$100 Novo7 tablet: Android 4.0, 7" capacitive screen, USB 2.0, HDMI
ainovo.com
ainovo.com
That's the manufacturer for the JZ4770 SoC (system-on-a-chip) used in the Novo7. Their page has:
- Product Datasheet (admittedly with only physical/electrical not logical details.)
- Links to Android NDK, Linux toolchain, Linux source, uboot source, sample Linux rootfs for the SoC family.
This is more open development information than almost any other SoC platform used in cheap Android hardware! Admittedly, it all looks a little old but even as an indication of attitude, it's a great sign.
To date, nearly every vendor of these kind of designs has kept this information close to their chest and charges for it - if it's available it's nearly always because of leaks not releases. That's one of the underlying reasons why most of the cheap tablets violate GPL.
Unfortunately, I can't turn up any information about the "vivante gc860" graphics engine - drivers for that will probably be binary blobs (like on nearly every other Android device, at any price point.)
Anyhow, I'm excited that if Ingenic put out sufficient information about this SoC and its features, and if the hardware is "good enough", you might expect to see some interesting other uses & ports in the coming months.
The only real obstacle to making them really useful is power supply, but wireless electricity should solve that problem shortly (and tablet computers might be their "killer app").
It's MIPS-based, not ARM. I don't know if that gives it anything of note. The thing _does_ exist, people have them in their hands. Not saying it's a worthwhile investment, but it might be.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJb3k4fZpB8&feature=yout...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuYE_u19i44&feature=rela...
This one is in Spanish, but you can see the FPS performance in a number of games, flash, PDF, etc..
Always the option of plugging it into the tv....but I have never ever in my life seen anyone do that.
Works well as a "HTPC". Although I haven't found a solution for a remote yet so it's like the good old days when the remote to the tv was physically tethered with a long cord.
However, as it's a marketing video there are approximately 4 seconds of "actual device" footage on there. Here's a video purporting to show 4.0 actually running on the Novo7:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuYE_u19i44
Looks good, although they don't really do anything apart from navigating around menus.
(Lots of videos show Novo tablets with Android 3.x, which it apparently already shipped with. Which I don't understand at all, did Google provide MIPS/Novo with sources to build Honeycomb for MIPS?)
I thought it was interesting for a couple reasons, though of course at a hundred bucks you're not going to get an impressive device, merely functional. It's running a MIPS-compatible processor, which was what caught my eye.
So it's probably not vaporware, but the lack of English certainly doesn't help me figure out anything.
Western companies selling (likely chinese-made) goods to China without investing in serious design, development and marketing (not to mention ecosystem and support) are not going to have much of a future, I agree.
Such as not buying Hyundai because their logo tries to mimic Honda's.
and yes, Hyundai is a good brand now. they even styled the H diferently, but their first cars, e.g. the pony, was a copy of Honda's offering at the time. and you never saw a pony because it couldn't even pass US emission regulations of the time. if it's an OK brand now, it's because it got a lot of money from people that couldn't afford a honda before.
anyway, to keep the analogy in context, i'd buy a huawei device, but not other brands that have a plastic case and/or brand name that is almost the same as a linksys one
I admit to not really knowing much about the Chinese market. But a low-cost home grown tablet brand competing against a foreign competitor, running Baidu Yi or whatever else emerges, is going to have certain undeniable advantages—just like Baidu, Renren, et al have advantages and have in many ways caught up to their western equivalents.
This isn't going to be in the same league as an iPad, or even a Kindle Fire no matter what tweaks or custom ROMs you load.
Nevermind that this manufacturer is small comparatively, and thus can't sell the number of units required for the discounts the likes of Apple, Samsung, and Motorola get.
That said, for only $100 I would be willing to give up a rich multimedia experience/gaming like the iPad for something that did an acceptable job browsing/email.
Or a quick and dirty POS system using Square (or whatever other payment processing people like these days).
Cheaper opens up more applications, ones that "also crappier" doesn't always preclude.
Not everyone in the world earns $120k/year at a Silicon Valley technology job. For much of the world, $500 is a lot of money to spend on a tablet, especially for those outside the United States. In Brazil, for example, after accounting for import taxes on electronics and difference in incomes, spending $500 on a tablet is similar to spending $5,000 on a new tablet in the US. And if you're comparing to a high-paying tech job, that might be more like spending $15,000 on a tablet.
If the iPad was $15,000, would you buy it?
Wherever there's a successful high-end product, there's an even larger space for a lower-priced, lower-end version of that product for the billions of people who can't reasonably afford it. Those who look outside the Silicon Valley bubble realize this, and know that there's a lot of money to be made, even if it's at low margins.
For example, here in New Zealand an IPad will set you back about NZD$800-$1300 depending on your model (16GB Wifi->64GB Wifi+3G). Our currency is currently trading at around 87 US cents, so someone is making a huge amount of money off gadgets in this country.
If tablets reached our shores at something like a reasonable price, people might buy them. Plus this tablet would make a nice testing/development tablet if it can deliver decent performance for the price.
If actual battery life 5+ hours (when watching videos) and it is just fast enough for e-reading, light browsing and most small games, I don't see why people wouldn't buy them unless build quality is really low. Then again, dubious build quality doesn't stop people from buying crappy TVs or bluray players.