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This Low End Android Tablet Comes with a (Non-Removable) Stand with Speaker

The tablet shown below has pretty low specifications with an AllWinner A13 SoC, 512 MB RAM, 4GB, a 7″ 800×480 display, and a not so attractive price. However its stand makes it somewhat unique, and this tablet may be practical as a media frame, kitchen tablet, or possibly as an input console for some external device. Here are the specifications of the device: SoC – Allwinner A13 ARM Cortex-A8 Processor @ 1GHz with Mali-400 GPU System Memory – 512 MB Storage – 4GB NAND Flash + (full size) SD card slot Display – 7″ capacitive touchscreen TFT display with 800×480 resolution Connectivity – Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n Sensor – Gravity USB – mini USB port Battery – Unknown Audio – Built-in speaker This Android 4.0 tablet comes with a power adapter, an OTG cable, and a user’s manual. You can purchase it for $83.59 on TinyDeal, but if you really need […]

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Wimoto Motes are Tiny Bluetooth Sensors for iOS, Android, and Linux Devices

Wimoto Motes are small (30x30x8mm) wireless sensors that communicate temperature, humidity, soil moisture… values to your iPhone, iPad, Android, and Linux (yes, including the Raspberry Pi) devices via Bluetooth. They are said to last for about a year on a single CR2032 battery and don’t require an Internet connection to work, but you can still upload your data to Wimoto cloud service via the app, or use an optional mote.cloud bridge to do it for you in realtime via Wifi. There are currently 4 Motes: Climote – Measures light (0 to 60,000 lux), temperature (-25 to 85 C) and humidity. Used to monitor a room environment (bedroom, cellar, greenhouse,…), and tell you if you need to make adjustment Growmote – Measures sunlight (0 to 60,000 lux), soil moisture (5 levels) and temperature (-25 to 85 C), to make sure your lawn or flowers are not  thirsty. Thermote – Measures an object temperature […]

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Linux-based $99 Ceptor HDMI Stick Powered by Freescale i.MX 6Dual

Thanks to individuals developers, we’ve been able to get Linux distributions based on Ubuntu, or Debian run on HDMI TV dongles for about a year, but nearly all of them just come with Android and that’s it. The only two exceptions I can think of are PengPod Pengstick and FXI Technologies Cotton Candy, where actively work on Ubuntu support, and provide images to boot from microSD. But now, Devon IT has developed a mini PC, called Ceptor powered by Freescale i.MX 6Dual processor with 1GB RAM, and up to 32GB Flash. It runs Linux-based ZeTOS operating system, and is destined at creating virtual desktop solutions for the enterprise. The casing just looks like HiaPad Hi802 or Zealz GK802 , but the internal specifications are slightly different: SoC – Freescale i.MX 6Dual @ 1 GHz + Vivance GC2000 GPU System Memory – 512MB or 1GB DDR3 Storage – up to 32GB eMMC […]

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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 […]

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How to Use Libhybris and Android GPU Libraries with Mer (Linux) on the Cubieboard

You may have heard about libhybris, a library that cleverly loads Android HW adaptations and convert calls from bionic to glibc. One of the greatest achievement of this library is to allow Android GPU drivers to be used with Linux, and is notably used by Canonical, although they did not write it, for Ubuntu 14.04 which will be compatible with any recent Android smartphones or tablets. One way to get started with libhybris is to port a device to Ubuntu Touch, but this may take a while. However, I’ve found a faster and easier way to play with libhybris thanks to Martin Brook (vgrade) who wrote a tutorial on how to use libhybris with Mer on the Cubieboard. Mer is an open source mobile Linux distribution powered by Qt/QML and HTML5, that’s born from the ashes of Meego, and is now used in the upcoming Sailfish OS. You’ll need to […]

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Actions Semi Announces ATM7023A Dual Core SoC for Tablets

Thanks to Actions Semiconductor ATM7029, you can now purchase quad core Android tablets for less than $100. They were at the Hong Kong Electronics Fair on 12-15 April, 2013, mainly to talk about ATM7029 capabilities such as up 6 simultaneous video playback, Android 4.2.2 support with Miracast, 1.3 GHz CPU clock (to be pushed to 1.5GHz later on), and so on. They also announced ATM7023A, a dual core Cortex processor targeting low costs tablets with the following characteristics: Dual core Cortex A9 family up to 1.2 GHz. 100% compatible with ARMv7 instructions Android 4.2.2 + Linux 3.4 OS. Seamless upgrade 3D GPU Advanced PMU, LPD GEN II architecture integrated, standby power over 1000 hours with a 8000 mAh battery. Display Interface – RGB, LVDS, MIPI support. Resolution up to 2048×1536 Video Decoding – 1080p60 Video Encoding – H.264 1080p30 Six videos playing simultaneously Quick Boot technology – Boots within 10 […]

Rockchip RK3568/RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs
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Allwinner Showcases A20, A31 and A31s Devices: Tablets, Phablets, Mini PCs, Projectors, Laptops, Development Boards…

Charbax is now at the China Sourcing Fair in Hong Kong, meeting and interviewing lots of Chinese companies. One of the companies I’ve been following is AllWinner because of their low-cost ARM Cortex processors, found in many Android devices, which somewhat support Linux. In the video below, we first learn they have shipped 1 million A31 in the last 4 months, A31s and A20 processors have been available since the end of March for phablets, and A20 price is supposed to be very close to A10. So products based on AllWinner A10 could be upgraded to AllWinner A20 for just a few dollars more as both SoC are (nearly) pin to pin compatible. By the way, if you’re interested in the Cubieboard, you may want to see this. We then go through lots of devices based on AllWinner SoC, albeit too fast to get many details, but the list may […]

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Mini PCs (MK802+, UG802, GK802 & iStick A200) Linux Performance Comparison

Ian MORRISON (linuxium) has tested Linux with several mini PCs powered by different processors. The main point of his tests was to evaluate the performance difference between running Ubuntu 12.04 natively, or in a chroot in Android using tools such as Complete Linux Installer. I previously tried Linux on Android in ODROID-X, and found the applications start time when running from an low-end SD card pretty dismal, and the graphics performance poor.  Ian had a different approach, and decided to use a subset of Phoronix Suite benchmarks to compare different hardware / software combination and posted the results in “mini PCs” G+ community. There’s a lot of data, and analyzing the results is not really straightforward without spending some time looking at the data. In this post, I’ll explain how the tests have been conducted, explain the results and try to draw a conclusion. Mini PCs and other Hardware Under […]

Boardcon Rockchip and Allwinner SoM and SBC products