighten huge multi-touch screens

Posted by – June 3, 2011

Check out this collection of pretty large optical based multi-touch screens shown by Nlighten at Computex.

ARM Powered Android used to lower the cost and power of Point-of-sale systems

Posted by – June 3, 2011

POSLab is showing their ARM Powered TI Cortex-A8 implementation of Android on a Point-of-sale (POS) system.

Malata shows first 7″ Tegra2 tablet

Posted by – June 3, 2011

This will run Honeycomb when it’s released after around September. Malata manufactures their tablets for several brands, including ViewSonic and others.

FirstView shows Rockchip RK2918 capacitive tablet design

Posted by – June 3, 2011

FirstView now also makes a nice looking capacitive RK2918 based tablet:

ZiiLabs ZMS-20 ARM Cortex-A9 1.5Ghz runs Honeycomb nicely

Posted by – June 2, 2011

ZiiLabs launches their ARM Cortex-A9 1.6Ghz processor, demonstrated here in their Jaguar 7″ and 10.1″ capacitive tablet reference platforms running Honeycomb smoothly. Here’s an interview with Tim Lewis director marketing and partner relations at ZiiLabs about their Stemcell’s differentiation, performance, value. Is this only the third SoC to publicly (I still had to go find their demos in their private meeting room) demonstrate Honeycomb support yet after the Tegra2 tablets and the Qualcomm Dual-core Asus Memo?

e-ink touch screen technologies shown by Freescale at Computex 2011

Posted by – June 2, 2011

Tyco Electronics introduces Acoustic Pulse Recognition (APR) touch screen technology in a reference e-ink touch screen based on Android on the Freescale i.MX508 platform.

Freescale Tablet strategy at Computex 2011

Posted by – June 2, 2011

Freescale is still showing just the i.MX51 and i.MX53 platforms at Computex, but this time, they emphasize the aspect of customizing tablets for niche uses, kind of providing for the long tail of the tablet market. Especially in the Chinese market, which could amount to 7 million tablets this year alone, Freescale has a pretty significant market share.

Qualcomm’s Dual-core is asynchronous, demonstrated at Computex 2011

Posted by – June 2, 2011

Qualcomm now has their dual-core super fast ARM processor in several products shown at this trade show, they demonstrate how they suggest that thekir asynchronous implementation is superior to competing Dual-core implementations, anyone got some benchmarks?

Nufront Cortex-A9 Tablet and Desktop reference designs at Computex 2011

Posted by – June 2, 2011

They say that they can make a 2Ghz ARM Cortex-A9 Dual-core now, but for now they are demonstrating it at lower clock speeds on an Android tablet, an Ubuntu laptop and an all-in-one Ubuntu 11.4 desktop example.

Wyse T50 Thin Client on Marvell Armada 510 presented by Canonical Ubuntu

Posted by – June 2, 2011

Wyse T50 is an Ubuntu Core powered thin client device, it is powered by Marvell Armada 510 (1Ghz). It features DVI, Ethernet, 4 usb host ports and an sd-card slot.

A further update on Linaro status at Computex 2011


At Computex 2011, Linaro gave an update on their status, with some new technical demos showing graphics and other hardware acceleration that thy are working on.

7″ Honeycomb Viewsonic 7x shown at Computex 2011

Posted by – June 2, 2011

ViewSonic is showing their new Tegra2 based 7″ capacitive Android Honeycomb tablet, with a layer of their own vertical-only custom UI on top. The price is going to be $449 for the WiFi version and $529 for the 3G version when it gets released.

$60 Cortex-A9 Android Set-top-box

Posted by – June 1, 2011

The price is a bulk price, at least 300 pieces need to be ordered, does not include the chosen remote controller that can go from a couple dollars to twenty dollars depending on what type of remote control is used. Also there are different memory and other components that can be configured. Most importantly is the idea to communicate that an ARM Cortex-A9 powered set-top-box could potentially run Google TV basic for ARM as soon as that one is released. It depends if Google decides to support their Google TV implementation on the AmLogic 800Mhz single core implementation, it depends if Google is interested at all in supporting HDMI-out only until their open source Ice Cream Sandwich and allow everyone to make whichever Google TV on ARM implementations they want anyways.

Hands-on with Nvidia Kal-El Quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 1.2Ghz (or more) prototype tablet at Computex 2011

Posted by – June 1, 2011

This is Nvidia’s next generation Quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 implementation that will be clocked at the minimum at 1.2Ghz but could be clocked higher by the time they start shipping these, with 12x faster graphics compared to Tegra2, huge video decode power at something that might look like Quad-HD video decoding. In this video I try to launch some of the early demonstration apps, animations and games that Nvidia uses to showcase their Kal-El performance in that prototype tablet.

Acer Iconia Smart, 4.8″ 1024×480 wide screen Android Smartphone

Posted by – June 1, 2011

Acer I think makes pretty cool Android phones that cover low end but also like this one pretty differentiated high-end in the Android smartphone space. This is the first time I see this aspect ratio in a 4.8″ capacitive LCD screen, nice.

Honeycomb is shown on the Intel Oak Trail Atom at Computex 2011

Posted by – June 1, 2011

Here I filmed a video with one of Intel’s software product managers who worked on porting Android Honeycomb over to the Intel Atom platform. Those reference tablets shown at Computex 2011, they are heavy, hot, fat, battery runtime is probably short while battery is much larger, some seem to run really slow through the UI, they are probably expensive. Though it’s interesting that after Google TV, Chromebook, Google is also not making it impossible for Intel to try to do whatever they can to try to keep up with change. I’ve tried to ask some Intel people if they plan to licence the ARM architechture, or/and to start manufacturing ARM Processors for Apple, Sony or others, and they seem to tell me that why not, could be possible, just rumors, but who knows..