In the last few days, there has been a lot of buzz about the YotaPhone, an upcoming Russian Android 4.2 smartphone featuring Snapdragon MSM8960 dual core processor with 2 GB RAM and 32/64 GB Flash. But the real innovation is the presence of 2 full 4.3″ displays: a standard LCD display on one side, and an E-Ink display on the other. Here are the preliminary specifications of the YotaPhone: SoC – Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 MSM8960 dual core Krait processor @ 1.5 GHz System Memory – 2GB RAM Storage – 32 or 64 GB NAND Flash Display 4.3″ LCD Display (1280×720) 4.3″ E-Ink EPD display Camera – 12MP front camera Connectivity Wi-Fi (Direct) Bluetooth NFC 2G, 3G and 4G (LTE) mobile networks Audio – 3.5mm headphone jack Battery – 2100 mAh. The device supports wireless charging. Dimensions – 67 x 131 mm Weight – 140 grams You may think a smartphone […]
Running Ubuntu in Android with ODROID-X Development Board
I’ve had several people asking me about running Linux on Android in the last few months, but I did not look into it into details, because I thought we would just be able to run server apps. That is until Rohith left a comment on CNX Software Facebook timeline, that it’s possible to run Linux in Android, and access the user interface via VNC (sort of simple, but I did not think of it). You probably need at least 1GB of memory and a multi-core processor to run this sort of setup correctly, so I finally decided to give it a try by running Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity interface in ODROID-X development board. I mainly followed the instructions available at http://linuxonandroid.org/ and inside the Android app. Most of the steps I followed can also be replicated on other rooted Android hardware platforms. Apart from Ubuntu 10.04 & 12.04, you can […]
$49.99 Android 4.0 Smartphone Powered by Spreadtrum SC6820 Cortex A5 SoC
Forget about sub-$100 smartphones, there’s now a sub $50 smartphone (including worldwide shipping), some kind of mini Galaxy S3 clone with a 3.5″ touchscreen, powered by Speadtrum SC6820 Cortex A5 + Mali-400 SoC, with 256 MB RAM, 256 MB ROM and running Android 4.0.3 (ICS). Here are the specifications of the device as shown in Focalprice: SoC – Spreadtrum 6820 Cortex A5 @ 1.2GHz with Mali-400 GPU System Memory – 256MB RAM Storage – 256MB NAND Flash + microSD socket (up to 8GB according to specs, 16 GB according to customer support) Display – 3.5″ capacitive touchscreen (480×800) Connectivity Bluetooth v2.0 Wi-Fi 802.11b Video Formats – MP4, 3GP Audio Formats – MP3, MIDI Camera – 0.3MP front camera & 1.3MP rear camera. Sensors – G-Sensor Network – GSM850/900/1800/1900, GPRS, EDGE Dual SIM card dual standby TV Support – Analog TV, PAL, NTSC, SECAM FM Radio Audio In – 3.5 mm […]
Leap Motion Demos: AirHarp and Hands-Free Quadrator
The Leap Motion, a 3D gesture recognition USB device, has been announced in May, but developer kits have only recently been sent out to… developers, and lots of demo has started to pop up, many of which are posted on Leap Motion Facebook page. My favorite demo is the Airharp which, as the name implies, is an harp controlled by finger gestures you do in the “air”, as it demonstrates both the accuracy and responsiveness of the Leap Motion. The project is written by Adam Somers, Senior Software Engineer at Universal Studio and Stanford Alumni, who released both the binary and source code for this demo: AirHarp 0.1 – Binary built against Leap SDK v. 0.6.6 that lets you add & remove strings, cycle through scales and toggle between fullscreen and windowed mode. The source code for the Airharp which uses muskit, a C++ toolkit for music applications, both of which […]
Collabora and Fluendo Release GStreamer SDK for Android
Collabora and Fluendo have recently announced the availability of GStreamer’s Software Development Kit for Android, which allows developers to create multimedia playback applications for Android smartphones and tablets using Gstreamer and the Android NDK.. The GStreamer SDK for Android targets Android 2.3.1 Gingerbread or higher (API Level 9 or greater). However, due to some of the restrictions of previous versions of Android, some features such as hardware acceleration are only available on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean (API Level 16 up). Normally, you’d need the GStreamer SDK which can be installed on Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian), Windows (XP/Vista/7/8) and Mac OS X (10.6 to 10.8). But for developing Android applications using Gstreamer, you don’t. What you do need first is a typical Android development environment with the latest Android SDK, the latest Android NDK, and optionally, but recommended, the Eclipse IDE with Android ADT and NDK plugins. Once everything is […]
2D/3D Graphics Linux Demo (X11, EGL, GLES2, Qt4) on AllWinner A10 Tablet
Xlab (Maxim Kouprianov) has tested 2D & 3D capabilities of AllWinner A10 SoC (with Mali-400 GPU) on a Ployer MOMO11 Bird Edition tablet running OpenEmbedded with kernel 3.0.52+ testing X11, EGL, OpenGL ES2 and Qt4 on the platform, and the results are pretty smooth as you can see in the video below, although there appears to be some flickering in LunaSysMgr demo. The tools used in the demos are xfwm4 (Xfce Windows Manager), es2gears_x11, cube (Qt), LunaSysMgr (Qt/WebOS) and glmark2-es2. Qt4 acceleration is done via XlibGL platform which in turns uses X11-EGL. He used the Mali drivers version r3p0 (mali400-gles20-gles11-linux-x11-ump) and xf86-video-mali on sunxi-linux github repository mainly maintained by rz2k. You can get more details on how to build Mali-400 support for AllWinner A10 on http://linux-sunxi.org/Mali400, and GPU benchmark results for A10 show the drivers seem to work as expected. Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time […]
Kimdecent T21 mini PC Unboxing and Review
Androidpc.es has written a review for the low cost ($49) Kimdecent T21 dual core mini PC in Spanish, and I’ll provide a summary of the review in English below. Kimdecent T21 Unboxing Kimdecent T21 is an Android 4.1 HDMI TV Stick powered by Nufront NS115 dual core Cortex A9 processor. Check out my earlier post about Kimdecent T21 for specifications. The package comes with T21 mini PC, a power adapter with USB to micro USB cable, and a user manual in English. You can also watch T21 Unboxing Video on YouTube. Kimdecent T21 User Interface & System Overview The user interface is a standard Android screen, albeit with power and volume buttons in the Status Bar. I don’t really find this interface very suitable for the TV, but you can always install your own launcher such as Android TV Launcher (apk), or other launcher apps available on Google Play. Beside […]
Jolla Unveils Sailfish OS based on Meego and Sailfish SDK
Last July, a company called Jolly announced it would design, develop and sell smartphones based on the Meego operating system. This is now closer to reality as a demo has been showcased running on Nokia N950, except the operating system is now called Sailfish OS. Internally, Sailfish OS is built on top of the Mer project and Qt. The UI is built with QML and QtQuick and the standard QtMobility APIs are supported. For software development, you’ll need to use a special version of QtCreator. The development flow looks very similar to what you would do to develop applications for Symbian or Harmattan phones. More precisely, the Sailfish SDK consists of QtCreator, a virtualised Mer Platform SDK and Sailfish components. Code is developed in Qt-Creator on the host device, then the code is passed to the virtualised Mer SDK where it compiles inside the Virtual Machine. If you want to […]