Motorola Announces ATRIX HD Smartphone Developer Edition

After 5 months after Motorola ATRIX HD hit the market, Motorola announced it would make a developer edition of the core Qualcomm MSM8960 Snapdragon based smartphone that comes with unlockable bootloader so that developers can play around and install their own firmware. Apparently the ability to unlock the bootloader is the only extra “feature” you get with this phone. You’ll then need to use a tool to unlock the device, lose your warranty, and start creating and flashing custom ROM to your phone. There is no plan to allow this on the “standard” edition of the phone  however, and efforts by the XDA developer community to unlock the bootloader do not appear to have been successful to date, except for some some Atrix HD bought from Ebay which already came unlocked.  Motorola ATRIX HD developer edition will be available soon for an undisclosed price, and only in the US. If […]

Variscite VAR-SOM-MX6 Freescale i.MX 6 Solo, Dual and Quad System on Modules Start at $59

Variscite has unveiled a new series of system on modules powered by Freescale i.MX6 Solo, Dual, DualLite and Quad processors with 512 to 2048 MB DDR3 RAM, and 128 to 1024MB SLC NAND Flash. Here are the modules key features: SoC – Freescale i.MX 6 series SoC (Single/Dual /Quad ARM® Cortex™-A9 Core, 1.2 Ghz) System Memory • Up to 16 Gb DDR3 RAM Storage – Up to 8 Gb NAND Flash for storage memory/boot Video Output: 2 x LVDS display interface HDMI V1.4 i nterface 1 x MIPI DSI Touch panel interface Camera – Parallel & serial camera interface (CSI) Connectivity On-board 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet PHY WLAN (802.11 b/g/n) Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR USB – 1 x USB 2.0 host, 1 x OTG Audio – Stereo line -In/out, digital & analog microphone, and S/PDIF In/Out Other interfaces: 2 x SD/MMC Serial interfaces ( SPI , I2C, UART, I2S,) 2x CAN […]

$100 Mele A1000G / A2000G Android Media Players with 1GB RAM and 8GB Flash

I’ve been asked by several people when there would be a Mele with 1GB RAM, well the time is now, with the Mele A1000G and Mele A2000G. Both appear to be based on the previous Mele A1000 and Mele A2000 set-top boxes, but feature 1 GB RAM and 8 GB Flash instead of 512 MB RAM and 4 GB Flash. Here are Mele A1000G & Mele A2000G Specifications: SoC – AllWinner A10 Cortex A8 processor @  1GHz System Memory – 1 GB DDR3 Storage: 8GB NAND Flash  SD card slot (up to 32 GB) Connectivity: Wi-Fi – 802.11 b/g 10/100 MB Ethernet USB – 3 USB Host ports SATA Interface for 2.5″ HDD Video Output – HDMI, composite and VGA. Audio Output –  RCA stereo output and optical out (SPDIF) Audio Formats – MP3 / WMA / WAV / OGG / FLAC / MKA Video Formats – TS / M2TS […]

PengPod 700 & 1000 – Linux Tablets Based on AllWinner A10

There are plenty of tablet based on AllWinner A10 and A13 processors, but all of them run Android, and you are out of luck if  you want to run Linux on your tablet, unless you hack this yourself. But this is about to change as PengPod will launch 2 tablets and 1 mini PC running Linux from NAND flash or micro SD card: PengPod 700 – 7″ tablet with Allwinner A10, 1GB RAM and 8GB Flash PengPod 1000 – 10″ tablet with AllWinner A10, 1GB RAM and 8GB Flash PengStick – AllWinner A10 mini PC with 1GB RAM and 4 GB Flash The table below gives more detailed specifications and comparison of the three devices. Device PengPod1000 PengPod700 PengStick Type Tablet Tablet TV Stick CPU Allwinner A10 AllWinner A10 AllWinner A10 Android 4 4 4 Linux 3.0.42 3.0.42 3.0.42 Screen 10” 7” External Resolution 1024×600 800×480 1080i Ram 1GB 1GB […]

Rockchip RK3066/RK30xx Processors Documentation, Source Code and Tools

Rockchip RK3066 (part of RK30xx family) is a Chinese dual ARM Cortex A9 SoC targeting multimedia products such as tablets (e.g. Cube U30GT), mini PC (e.g UG802, MK808) and in theory set-top boxes, but I can’t find any products based on this Rockchip processor. It seems mini PCs/ HDMI TV sticks have taken over this market. RK3066 Processor The processor features two ARM Cortex A9 clocked at up to 1.6 Ghz with a quad core Mali-400MP GPU. It can support 1080p (3D) encoding/decoding, provides HDMI 1.4a, VGA, composite, component and LVDS video outputs (Dual display support),  USB 2.0 Host and OTG ports, a MAC interface (Ethernet), and much more… Here are the key features of Rockchip RK3066 processor: Dual Core A9 + Quad Core Mali-400MP GPU 2 banks, 8/16 bit Nor flash / SRAM interface 8 banks, 8/16 bit async NAND flash, LBA NAND flash and 8-bit sync ONFI NAND […]

Rockchip RK3066 UG802 mini PC is Now Available for Just $46.50

Earlier today, a reader left a comment about a mini PC based on RK2908 sold for $40 including shipping on Ebay. No bad! But since I hadn’t checked mini PCs on Aliexpress for a few months, I decided to have a look for cheap devices. The cheapest sold by a company with decent feedback is the IP872 ($34 including shipping), but it’s based on an ARM11 chip (Infotmic IMAPX 200) and runs Android 2.3, so I don’t find it that interesting. There are also some AllWinner A10 mini PCs that cost just above $40 including shipping, but then I found one company selling UG802 for $46.50 including shipping via China Post. It’s quite shocking that the price halved within 3 months, and this makes single core mini PC that less attractive, unless you want to run Linux (Ubuntu, Debian…) which is not yet supported by RK3066. The device sold by […]

Versatile Express TC2 (2xA15, 3xA7) Development Board at ARM Techcon 2012

If you’ve been following Linaro work, you may have read they develop big.LITTLE processing on TC2, a Test Chip based on 2 Cortex A15 cores and 3 Cortex A7 cores. Charbax is at ARM Techcon 2012 and he shot an interesting video showing 2 Versatile Express development boards based on TC2 demonstrate different big.LITTLE processing schedule strategies: The first scheduling strategy switches between Cortex A15 and Cortex A7 depending on the load required. The second scheduling strategy makes use of 5 cores at the same time and runs high load tasks on the Cortex A15 cores whereas simpler tasks are run on Cortex A7 core. This is only available on Android and Linux and the moment. TC2 is an actual silicon (not FPGA), and as they opened the casing of the development kit (Around 5:00 in the video), you’ll see a fan to cool down the SoC as it is […]

WM8850-MID Tablet Firmware Files and Root Instructions

I’ve bought a noname tablet described as W8850-MID in the Android Settings that did not come rooted, and after several attempts trying to find how to root the tablet I had more or less given up, as tools such as UnlockRoot or OneClickRoot did not work with the device. After not using my tablet for 2 months, I started it again, but it just showed the Android animation forever, and failed to boot to the home screen. So I had to do something and finally managed to find firmware files for the device and root it. I’ll explain the whole process I went through in this post, but basically all you have to know is that if you have the same WM8850-MID tablet as I have (WM8850_MID7_PuZhi_W01_8223), it is fully compatible with Eken W70 and you can just install the latest W70 firmware (v1.10) from Eken support site that comes […]