Sriram Peruvemba, Vice president of marketing at E-ink, presents the new flexible plastic based E-ink display. That new plastic e-ink screen technology will make it more usable for school children to use E-ink based devices to read all their textbooks and for all to access all books and texts ever written in the whole world.
E-ink is for full readability, outdoors, with reading lights indoors, it basically provides near paper quality, perfect for reading hundreds of pages. Something that is not possible on the current LCD based iPad.
As a demo, Freescale has put some capacitive sensors and combine them with resistive stings to thus combine the effect of a keyboard and of a guitar into an instrument.
The AcceleGlove™ instrumented gesture recognition glove (“designated iGlove for DoD/NIH applications”) has been developed under SBIR grants from the U.S. Army and Department of Education. Find more informations at: http://www.acceleglove.com
AllGo is presenting what may be one of the lowest cost ARM9 i.MX233 based Android device solution. For Tablets, PMPs, intelligent screens. AllGo provides Android software integration on the Freescale processors. The full Tablet with a 7″ WVGA screen and a battery could have a Bill Of Material cost of as low as $35.
Genesi Americas is presenting this awesome looking ARM Cortex A8 based Smartbook design, presented by Genesi who designed the hardware in collaboration with Pegatron of this latest generation of this Freescale Powered Smartbook design. For fun, we are running Microsoft Office through a high resolution version of Citrix viewer on the latest version of Ubuntu 10.4 for ARM processors. This could provide a one click online based software as a service solution. Want to run any X86 application on your ARM Laptop? Just click through the Citrix virtualization stuff and you can have it all running and smoothly. In theory, the apps could be processed by a grid and delivered much faster than on a single x86 processor based device.
Genesi are providing the hardware and software integration solution, in combination with Future Electronics, they can provide the whole solution to carriers, distributors, with the full bill of material, setting up the manufacturing and making the whole thing work and be sold to the market.
Aura, the Genesi Firmware offering, implements a run-time, re-entrant hardware abstraction layer supporting the industry standard IEEE 1275 (OpenFirmware) and UEFI firmware specifications, with significant added functionality.
These additional features provide cost reduction of systems and faster time-to-market of hardware. Genesi provides board bring-up services and firmware for other Power Architecture and ARM hardware suppliers, up to and including a Linux desktop, based on our firmware.
Genesi is an active Open Source supporter, having donated a lot of hardware over the years to Debian, OpenSuSe, Gentoo, Crux and many other Linux distributions.
Genesi are very active in optimizing software specifically for ARM Cortex by porting libraries to the NEON unit in these devices resulting in large speedups.
On a bright sunny day at the Freescale headquarters in Toulouse, Kurt Petersdorff of Liquavista shows us the Liquavista screen and describes some of how it works. Liquavista thus supports color outdoor readability and claims that this screen can be manufactured with little changes to the existing huge LCD manufacturing process.
Freescale and QNX Software Systems are showing their new smart energy reference, a pre-integrated software stack that makes it easier to design, deploy, and extend smart-home energy management systems based on the Freescale i.MX25, i.MX35 and i.MX51.
Imagine a robot that represents you in a distant location – one that represents you in healthcare facilities, in manufacturing sites – even at conferences. With a remote control software, the robot is controlled with a mouse, a video camera and screen to enable videoconferencing that can take you where you need to go to get your job done more efficiently.
You know the slot cars, you have two little electric cars on a track and two players have a button to decide how much voltage to send over to the car. Freescale has collaborated with universities in Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania to use Freescale sensors and software algorithms to create an automatic self-driven car that is faster than most human drivers. As it learns the track on its first lap, it then speeds away at full speed, knowing exacly how much speed to use in each turn. You can watch this other official video showing the self-driven slot cars at Self-driven slot cars at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv5_g5dVsaw
Canonical is showing the Freescale i.MX51 Pegatron Laptop reference design running the latest version of Ubuntu Netbook Edition optimized for ARM for speed (could they be calling this the Ubuntu Smartbook Edition?). In this video, the representative of Canonical explains some of the things that are being worked on to optimize Linux as a full laptop experience on ARM platforms like the ARM Cortex A8 and the multi-core ARM Cortex A9 that are coming out soon. I will film another video with Canonical to try to get more details on how the upcoming ARM Powered laptops are going to look like and how Linux is being optimized for it.
Here’s my review of the Dell Streak, 5″ capacitive Qualcomm Snapdragon powered Android Tablet, as posted by JKKmobile.com a few minutes after I first tried to use his unit at the recent Computex in Taiwan.
The 4.8″ to 5″ Android Tablet is in my opinion the coolest and the best size for a Tablet because it is the largest possible screen that fits in most pockets, thus this form factor Android tablet can be carried around everywhere with the largest screen size for web browsing and watching videos and launching apps always available.
Archos created and has been selling this form factor since 2003 with their release of the Archos AV300, back then the first large screen PMP device. Since 2005, Archos released the first WiFi enabled touch screen embedded Linux Qtopia based PMA430 and for over 9 months, the Android based Archos 5 Internet Tablet has been available on the market at $249 in Radio Shack.
The release of the Dell Streak is a good thing for Archos as it popularizes the form factor. Also, I believe Archos has some advantages even with their 9 month old Android product such as pricing with a 9 month old pricing that is at about half the launch price of the Dell Streak, support for all video codecs and high profile H264, larger storage capacities up to 500GB, HDMI output, USB host and a bunch of other features. Also, Archos is expected to release 45nm based OMAP3640 Android tablet devices by September, thus further improving on the features and on the price/value performance.
I am a big fan of the e-reader market, it helps people read again, as TV and the Internet has taken over more and more of people’s time, the e-readers makes it possible to read any book, any article at any time with a quality up close near to paper quality.
I filmed an early Android e-ink prototype at CeBIT that was showcased by Gigabyte, now Freescale is pushing further the use of Android as the software stack for e-ink e-readers with the i.MX51e development board demonstrated in this video. This could mean awesome use of feed readers, where articles, blog posts could also be beamed from the Chrome browser extension directly to your Android based e-reader. The feature of adding text contents from your laptop to your e-reader could become really really powerful.
Featuring pocket size touch demo DEMOMPR031 (4 µA current consumption with ITO pads) and Freescale appliance touch control hob demo. I filmed this at the Freescale European headquarters in Toulouse.
Acorp is releasing the EM501R, 4.8″ Android Rockchip RK2808 powered tablet to be sold at only $88 (for distributors buying at least 1000 pieces). This is the Acorp 5″ Rockchip 600mhz ARM9 based Android tablet. This sized tablet fits just fine in most pockets and provides better view of web browser, video and apps than on a 3.5″ phone.
