OYO ebook reader available as eWooky

A  Czech company Wooky decided to include another ebook Reader into their project.

Instead of Archos Arnova 8 G2 used last year,  this time they selected e-ink device, manufactured in India,  known as OYO reader in Europe.

OYO/eWoooky Specifications

• 6-inch SiPix capacitive touchscreen; 800 x 600 pixels; 16 grayscales.
• Formats supported: TXT, ePub, PDF, HTML image viewer, JPEG, PNG, BMP, MP3.
• Micro USB port.
• Dimensions: 154 x 124 x 11mm (6 x 4.9 x .43 inches); weighs 240g (8.5 ounces).
• 5 fonts; 6 font sizes.
• Wi-Fi connection.
• 2GB internal memory; MicroSD slot (up to 32GB).
• Battery life 8,000 pages.

eWooky reader is available for 125 €.

Google Nexus tablet: Asus or Samsung?

According to Slashgear rumors, new Google tablet (expected to be introduced in Google conference June 2012, 27th-29th,  together with introduction of new Android 5.0 Jelly Bean) wil be based on Samsung Exynos 5210 SoC.

If you are not familiar  with Exynos chip family, remember that  Samsung Exynos 5210 is an ARM Cortex-A15 implementation, providing 3.5 DMIPS/MHz.

Does this mean, that Asus is out of the game? Or does it just mean that Samsung Exynos CPU is used, and Asus is still expected to produce Google tablets?

In both cases, it means that Google Nexus tablet will be killer for most of chinese tablets at least from performance point of view. Raw performance of about 15000 DMIPS can not be matched by any of current China SoC producers.
As of now, most powerfull chinese chips used in tablets are dualcore Rockchip3066 and AmLogic AML8726-MX, ARM-Cortex-A9 implementations capable of up to  7500 DMPIS @1.6GHz and equippped with  Mali-400 GPU.

Qualcomm MSM7225A and MSM7227A specifications and performance revealed

New cheap Android phones as p.e.  ZTE Blade II and Huawei Ascend G300 are coming into market and they are succesfull. Both of those models are powered by Qualcomm MSM7227A SoCs.

Some shops specified them as using ARMv7 CPU, but we already discussed MSM7x25 andMSM7x27  a year ago and we are definitely sure, that  MSM7x27 is ARM1136JF-S core implementation.

So do we have wrong information? Are their specifications valid or not?

Thanks to XDA Developers member HUdasp, we finally have got a missing piece to Qualcomm Snapdragon S1 specifications mosaic. Those chips was previously known as Mobile Station Modems (MSM), but a year agom Qualcomm marketing decided to move them to Snapdragon family, allowing devices manufacturers to position their MSM7x2x based devices as containing Snapdragon SoC. “Snapdragon Inside” sounds pretty well, but what is reality?

MSM 7×27-T (aka MSM7x27 Turbo) was just same chip operating by higher frequency. MSM7x27A and MSM7x25A are based on completely new design. Not only die-shrink from 65 to 45nm, but even architecture step up to Cortex-A5. And, moreover, you can see that MSM7x25A does contain Ardeno200 GPU!

Qualcomm decided not to use new model numbering probably to market those SoCs as easy replacement of  MSM7x25 and MSM7x27. 

Snapdragon S1 detailed specifications

(Click to picture to see in original size)

Concerning row performance, we can count it from ARM Cortex A5 specifications:

MSM7x25       528 MHz x 1.25 DMIPS/MHz =   660 DMIPS
MSM7x27         600 MHz x 1.25 DMIPS/MHz =   750 DMIPS
MSM7x27-T    800 MHz x 1.25 DMIPS/MHz = 1000 DMIPS
MSM7x25A      800 MHz x 1.57 DMIPS/MHz =  1256 DMIPS
MSM7x27A   1000 MHz x 1.57 DMIPS/MHz = 1570 DMIPS

Conlusion: New Qualcomm  MSM7x27A  and MSM7x25A SoCs bring a performance increase about +60-110% over their predecessors not only by  higher operational frequency, but more due their new Cortex-A5 architecture.  In addition, MSM7x25A got graphic core, what was missing in MSM7x25. Both SoCs are capable of processing complete ARMv7 instruction set. (Source: Qualcomm Snapdragon detailed specifications)

Ainol Novo7 Aurora II and Elf II postponed to June

May 08, 2012, San Jose, CA, USA: The release date of Ainol’s  new model of NOVO 7 ELF and NOVO 7 Aurora, aka Aurora II and ELF II, is pushed out to end of June or beginning of July. In order to meet the customer demand on Aurora, the Aurora production has resumed, but no more ELF will be made due to the high defective rate on its high resolution screen.

Ainol’s NOVO 7 ELF and NOVO 7 Aurora tablets became very hot after NOVO 7  tablet  won the 2nd place of “Best Tablet Award” on CES in January this year.

…

(Read more at uplaytablet)

It means, that currently Ramos W17 Pro is only one Amlogic AML8726-MX dual core based tablet available.

How cheap tablets improved in just two years

During last two years, tablet world has been swirling very intensively:

• CPU evolved from ARM9/ARM11 cores to Cortex-A8/Cortex-A9,  increasing typical performance from about 800 DMIPS to 3000 DMIPS and more.
  Dualcore CPU appeared, first seen in iPad2 with Samsung A5 (S5L8940) inside, bringing new level of computing power: 5000 MIPS.
  Quad core tablets are just in front of your door (but their price tag still protect them to enter mainstream world).
• LCD changed from resistive to capacitive and resolution increased from 800×480 to 1024×600 and more, up to 2048×1536 in new iPad.
• Android had improved dramatically from slow 2.1 Eclair (no JIT compilation) to multicore optimised 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
• Battery life increased dramatically.
• etc.

Thanks to ColonelZap, you have unique opportunity to quickly compare mainstream tablet of 2010 and 2012. Worth to watch!

(Video source: ColonelZap’s blog)

Why Apple does not make iPad Mini

Today a new information concerning Apple’s 7.85″ iPad Mini tablet started to whirl around the world.

I”m very skeptical concerning Apple Mini and the table below tells you why I am:

Apple iPad manufacturing costs

Apple is selling their product with at least 60% price margin. It is logical, Apple has to maintain iOS, product desing, development etc. But the cheapest tablet they are producing (old  iPad2 version w/o3G module) has still manufacturing cost at least $250.

Smaller tablets use mostly the same components, except of LCD – so there is space for  saving about $20. All the other, incl. CPU would be the same – Apple wouldn’t allow to sent out a device with worse performance than existing one. And as display resolution is expected to be at leat 1024×768, there must be at least same A5 CPU as inside of iPad2.

Simply sad: iPad mini manufacturing would be too expensive to enable Apple to sold it for competitive price. 

Source: Adrian Kinsley/Hudget at ZDBlog

AmLogic AML8726-MX specs revealed

Architecture of yesterday announced AmLogic AML8726-MX CPU is now revealed a bit more.

 AmLogic AML8726-MX CPU architecture

CPU part is (as you may expect), double of  AML8726-M (Cortex-A9) ARM core.  Amlogic annouced 7500 DMIPS, from which fact we have deducted 1,5GHz operational frequency:

7500 DMIPS / 2 cores / 2,5 DMIPS per MHz  = 1,5Ghz 

But what about graphics? We already speculated  about GPU: Now its confirmed,  there are two Mali-400 GPU cores inside, operating at 300-400 MHz, giving this chip power close to 88M triangles/s and fill rate  3.2G pixels/s.

Just compare those figures with iPad GPU performance:

• iPad: PowerVR SGX535 … 28 MT/s
• iPad2 PowerVR SGX543MP2 … 70 MT/s
• new iPad:  PowerVR SGX543MP4 … 140 MT/s
• a tablet with AML8726-MX: dual Mali-400MP … 88 MT/s

Please, realize that new iPad has 4-times more pixels to work with, which is huge amount of work for GPU (and cause of new iPad overheating issues) . For displays used  in 7″ tablets (mostly 1024×600 and sometimes even 1280×800), 3.2Gpixels/s is more than enough to bring very good graphical and game performance.

(sources, Google translated: 1Pad.cn , Shanzaiji.cn)