Android Category - Page 304 of 456 - CNX Software

August 14, 2014August 15, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 22 Comments

Unboxing of WeTek Play DVB-S2 Android / Linux STB

WeTek Electronics, a company based in Hong Kong, has sent me an Android TV powered by Amlogic AML8726-MX dual core Cortex A9 processor. Nothing new here, but I was very very interested in reviewing it because it includes a DVB-S2 tuner, and on top of their stock Android firmware, the company provides various Android and Linux firmware files such as CyanogenMod, ParanoidAndroid, OpenELEC, Linux with Enlightenment desktop environment, Lubuntu 14.04 and so on. Today, I’ll list the hardware specifications of the device, show some unboxing pictures and video, and as usual, open the device to see what’s inside. I’ll provide a full review in one or two more posts. WeTek Play Specifications Apart from the DVB-S2 tuner are the serial port, the hardware specifications sound familiar: SoC – Amlogic AML8726-MX dual core Cortex A9 @ 1.5GHz with Mali-400MP GPU System Memory – 1GB DDR3 Storage – 4 GB NAND flash […]

August 14, 2014August 14, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Samsung Announces Exynos 5430 SoC, Manufactured with 20nm Process

Samsung already have a few octa-core big.LITTLE SoCs part of Exynos 5 Octa family with Exynos 5410, Exynos 5420, and Exynos 5422/5800, all based on 28nm process. The company has just announced a new Exynos 5 Octa processors with Exynos 5430, but this time manufactured using 20nm High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) process technology providing 25% less power consumption compared to 28nm Exynos SoCs. Exynos 5430 SoC will feature four ARM Cortex A15 cores at 1.8 GHz, four Cortex A7 cores at 1.3 GHz, supports WQHD (2560×1440) and WQXGA (2560 x 1600) displays using hibernation display and Mobile Image compression (MIC) in order to lower power consumption. It also said to support HDMI, come with a Multi Format Codec (MFC) supporting HEVC/H.265 decoding, as well as an enhanced dual ISP, and up to 17GB/s of memory bandwidth. That’s about all the information I could get at this point. The CPU core […]

August 13, 2014February 22, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

MIPS Creator CI20 Development Board Powered by Ingenic JZ4780 SoC

There are plenty of ARM based development boards running Linux and Android, but with MIPS it’s a different story. Microchip does have some affordable development board powered by their MIPS MCUs, but these don’t have the hardware specs to run Linux based operating systems, and Ingenic Newton Platform for wearables can run Android and Linux, but it appears to be reversed to companies with virtual no documentation. There are some MIPS platform running OpenWRT on hardware such as routers or Wi-Fi boards, but these can’t be considered fully supported development boards. But Imagination Technologies is trying to make MIPS more relevant, first by launching Prpl developers’ community, and MIPS Creator CI20 development board powered by Ingenic JZ4780 dual core MIPS32 (Xburst) core processor with PowerVR SGX540 GPU should soon be available with complete documentation and source code. Let’s go through the hardware specifications first: SoC – Ingenic JZ4780 dual core […]

August 13, 2014November 23, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Toshiba TZ5000 ApP Lite Media Player Development Kits Run Android 4.4 and Ubuntu Linux

Toshiba has recently announced two development kits powered by their TZ5000 ApP Lite SoC featuring two ARM Cortex A9 cores, PowerVR SGX540 GPU, PowerVR VXD395 GPU, an optional 4GB MLC NAND, and Ensigma C4500 Wi-Fi baseband engine into a single chip solution that targets Over-The-Top (OTT) tuners and IP media boxes, wearable devices, digital signage, thin clients, and more. The first development kit, RBTZ5000-6MA-A1, is a full size board that supports Ubuntu, the other one, RBTZ5000-6MA-A1, is an HDMI stick form factor board running Android 4.4. Toshiba RBTZ5000-2MA-A1 Board (Ubuntu) RBTZ5000-2MA-A1 Starter Kit specifications: SoC – Toshiba TZ5011XBG dual core Cortex A9 processor @ 1.0 GHz with PowerVR VPU and GPU, and Ensigma C4500 Wi-Fi baseband engine System Memory – DDR3L-1600 Storage – 8GB eMMC (external) + MicroSDXC Connectivity – Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac 2×2 MIMO (via Ensigma C4500), Bluetooth 4.0. Ethernet is available via a daughter board connected to ADB. USB […]

August 12, 2014September 23, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

How to Upgrade Firmware in Rockchip RK3288, RK3328, RK3399 Android TV Boxes

For some reasons, Rockchip is extremely fond of Windows based firmware tools, and instead of providing a simple SD card method, they’ve continued to use these awful tools to upgrade firmware for Rockchip RK3288, RK3328, RK3399 devices, and other Rockchip based TV boxes. I don’t mean to say these are useless, but they should not be used by end users, unless their device is bricked. Nevertheless, Rockchip has now release version 2.3 of their Android tools for Windows, and GeekBuying has published a guide showing how to do, which I’ll summarize below. Rockchip has also released an updated version for the Linux Upgrade Tool (upgrade_tool) v1.24 that allows you to do the update in Linux. [Update: The latest versions of DriverAssistant (Step 1) and AndroidTool (Step 2) can be found in Rockchip-Linux account in Github] The first thing to do is to make sure you’ve got the latest Rockchip USB […]

August 12, 2014August 12, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

SPMC is a Fork of XBMC Available on Google Play Store, Amazon AppStore

XBMC 13, released a few months ago, is the first official release to support hardware video decoding on many ARM based Android devices. However, although both XBMC Android apks for ARM and x86 can be downloaded from xbmc.org, Team-XBMC have decided not to publish XBMC for Android on app stores such as Google Play, partially because video hardware decoding is not yet fully working on all popular Android SoC platforms and devices, but also because of the upcoming name change from XBMC to Kodi. Since the code is open source under GPLv2, anybody can build it, and somebody published XBMC on Android as a paid app, which would have been legal if they changed the name, but as they used XBMC trademark, it has been removed since then. Seeing this, Chris Browet (Koying), one of XBMC developer, decided to fork XBMC, apply some patches not yet approved in mainline XBMC, […]

August 12, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

More Technical Details & Benchmarks about Nvidia Tegra K1 “Denver” 64-bit ARM SoC

The 32-bit version of Nvidia Tegra K1 have generally received good reviews in terms of performance, especially GPU performance, and the company has also provided good developer’s documentation and Linux support, including open source drivers for the Kepler GPU (GK20A) found in the SoC. But as initially announced, Tegra K1 with also get a 64-bit ARM version codenamed “Denver”, and Nvidia provided more details at Hotchips conference. The 64-bit Tegra K1 will still feature a 192-core Kepler GPU, but replace the four ARM Cortex A15 cores found in the 32-bit version, by two ARMv8 “Project Denver” cores custom-designed by Nvidia. The multi-core performance of the dual core 64-bit Tegra K1 @ 2.5 GHz may end up being equivalent to the quad core 32-bit Tegra K1 @ 2.1 GHz, but the single core performance will be much better thanks to a a 7-way superscalar microarchitecture (vs 3-way for Cortex A15), as […]

August 11, 2014October 20, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Vigekwear is a Modularized, Open source, Wearable BLE Development Kit (Crowdfunding)

[Update: Atomwear has been renamed to Vigekwear due to (Intel’s) copyrights infringement]. Giayee is a company mainly manufacturing Android tablets, thin clients, and mini PCs, but their latest product, called Atomwear, is a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) development kit based on Nordic nRF51822 chipset that comes with various modules such as battery charger, accelerometer, gyroscope, OLED display, heart rate monitor, etc… which connect together via 24-pin connector on a standard rigid baseboard or a flexible printed circuit (FPC). All modules are connected via the same 24-pin connector with power, I2C, SPI, UART, ADC, and GPIOs signals. The baseboard and FPC both contain 6 such connectors connected in parallel for up to 6 modules, and two baseboard can be connected together via a bridge circuit to accept more modules. The minimum configuration is with a BLE MCU module, and a power module. The different boards and modules are listed as follows: […]