Category: CES

Dwco Android Tablets

Posted by – January 16, 2011

Dwco Electronics Limited is showing an 8″ resistive tablet, as well as 7″ and 10″ Rockchip powered tablets.

Yootechpros 9.7″ Android Tablet

Posted by – January 16, 2011

Yootechpros are showing a 9.7″ LG IPS panel Samsung Hummingbird 1Ghz ARM Cortex-A8 based Android tablet which could retail at 30% cheaper than the iPad.

WiFi Galaxy Tab

Posted by – January 16, 2011

Samsung is releasing a slightly cheaper WiFi-only version of the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

jkkmobile.com: Asus Eee Pad Memo

Posted by – January 16, 2011
Category: Tablets, Qualcomm, CES, Android

Asus presents a 7″ capacitive Android Tablet which may have the Dual-Core 1.2Ghz MSM8260 Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. Micro HDMI output, built-in SIM card slot, it’ll run Honeycomb when released.

This video was released at: jkkmobile.com

jkkmobile.com: Asus Eee Pad Transformer

Posted by – January 16, 2011
Category: Tablets, Nvidia, CES, Android

Asus is back at making ARM Powered laptop/tablet form factor, after the mysterious dissapearance of the Qualcomm Snapdragon Asus Laptop at Computex 2009. This Asus Eee Pad Transformer runs on the Nvidia Tegra2 ARM Cortex-A9 processor, has 10.1″ capacitive touch screen, the keyboard dock transforms it into a Honeycomb laptop.

This video was released at: jkkmobile.com

Motorola Atrix 4G wins “Best of CES 2011”

Posted by – January 15, 2011

The winner of ARMdevices.net Best of CES 2011 award goes to the Motorola Atrix 4G smart phone.

Congratulations! clap clap..

With the launch of this new Motorola Super Phone, we have witnessed a historic moment in the history of consumer electronics. Motorola unveils not only the most powerful smartphone yet based on Nvidia’s Tegra2 AP20H ARM Cortex-A9 processor, but has actually worked feverishly on making software layers on top of Android to provide for a Desktop/Laptop replacement experience, all powered by the phone! Motorola presents full HD resolution Firefox web browser running on top of Android, Citrix virtualization integration for running all other x86 apps that can be virtualized, they put Android in a Window so you can still run any Android apps in that Window when in Desktop mode! And this is the first generation of this type of product, so you are only witnessing the beginning of ARM Powered Pocketable Smart Mobile Devices to be able to power everything you would do on a Laptop powered by Intel/Microsoft. Expect even faster dual-core processors to run this type of product soon with unlimited amounts of tabs with lots of pictures/embedded videos and do it all fully smoothly.

Here is my 25 minute long video featuring the part of the keynote unveiling of the product as well as 16 minute interview with Seang Chau, product manager on Motorola Atrix 4G, Vice President and Chief Software Engineer at Motorola Mobility Inc:

To tell you the truth, this award does not mean Motorola Atrix 4G is perfect yet. I noticed some lagging on scrolling when browsing through 3 or 4 tabs with websites loaded such as ARMdevices.net Engadget.com and Gizmodo.com and having Flash videos play in one of the tabs and maybe other Flash instances such as some advertisement running in some other tab. Maybe the slow downs can be removed if Flash can be managed to only use processing and memory bandwidth on-demand or seamlessly when in the front tab. This type of slow down may be caused by any number of factors. Maybe the Software isn’t fully ready yet and can still be optimized. Maybe the Chrome browser on ARM would be faster than Mozilla Firefox. Maybe the Nvidia Tegra2 AP20H processor doesn’t yet have enough fast access memory bandwidth, not fast enough I/O speeds to let the Firefox tabs load their contents instantly enough when switching tabs. Although, I haven’t tested it yet, I wonder if the Tegra2 AP20H is not yet fast enough for full 1080p@60fps high bitrate high profile video playback of all video formats. I tried to playback the 9mbitps .MP4 h264 that my Sanyo HD1000 camcorder makes as well as the 5-24mbitps .MTS h264 that a Panasonic SH900 camcorder makes, those files are not yet recognized or launchable by the file browser. Too bad I didn’t have some standard 720p and 1080p MKV movies on my mass storage device that I tested.

Anyways, multi-tab browsing and HD video isn’t smooth on a regular Intel Atom netbook either, 480p YouTube seems also to be the maximum that can smoothly be played back using even a recent dual-core Intel Atom N550 Acer D255E netbook, and over 100 million consumers seem to be more or less satisfied with that or even slower experience. The key here is to see if the ARM Cortex-A9 platforms in Laptop/Desktop situations can match performance of Intel Atom. At least Motorola is hereby showing that they are investing heavily into this convergence, they are now definitely officially focused on speeding up ARM Powered performances to a level where consumers and enterprise can be satisfied to replace their Wintel machines. This is the big type of high-end Android product that AT&T wants to promote now that their iPhone exclusivity is finished. Motorola may be trying to say that they are not entering the Laptop and Desktop market, when in fact they are and they are pulling the whole smartphone industry in there with them.

MID Joyplus Android Tablets

Posted by – January 15, 2011

Joyplus International Enterprise Ltd shows a 5″ resistive Android tablet powered by ARM11 800Mhz 76JZFS Core with removable 2300mAh battery, 7″ Marvell PXA168 800Mhz design with Ethernet connection and a 7″ capacitive Samsung ARM Cortex-A8 Hummingbird powered with 1080p HDMI output.

Natural Sound Electronics Android Tablets

Posted by – January 15, 2011

Natural Sound Electronics presents a 9″ Telechips ARM11 Android Tablet for $125 in bulk excluding flash memory cost, 7″ capacitive Marvell with Android 2.2 for $100 in bulk.

Pierre Cardin 9.7″ and 7″ Android Tablets

Posted by – January 15, 2011

Pierre Cardin Communication Electronics also called Shenzhen Vogues Industries are showing these new interesting Android tablets, one is 9.7″ same LG IPS capacitive panel as on iPad running on Rockchip RK29xx series with front and back cameras, another tablet is 7″ capacitive Samsung ARM Cortex-A8 Hummingbird tablet to be sold at $150 in bulk, and they also make a probably cheap 3.5″ Qualcomm MSM7227 mobile phone as well.

the-digital-reader.com: Newsmy Rockchip powered Android Tablet “kindle clone design”

Posted by – January 15, 2011
Category: Tablets, Rockchip, CES, Android

Rockchip was powering about 50 Android tablets at CES 2011, Nate the Great liked this Android tablet design presented by Newsmy at the Rockchip booth:

This video was posted at: the-digital-reader.com

the-digital-reader.com: Gajah BK 7009 Android tablet

Posted by – January 15, 2011
Category: Tablets, Rockchip, CES, Android

Nate the Great found this Gajah BK7009 7″ Android tablet with a customized Android UI for e-reader mode:

This video was posted at: the-digital-reader.com

Canon Vixia HF G10 Sample recordings

Posted by – January 15, 2011

As I am considering the new 2011 camcorder Series from Panasonic/Canon/Sony/Nikon for upgrading to higher quality 1080p video-blogging, I thought I would test the qualities of the newest $1500 Canon Vixia HF G10 series camcorder by recording samples onto my own SD card and post them here on YouTube and include the full download of the original sample video file for your analysis.

The picture quality on Canon Vixia HF G10 should basically be the same as on the $500 more expensive Canon XA10, that nearly only ads XLR audio inputs, so if I find out I might want to upgrade my audio recordings to XLR, I might go with that.

The Canon Vixia HF G10 sensor is 1/3 of an inch in size and has a pixel count of 2.07 megapixels, which corresponds exactly to a 1920 × 1080 resolution. Canon’s theory is that by having a sensor that matches to Full HD resolution, the video image will benefit overall. (read more infos on camcorderinfo.com) Canon uses their new DIGIC DV3 Processor which hopefully thus provides good compression quality even when filming at 12mbitps or lower bitrates for easier uploads.

No in-camera cut and join editing? No 720p modes? No 60p mode? No overlay graphics integration (such as transparent png file with my logo at bottom right corner of videos)? No built-in Bluetooth mics and sound mixer (Canon says they got an external Bluetooth microphone option, though may not support more than one Bluetooth microphone at the time)? No built-in fast WiFi and Ethernet YouTube uploads? I would like a good in-camera compressor to make high quality at low manageable bitrates to upload HD on YouTube without requiring PC re-encoding, without it taking too long especially at conferences where there is slow upload speed. Those are features I would like in my next camera, but I still may do without if quality can be much improved over the Sanyo HD1000 that I have been using for all my video-blogging since March 2008. Do you think I should upgrade my video-blogging to this camera or do you have another suggestion for what new camera I should consider?

24mbitps@1080p@24p Sample:

Download sample on Google Docs (96MB for 34 seconds)

12mbitps@1080p@24p Sample:

Download sample on Google Docs (52MB for 35 seconds, this is probably the quality I would record my video-blogging in for it not to take too long to upload to YouTube)

Top-24 videos I filmed at CES of products not covered by Engadget

Posted by – January 14, 2011

While Engadget has about 38 bloggers at CES and a huge dedicated trailer with dedicated fiber optics line just outside the Central Hall, it can be hard for a small independent blogger like me, fighting for bandwidth at cheap Las Vegas hotels (Internet access in my Sahara hotel room actually didn’t work at all during the whole CES) or staying on the floor outside the Las Vegas Convention Center press room untill 11PM every night (until they turned off the lights and security kicks me out), uploading and posting 106 HD quality videos during CES bringing you exclusive contents even as sites like Engadget and 100 other big blogs always post 500 things on the first day of CES, their coverage is great. But I notice I may have covered a bunch of things that the Engadget bloggers didn’t find interesting enough or couldn’t find (too busy partying with Lady Gaga?), let me give you an overview of some 24 products that I have filmed and that seem not to be covered on Engadget (I still have more than 20 CES videos to upload and to post later today and the next few days):

NEC Tegra2 Powered 7″ Laptop, Engadget only covered NEC’s cool dual-resistive-screen Android tablet which I also filmed, but they don’t seem to have found this 7″ Tegra 2 Laptop with Touch screen form factor.

Innodigital WebTube, Android ARM Cortex-A9 set-top-box, Korean Innodigital seems to be making the absolute best Samsung ARM Cortex-A8 $165 and Trident ARM Cortex-A9 $265 Android Set-top-boxes. Those I believe may be Google TV ready once that software for ARM is ready.

OLPC XO-1.75, ARM Marvell Armada 610 version of the XO Laptop!, Engadget did cover it but not with video.

Onyx Boox M90, cool 9.7″ connected e-ink e-reader with digitizer annotations input and cool embedded Linux software by Chinese Onyx International. Definitely a good alternative to the 9.7″ Kindle DX that has no touch screen input features.

Ramos ARM Cortex-A9 Tablets, except all the Tegra2 tablets and the OMAP4430 Blackberry Playbook, Ramos may have been one of the only ones showing alternative AmLogic 1.2Ghz ARM Cortex-A9 based tablets at CES.

Polaroid Android Tablet, Polaroid showed a 9.7″ Android Tablet to compete directly with the iPad.

Shenzhen ACT 4.8″ capacitive Marvel PXA935 clamshell Android, a really enjoyable 1Ghz Marvell powered Android 4.8″ capacitive clamshell form factor with dual-sim card. This design could be close to dream like for some productive Android fanboys.

Ocean Star 1024×600 7″ capacitive Rockchip RK2818 Android Tablet, at $140 in bulk, may be most affordable 1024×600 7″ capacitive Android tablet yet and can have 3G built-in for $50 more. Rockchip is ramping up!

Mary-Lou Jepsen gives an update on Pixel Qi at CES 2011, Engadget did talk about Pixel Qi news, but did not post an extensive interview with Mary-Lou Jepsen talking about status like mine.

Archos 101 Home Tablet, possibly cheapest 10″ capacitive ARM Cortex-A8 tablet, yet another in the Rockchip Home Tablet series for Archos, Rockchip says it could be sold for $199 retail, price is to be confirmed by Archos once Rockchip RK29xx is delivered in mass quantities for this product to ship.

Rockchip presents RK2818 and RK29xx series Processors at CES 2011, Engadget didn’t provide you with an extensive interview with top representative at Rockchip about their status. Rockchip was in over 50 Android tablets shown at CES, from RK2818 to RK29xx, that’s possibly a record.

GreatWall M7250, $125 Android Tablet, Marvell 166 ARM11 based 7 Android tablet, it costs $125 in bulk, offers a 3G built-in option for $45 extra

Zaidtek E7 and Zaidtek H7 Android Tablets, Qualcomm MSM7227 and Rockchip RK2818 capacitive 7″ tablets, $350 and $250 respectively, may be some of “most affordable” such capacitive tablets with 3G built-in. Seems to be same design in $450 at retail Aigo N700 which I also filmed.

Robo Builder dancing robot, humanoid Robot building and programming kit for around $860

Mastone 10.1″ OMAP3630 Android Tablet, one of the first designs after Archos to use OMAP3630 in a tablet as far as I know.

Jetbook mini LCD based $99 e-reader, uses interesting LCD based e-reading technology from Toshiba, and is affordable.

Match Tech 9.7″ Capacitive i.MX51 Android Tablet, another proof Apple has lost exclusivity on LG’s 9.7″ IPS capacitive touch screen panel, here powered by Freescale i.MX51 and with design to be upgraded to faster i.MX53 when available.

istation (previously Digital Cube) launched 7″ 3D Tablet and 5″, may not have fastest Telechips processor, still original designs.

Nufront ARM Powered Laptops, first time Nufront shows their ARM Cortex-A9 in 10″ and 14″ Laptops and 10″ Tablets.

Freescale i.MX508 next generation e-ink platform, in this video showing 8fps refresh rates and Android for e-ink e-readers which could enable awesome e-ink apps (rss readers, news readers, email, web browsing, etc..)

Freescale i.MX51 Powered Tablets at CES 2011, tour of about a dozen Freescale powered Android tablets.

Seco srl presents Pico Projector in a Lamp concept, check this out, one of the most original uses of Android and pico projector.

Honeycomb user interface demo, I actually grabbed some footage of me using the actual Android Honeycomb OS (considering it’s not final or simply secretive for now), did anyone else post Honeycomb UI videos other than the official ones that were playing in loop on any Xoom demonstrated at CES?

LG Smart TV to be ARM Powered, some interviewing with LG Smart TV product manager about how it’ll be ARM Powered.

Check back as I am uploading the remaining 20 or so videos that I filmed at CES today and the next few days.

Panasonic HDC-HS900 Sample recordings

Posted by – January 14, 2011

As I am considering the new 2011 camcorder Series from Panasonic/Canon/Sony as my new video-blogging camcorder, I thought I would test the qualities of the newest Panasonic HS900 series camcorder by recording samples onto my own SD card and post them here on YouTube and include the full download of the original sample video file for your analysis.

The Panasonic HDC-HC900 comes with same 3MOS three 1/4.1-inch CMOS sensors as last year-s HDC-HS700 series, but now includes a better processor called Crystal Engine PRO. Panasonic claims this new processor reduces noise by 45%, and should produce better images in low-light conditions. (read more infos on camcorderinfo.com)

No in-camera cut and join editing? No 720p modes? No 24p mode? No overlay graphics integration (such as transparent png file with my logo at bottom right corner of videos)? No built-in Bluetooth mics and sound mixer? No built-in fast WiFi and Ethernet YouTube uploads? I would like a good in-camera compressor to make high quality at low manageable bitrates to upload HD on YouTube without requiring PC re-encoding, without it taking too long especially at conferences where there is slow upload speed. Those are features I would like in my next camera, but I still may do without if quality can be much improved over the Sanyo HD1000 that I have been using for all my video-blogging since March 2008. Do you think I should upgrade my video-blogging to this camera or do you have another suggestion for what new camera I should consider?

Sample at 1080p@60fps@24mbitps: Download original sample file on Google Docs (108MB for 38 seconds)

Sample at 8mbitps HX mode: Download original sample file on Google Docs (31MB for 30 seconds)
Watch that sample on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE1tMrzvjxs

Sample at 6mbitps HC mode: Download original sample file on Google Docs (24MB for 31 seconds)
Watch that sample on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTCf8XHc_UQ

ARM Powered Google TV confirmed

Posted by – January 14, 2011

I have it on very high authority from someone at Google (to remain anonymous) that an ARM Powered Google TV platform is coming soon.

The specifics of how Google TV on ARM allows for differentiation (also called fragmentation), if there is support for versions without the whole HDMI-passthrough/IR-blaster overlay features, if Google TV on ARM has 1080p@60fps requirements or if 720p@30fps can be enough, if there will be support for cheaper ARM11 platforms such as Korean Telechips based Android-ready boxes, all of that is yet to be confirmed. But a bloggers logic says that eventually all ARM platforms and setups should be compatible. But as with delay in providing official Google Marketplace on non-standard Android Tablets (in a world of Android makers wanting to compete with iPod Touch and iPad), Google has authority to also decide to block or delay official Marketplace or other official features of Google TV on non-standard and cheaper Set-top-box devices.

I have been rumoring this for many months here on ARMdevices.net (1, 2, 3, 4) that Google TV on ARM would be a certainty, it’s also been talked about by ARM President Tudor Brown back in November that “If Google TV is to be mainstream, it must be built on a lower power system, …on lower cost technology”.

Recently, an unofficial jailbreak on Google TV also confirmed my speculation that the main reason TV Networks can block Google TV is because of the Flash Plugin officially announcing itself in the browser to be of Google TV user agent. Jailbreaking thus allows to install a hacked Flash Plugin that cannot be detected by websites.

Just as since Computex in June 2010 (Bonux, Keenhigh mediatech), I filmed several interesting ARM Powered Android Set-top-boxes at CES 2011 such as the ARM Cortex-A9 Innodigital WebTube and two more Android WebTV solutions that I still have to upload, all of these ARM Powered Android Set-top-box solutions should be able to run a basic Google TV software just as well.

Consider that Google has to cater to not pre-announcing future products too early as to not cannibalize the sales of the existing Intel powered Google TV boxes such as the Logitech Revue, the stuff from Sony and the upcoming Google TV solutions from Vizio, Toshiba, Samsung, Sharp, LG and others (some of those may already be ARM Powered, who knows..). Thus expect the official announcements to happen closer to the date when the Google TV software on ARM is ready for mass marketing and closer to sales.

I still believe that a sub-$100 ARM Powered Google TV Set-top-box could be one of the most revolutionary things to happen to TV since it was introduced in the late 1920ies. The revolution is when an affordable sub-$100 box (that everyone can afford) provides easy UI and meaningful algorithms for one-click instant access to all the worlds legal or illegal VOD contents. Instant access for all to every video ever made. Any video maker can be instantly broadcast on an infrastructure to be seen everywhere according to an algorithm based on ratings to determine quality and originality. People watch an average of 5 hours of TV per day, it greatly aspires to be revolutionized.

Qualcomm’s dual-core snapdragon was at CES 2011

Posted by – January 14, 2011

I didn’t have time to find it when I tried to find new stuff at Qualcomm’s CES booth, but they did show a reference platform for their upcoming dual-core Snapdragon MSM8660 to some bloggers at CES 2011 and they posted an official video here:


Source: youtube.com/QUALCOMMVlog
Found via: engadget.com

Expect to see more on Qualcomm’s Dual Core Snapdragon at Mobile World Congress next month.

Here’s an interview showing Qualcomm MSM8660 reference prototype at CES 2011 posted by IntoMobile.com:


Source: youtube.com/IntoMobile

$130 Android Laptop

Posted by – January 14, 2011

Hopeland Digital Corporation of Shenzhen releases this NB-100 10.1″ Android Laptop, powered by the ARM11 Telechips 8902 processor, 256MB RAM, 8GB nand flash, SD card slot, WiFi, it runs Android 2.1 for now, possibly upgradable. What does Google need to do to optimize Android for the Laptop? I think someone just needs to put an ARM Cortex A8 or A9 processor inside (with good fast I/O and memory, enough RAM..) and port a full Chrome browser for it (perhaps just run Chrome OS for ARM) and we’ll be all set. Do you think this type of platform is soon ready to replace $300 netbooks and the $1000 MacBook Air?

GreatWall M7250, $125 Android Tablet

Posted by – January 14, 2011

China GreatWall Computer Shenzhen releases this Marvell 166 ARM11 based 7 Android tablet, it costs $125 in bulk, they provide Capacitive or Resistive model, as well as offer a 3G built-in option for $45 extra.

Zaidtek E7 and Zaidtek H7 Android Tablets

Posted by – January 14, 2011

Zaidtek E7 is an ARM11 Qualcomm MSM7227 based Android 2.1 capacitive tablet. You can notice that it looks similar to the Aigo N700 tablet that I posted earlier. This video also features the Zaidtek H7 Rockchip ARM9 RK2818 Android tablet. Prices are $350 and $250 respectively both including the built-in 3G modem for bulk orders of at least 200 pieces.

PocketBook 603, 903 and IQ at CES 2011

Posted by – January 14, 2011

PocketBook are releasing the 603 Pro, 903 Pro and PocketBook IQ Android Tablet/E-reader globally.