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Earl Rugged E-ink Tablet for the Outdoors

Earl is a rugged Android 4.1 Android Tablet with all you need for the outdoors including a 6″ E-ink display to be readable in all light conditions, GPS capability, and 20 hours of battery life. And if it’s not enough, you can also recharge this water-proof device with the built-in solar panel on your way to the mountain top. Here are the specifications of this device: SoC – Freescale i.MX 6 DualLight Cortex A9 @ 1GHz + Vivante GC880 GPU System Memory – 1GB Storage – 16GB flash + microSD slot Display – Flexible 6″ E-ink screen (1024×768),  with glove friendly IR touchscreen Connectivity – Wifi b/g/n, BT 4.0, ANT+, NFC, FRS/GMRS/MURS, and GPS + GLONASS Sensors – Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Magnetometer, Temperature, Barometer, Humidity, and Anemometer Misc – Radio AM/FM/SW/LW + IR blaster Battery – 3000 mAh (20+ hour) rechargeable with solar panel or via the provided 20″ USB lanyard. […]

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Review of Bluetimes MX5 Android 4.2.2 Set-top Box

Bluetimes MX5 is an Android 4.2.2 set-top box powered by AMLogic AML8726-MX that costs around $70, or about $30 less than devices with similar hardware such as G-Box Midnight MX2 or Tronsmart Prometheus. AndroidPC.es got hold of one sample, also called 10moons D6, took some pictures and reviewed the devices for us. Bluetimes MX5 Unboxing The package contains the media player, an RF remote control and a power adapter, but no cables, which is one way to save on costs. Looking at the rear panel of the device front left to right, we can see an external Wi-Fi antenna, the 5V power jack, one USB port,  a composite RCA connector and stereo RCA output, an Ethernet RJ45 port, HDMI output, and SPDIF output. An SD card slot and another USB host port are located on the front panel. So Bluetimes MX5 just has 2 USB ports, which is a bit […]

Khadas Edge2 Arm mini PC
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Micromint Bambino 200 and 200E Dual ARM Cortex M SBC Support .NET Gadgeteer and mbed Applications

Micromint, a US based supplier of single-board computers and industrial embedded controllers, has just announced Micromint Bambino 200 and 200E single board computers powered by NXP LPC4330 dual core Cortex M4/M0 MCU @ 204Mhz. Those 2 boards support .NET Gadgeteer and mbed frameworks. Key Features of Micromint Bambino 200: NXP LPC4330 Dual core ARM Cortex-M4/M0 @ 204 MHz with 264 KB SRAM. Storage – 4MB SPI flash USB – High-speed USB 2.0 device port used both as a power source and for data communications or debugging Misc – 2 buttons, 2 LEDs 5 Gadgeteer sockets Dimensions- 101.6 x 58.4 mm Bambino 200E is based on the same platform but adds: Storage – 8 MB SPI Flash (vs 4MB) 10 Gadgeteer sockets 10/100 Mbps Ethernet microSD socket Xbee socket Power jack – 7 – 15 VDC The company also explains that a JTAG for low level debugging, a coin cell battery […]

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Intel Takes on ARM with Silvermont Microarchitecture for Low Power SoCs

Intel has launched Silvermont, a new microarchitecture for low power SoC targeting smartphones, tablets, and servers in data centers. Silvermont SoC will be manufactured using 22nm Tri-Gate SoC process, and the company claims 3x times more peak performance than current generation Atom processors, or 5 times less power consumption at the same performance level. Silvermont will be used in Bay Trail, Avoton,  and Merrifield processors: Intel’s quad-core “Bay Trail” SoC is scheduled for Q4 2013 tablets, and variants of the “Bay Trail” platform will also be used in market segments including entry laptop and desktop computers. Intel’s “Merrifield” is scheduled to ship to customers by the end of this year, and actual smartphones will show up in 2014. Intel’s “Avoton” will be used in low power microservers, and provide full server product capability that customers require including 64-bit, integrated fabric, error code correction, Intel virtualization technologies and software compatibility. Intel […]

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Vivante GC4000 is The Best Mobile GPU… When It Comes to Accuracy

Most of the time, mobile GPU comparisons involve benchmarks such as Antutu, Nenamark 2, etc…, or people may consider which games will be able to run smoothly with a particular device, but we seldom compare image quality, for the simple reason it’s usually more difficult to achieve. YOUi Labs has just done that, however, by running the shader code below on several hardware platforms, mainly Android tablets, with the most common mobile GPUs, and used the results obtained with a  Desktop PC GPU, Nvidia Geforce GT 630M, has a reference.

Here are the results: The worst GPUs are Mali-400 MP4 in Exynos 4412 and Geforce ULP in Tegra 3, which can respectively only show 5 and 8 lines before degradation, and the top two GPUs are Qualcomm Adreno 225 in MSM8660A, and Vivante GC4000 in HiSilicon K3V2 processor. Imagination Technologies SGX544 and ARM Mali-T604 also provide decent results, but […]

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Matricom G-Box Midnight MX2 Android TV Box Review

Matricom sent me one of their latest G-Box Midnight MX2 media player based on AMLogic AML8726-M6, with 1GB RAM, 8 GB flash, running Android 4.2, and with full support for XBMC. This is an update of the G-Box Midnight based on AML8726-M3 which supports XBMC in Android, as well as XBMC Linux thanks to community builds. Specifications: SoC – Amlogic AML8726-MX Dual Core Cortex A9 CPU + dual core Mali-400 GPU System Memory – 1GB DDR3 RAM Storage – 8GB Flash + SD card slot (Up to 32GB) Video Output – HDMI v1.4, composite (CVBS) and component (YUV) Audio Output – HDMI, AV, and SPDIF Connectivity – 802.11b/g/n internal Wifi + 10/100 Ethernet Port USB – 4x USB 2.0 Ports (1 might be OTG) IR sensor Power Supply – 5V/2A The hardware and software is very similar to Tronsmart Prometheus (See review), as both are based on AML8726-MX, run Android […]

Rockchip RK3568/RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs
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Linaro Releases IKS big.LITTLE Implementation Source Code

Yesterday, Linaro announced the released of the IKS (In-kernel switcher) implementation for big.LITTLE processor which allows the SoC to switch between individual Cortex A7 or Cortex A15 cores to optimize power consumption. Currently, the only consumer device using supporting big.LITTLE the Samsung Galaxy S4 thanks to Samsung Exynos 5 Octa featuring 4 ARM Cortex A7 and 4 ARM Cortex A15 cores. IKS implementation can only make use of 4 cores at a time in this processor, since it must choose between A7 or A15 depending on the load. HMP (Heteregenous Multi-Processing) implementation is currently worked on in order to be able to use all 8 cores, and distributes tasks to the right core for the job. You can read my previous post for differences between IKS and HMP. Linaro explains the current source still needs a few more modifications before being upstream to mainline. The code was developed for and […]

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Promate LumiTab Android Tablet Features a DLP Pico-Projector

Back in 2011 & 2012, we saw some Android products with a pico-projector, including a lightbulb running Android, but pico-projectors never really seemed to be embedded into consumers products. Promate, however, decided to add one of those to one of their Android tablets. Promate Lumitab would just be a typical Android 4.2 tablet with a 7″ touchscreen, a dual core processor (OMAP4460), 1GB RAM, 16GB flash, if it did not also come with a DLP pico-projector capable of outputting an image up to 100″ (254 cm). Promate Lumitab Specifications: SoC – TI OMAP4460 Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 @ 1.5GHz + PowerVR SGX540 GPU System Memory – 1GB LPDDRII RAM Storage – 16GB flash, and a microSD slot Display – 7-inch IPS display (1024×600) Video Output mini HDMI Pico-projector DLP technology 854×480 (WVGA) resolution. 35 Lumens, Projection size of more than 100 inches, and projection ratioof 1.5 Audio I/O – 3.5mm stereo […]

Khadas VIM4 SBC