Universal Microelectronics Co. Ltd. is showing this awesome looking video phone project based on a powerful ARM Cortex A8 processor to integrate the Google Android OS into a 10.1″ capacitative touchscreen product! It has HDMI output, capacitative touchscreen (Android touchscreen dirvers are still under construction), ethernet plug, USB host and more features. Built-in dect phone, webcam. For about $260 price for carriers or resellers to buy this in bulk. They are also making a 4.8″ 800×480 version with a built-in mini-HDMI output, MicroSD slot and USB-host as well for about $200!
4.8″ 800×480 Android Tablet with built-in GPS, 8GB flash storage, it can playback video formats up to D1 resolution, it has WiFi built-in as well, 3G could be built-in as well “in the next 3 months”. Philip Zhou, Overseas Sales Manager at http://www.smit.com.cn shows it to us in this video.
They are not announcing any price at this moment, I am guessing that this Android MID could be sold for cheap, around or less than 200 dollars.
It runs Maemo 0.9 embedded Linux on a Marvell ARM processor. It has 4GB built-in flash memory with MicroSD memory expansion slot. Integrated 3G, WiFi on a nice 800×480 4.3″ touchscreen. It’s part of the big embedded Linux push by China Telecom to bring more functional smart mobile devices in the hands of Chinese people and ready to export worldwide. Stephen Kwan, Director of http://www.chinaoptima.com shows us the product.
This device is so far the most awesome I have seen at IFA 2009, it’s a 5″ Smartbook, one of the worlds first that will be released running on an ARM Cortex A8 processor by Freescale. Running Ubuntu 9.04 for ARM optimized for this ARM processor.
In this video I boot-up the machine (you probably wouldn’t need to boot it up really, it’s got 10 hours battery life and can probably go into standby just fine with instant resume from standby). I go on certain websites like Engadget.com over WiFi and I ask the Sharp PC-Z1 products representative a bunch of questions about price (340€), availability (September, that’s now folks!), weight (she forgot, but you can find that online).
This is the reason to go to IFA, wow awesome!
My suggestion: Sharp should sell this for 200 dollars with a 7″ screen (cause there is space on this form factor) and it’ll be the worldwide winner.
Mary Lou Jepsen, CTO and inventor of the Pixel Qi technology, explains more of how the Pixel Qi 3Qi screen works, shows us a bit of how she works with her screen technology in her home lab, testing the angular performance in the OLPC screen and tells how power consumption can be saved further with a few motherboard modifications to behave like the OLPC laptop (turning off the processor and motherboard when they are not needed) and more.
(Youtube is still processing this 10 minute long HD quality video, it should be up in a few minutes in low quality and a couple of hours in HD quality)
Side by side comparison video showing the Pixel Qi 3Qi LCD screen next to the E-ink based Amazon Kindle, next to the transflective Toshiba R600 and next to a regular resistive touchscreen tablet laptop. Comparing performance in direct sunlight, in the shade and in a dark room with and without the backlight.
Following the initial video that was released showing the Pixel Qi screen during the Computex trade show in Taipei, Mary Lou Jepsen, CTO and Inventor of the Pixel Qi screen technology, answers user comments that were posted on the Engadget and Mobileread threads (among many other blogs who linked to the first video) with users from all over the world commenting and asking questions about the screen in the first video.
Kinpo is making a 7 inch Android tablet powered by a Freescale processor. A bunch of engineers happened to come by the Freescale headquarters with this device while I was there filming a whole bunch of other videos. I then convinced them to show it to me and to let me film it. They installed Android on a 800×480 resolution 7″ touchscreen tablet device. It works pretty smoothly though they obviously have some tweaking that they still need to do before such a device can be sold. This device currently has some pretty obvious bugs like the video not playing correctly.
