Mele Android Set-Top Boxes At China Sourcing Fair 2013

The Mele A1000 and A2000 based on AllWinner A10 have been relatively popular last year, and recently Mele A1000G Quad has been unveiled with AllWinner A31 quad core Cortex A7 processor, and there was talk about a  Dual core version as well. Charbax has shot 3 videos at Mele stand at China Sourcing Fair in Hong Kong earlier this month, so I’ve got a bit more news to share. The first video shows the Mele A1000G Quad with a 2.4Ghz remote (which must be Mele F10 Fly Mouse). We don’t really learn much more than we already know,  but we can see the device is action with a 3D game controlled with the “Fly Mouse”, and the new “Metro” style user interface. This STB is currently running Android 4.1, but an upgrade to Android 4.2 is expected in June. The device will be available in May for about $110 retail, […]

Cloudsto A20 Media Stick Pictures, Screenshots And Antutu Benchmark

Cloudsto A20 Media Stick, a mini PC based on AllWinner A20, was discovered in March, with shipping expected in early April. One person in Korea (“Eddy Lab”) got hold of the device and took some pictures of this mini PC, as well as screenshots. But before going through this, let’s have a look at the specifications: SoC – Allwinner A20 dual core Cortex A7 + Mali-400MP2 GPU System Memory – 1GB DDR3 Storage – 4GB Flash + micro SD slot (Up to 32 GB) Video Output – HDMI (1080p) Video Containers – RM, RMVB, MPEG1/2/4, MPEG2 Transport Stream, VOB, AVI, ASF, WMV, MKV, MOV, MP4, RMP4, IFO, ISO Audio Codecs – AAC, MP3, OGG, WMA, WAV, M4A Connectivity – Built-in Wifi 802.11 b/g/n USB – 2x USB host (1x full USB, 1x mini USB) IR Receiver The package contains the A20 Media Stick, a remote control, a power adapter and […]

Allwinner Showcases A20, A31 and A31s Devices: Tablets, Phablets, Mini PCs, Projectors, Laptops, Development Boards…

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Charbax is now at the China Sourcing Fair in Hong Kong, meeting and interviewing lots of Chinese companies. One of the companies I’ve been following is AllWinner because of their low-cost ARM Cortex processors, found in many Android devices, which somewhat support Linux. In the video below, we first learn they have shipped 1 million A31 in the last 4 months, A31s and A20 processors have been available since the end of March for phablets, and A20 price is supposed to be very close to A10. So products based on AllWinner A10 could be upgraded to AllWinner A20 for just a few dollars more as both SoC are (nearly) pin to pin compatible. By the way, if you’re interested in the Cubieboard, you may want to see this. We then go through lots of devices based on AllWinner SoC, albeit too fast to get many details, but the list may […]

Mele A1000G Quad Set-Top Box Features AllWinner A31 SoC

Mele A1000 Android set-top box based on AllWinner A10 is one the best platform to play with Linux on ARM, thanks to its low cost, numerous features, hackability, and the work of the developers’ community on arm-netbook mailing list, and now in sunxi-linux. I like it so much it’s the first item in my short list of hackable gadgets. However, the hardware specifications of the original Mele A1000 may be too weak for some of today’s applications. So I’m pleased the announce that Mele A1000G Quad is now available (for pre-order) with AllWinner A31 quad core Cortex A7 SoC, 2GB RAM and 8GB Flash. Here are the specifications for Mele A1000 Quad STB: SoC – AllWinner A31 quad core Cortex A7 @ 1.5GHz + PowerVR SGX544MP2 GPU System Memory – 2GB DDR3 RAM Storage 8GB Flash SD card slot SATA connector (most probably via a USB to SATA chipset) Video […]

PengPod 700 Linux Tablet Used As a 3D Printer Touchscreen Controller

PengPod 700 & 1000 are two of the rare Linux tablets to be available on the market. Those tablets are based on AllWinner A10 SoC which can support both Android and Linux thanks to independent developers. After a successful Indiegogo campaign, where they managed to received pledges for a few hundred units of both model, people started to receive their Linux tablets earlier this year. Francesco Santini decided to purchase PengPod 700 in order to use it as an touchscreen controller for his 3D printer (Solidoodle). He modified Pronterface, a graphical user interface written in Python to control 3D printer, for the 7″ display the of PengPod tablet, and made the change available in his github account https://github.com/fsantini/Printrun-pengpod700. He uses a SAMBA share to copy G-code files (“G-code is the common name for the most widely used numerical control (NC) programming language”), and load the required file from the PengPod […]

AllWinner A20 Linux Source Code, EVB Schematics and Product Brief

Hardware based on AllWinner A20 such as Cloudsto Media PC PRO DRIVEDOCK, should start to be available soon, and resources for developers have been slowly released (or leaked) to the community. AllWinner A20 Source Code The source code for AllWinner A20 and A31 has been released to sunxi-linux a while back, and they have started to clean up the code before hardware becomes available. The code apparently hasn’t made it to sunxi-linux github account just yet, but Linux for A20  has been imported into github at https://github.com/amery/linux-allwinner/tree/import/lichee-3.3/a20-dev. AllWinner A20 is known as sun7i in the code. AllWinner A20 Evaluation Board Schematics and Product Brief Olimex received A20 EVB schematics and product brief from AllWinner earlier this week, and as usual, they promptly uploaded those documents to their github account. The 3-page product brief does not bring anything new, and the data sheet does not seem to be available right now. […]

Veidoo HD2 Android Set-top Box Features a 5MP Camera

There seem to be more and more Android set-top boxes that can be fitted on top of the TV, but if you are mainly interested in video conference they may not always have very good cameras: MK818 comes with a 0.3MP camera and Archos TV Connect has a 1MP webcam according to Arctablet, which is good enough for 720p video conferencing. On the contrary, Veidoo HD2, an Android 4.0 set-top box powered by AllWinner A10, comes with a 5MP camera which should allow you, in theory, to do video conference in 1080p if your internet connection permits it. Here are the specifications of the device: SoC – Allwinner A10 Cortex A8 @ 1GHz + Mali-400 GPU Memory – 1GB RAM Storage – 8GB + micro SD slot (Up to 32GB) Connectivity – Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n + 3G support via external 3G dongle Camera – 5.0MP auto focus Video Output – HDMI […]

Mini PCs (MK802+, UG802, GK802 & iStick A200) Linux Performance Comparison

Ian MORRISON (linuxium) has tested Linux with several mini PCs powered by different processors. The main point of his tests was to evaluate the performance difference between running Ubuntu 12.04 natively, or in a chroot in Android using tools such as Complete Linux Installer. I previously tried Linux on Android in ODROID-X, and found the applications start time when running from an low-end SD card pretty dismal, and the graphics performance poor.  Ian had a different approach, and decided to use a subset of Phoronix Suite benchmarks to compare different hardware / software combination and posted the results in “mini PCs” G+ community. There’s a lot of data, and analyzing the results is not really straightforward without spending some time looking at the data. In this post, I’ll explain how the tests have been conducted, explain the results and try to draw a conclusion. Mini PCs and other Hardware Under […]