Videos from this year’s HKTDC Hong Kong Electronics fair are being uploaded to Youtube thick and fast, and as usual Charbax from armdevices.net is there to interrogate the staff at all of our favourite manufacturers booths. One such video comes from the RockChip booth where we find out a bit more about some of the projects that they are working on from Vice President Chen Feng.
read postRockChip and Yinlips News From The HKTDC Hong Kong Electronics Fair
It’s been a while since RockChip announced their new line of SoCs, but it looks like they’ll finally be available to buy in consumer products some time this month. The SoC is comprised of a Quad core 1.8Ghz CPU, Quad core 500Mhz Mali-400 GPU, 1GB 2GB* of RAM and will be built on the 28nm …
Before we get started I think it’d be worthwhile identifying the purpose of a 5 inch tablet. A lot of you with high end smart phones might wonder why anyone would need one of these, and I agree that there is a huge overlap between smartphones and these 5 inch Android tabs. But aside from the uncontrollable gadget lust that forces me to part with my cash every once in a while, it does have its niche to fill.
When I was a kid I always wanted a PMP. I remember ogling over various Archos, Creative and RCA players on ebay – 10 years later I still wanted one, despite owning a smartphone. I can’t speak for all current or previous generation phones out there but in the case of my HTC Desire (and some current generation smartphones that my friends own) it is useless as a PMP. The sound quality through speaker is abysmal, through headphones it’s dull and flat. Its video capabilities are lack lustre at best and even if they weren’t then the battery would probably let me down before a movie had finished anyway. Phones have a long way to go before they can call themselves competitive MP3 or video players.
So this is where the niche lies. A large screened but pocketable device with good sound quality, almost limitless video capabilities and a battery that isn’t going to roll over and die half way through a film. Can it be done? And more importantly can it be done well? Read on for a brick wall of text…
Not strictly on topic, this, but as it fits the criteria of being both obscure and handheld and capable of playing games (if you can stand the lack of physical controls) then I’m going to crow bar it into this blog anyway. So there.
Chinese Android tablets are nothing new, but a Chinese Android ‘tablet’ that fits in your pocket with ease and is able to comfortably run the demands of Android 2.3 is thus far unheard of. Step in RockChip. Their RK2918 SoC is based on a Cortex A8 CPU running at 1.0 – 1.2 Ghz (This might be another marketing fib whereby the clock speed is added to the GPU clock speed, but who knows right?). It’s been implemented, coupled with up to 512MB of DDR3 RAM in a few 7″+ tablets in the past month or so and looks to be the first RockChip that can really run Android at an acceptable pace. RockChip have always had a decent implementation of Android available for their SoCs but lacklustre processors were always a bit of a hindrance. Until now…
read postA New Wave Of Pocketable Android PMPs Is About To Break…