Sony Announced the Android Walkman NW-Z1000

Sony Corp announced three new series of its Walkman portable music including the “NW-Z1000” series powered by Nvidia Tegra 2, equipped with an 4.3-inch TFT LCD panel and running Android 2.3 (gingerbread). NW-Z1000 user interface is slightly customized and its sound quality is improved thanks to a digital amplifier chip called “S-Master MX.” The changes made to the UI include shortcut icons for Sony’s music applications and video players at the bottom of the screen. The NW-Z1000 has wireless LAN capability, GPS and sensors such as acceleration sensor and is pre-installed with GMS (Google Mobile Service) which includes Google Maps, YouTube and Android Market. Here are the specifications of the NW-Z1000 series Walkmans: Android 2.3 with access to the Google market YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps and various Sony apps pre-installed (Sony Music Player, Photo Player, etc.) 4.3-inch LCD with 480×800 resolution NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual core mobile CPU (1GHz) 512MB main […]

Ziilabs Unveils Low Cost Jaguar3 Android Tablet Reference Designs

Earlier this May, Ziilabs announced the ZMS-20 dual core processors targeted at Android Honeycomb tablets. They have now unveil the 3rd generation of Android Tablet reference designs based on ZMS-20 and ZMS-40 called Jaguar3. Here’s an excerpt of the press release: ZiiLABS, a pioneering media processor and platforms company (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Creative Technology Ltd), today introduced its JAGUAR3, the most powerful 3rd Generation Android 3.2 tablet series. JAGUAR3 is a series of ultra-slim, ultra-lightweight and stylish 10.1” tablet reference designs targeted at the OEM markets. With over a decade of designing experience in portable mobile devices, Creative provided the ergonomic and sexy design of this series of JAGUAR3 tablets. ZMS-20 StemCell Processors JAGUAR3’s superior performance, low power consumption and rich feature set comes from the dual-core 1.5GHz ARM Cortex-A9 based ZMS-20 StemCell Processors. ZMS-20 has another 48 StemCell Processing cores within, which effectively make it into a 50-core processor. […]

Android 2.3.4 Release For ST Ericsson Snowball Development Board

Igloo Community – the team developing for ST Ericsson Snowball Nova A9500 development board – has released the first version of Android 2.3.4 for the board. It can be downloaded at http://igloocommunity.org/download/android/images/20110910/. Here are the main features for this release: Based on Android 2.3.4 HDMI/DVI-D display support Graphics acceleration with the Mali 400 GPU Bluetooth support Multimedia acceleration Ethernet connectivity microSD card support Sensors support ADB over ethernet (by default) and over USB OTG port and the Known issues: WLAN connectivity is disabled in the UI due to startup problems with the interface. Audio recording does not work Consecutive audio playback might not work Potrait mode does not work (rotating the device corrupts screen until rotated back) Might be a temporary problem, but the browser crashes on the default google page when loading finishes. Other pages seem to work fine, so interrupting loading or going through the search acts as […]

Chumby NeTV: Open Hardware and Software STB

Althought not officially announced, Chumby is currently developing a Linux-based IPTV media player that can be remotely controlled by a Wi-Fi connected Android device. It will be offered as an open development platform where both software and hardware will be made available to developers. NeTV is built around a Marvell Armada 166 processor clocked at 800 MHZ (88AP166 – Armada 100 Family) with 2GB RAM, a MicroSD slot and Wifi. The media player is powered via micro USB and comes with a 7-button IR remote, although you might prefer to use your Android device to control the device via a WiFi connection.  NeTV STB supports  HD resolution (480p, 720p & 1080p24 “True Cinema”). On the software side, NeTV provides what they call “Smart Event Display” that allows you to receive personalized internet news via Twitter, Facebook and other internet news source. Android users can also enjoy seamless SMS and email […]

Advantech PCM-C3500 Series OMAP35xx SBC

Advantech announced the PCM-C3500 Series single board computers (SBC) powered by TI OMAP3503 or OMAP3530 processors with 128 to 256 MB SDRAM and 1 to 2 GB Flash (optional) . These heatsink-free boards are targeted for various low-power applications in industrial control, HMI/kiosk, medical, and portable applications.The boards will run Windows CE 6.0 (default), Embedded Linux 2.6 and Android 2.2. Here are the specifications for PCM-C3500 SBC: CPU – PCM-C3530: TI OMAP3530 @ 600 MHz / PCM-C3503: TI OMAP3503 @ 600 MHz DSP – Built-in 430-MHz TMS320C64x+™ DSP Core (PCM-C3530 only) 2D/3D Accelerators – OpenGLES 1.1 and 2.0, OpenVG1.0 (PCM-C3530 only) OS – WinCE6.0 English professional version as default, and Linux DRAM – PCM-C3530: 256 MB, PCM-C3503: 128 MB (Optional: 256 MB) Onboard Flash – PCM-C3530: Default 2 GB, (Optional: 0 GB, 1 GB) /PCM-C3503: Default 0 GB, (Optional: 1 GB, 2 GB) RTC Watchdog Power Management – Standard, idle […]

Netgem N7500 & N9700 Media Centers and N8400 Media Server

Netgem will be present at IBC 2011 in Amsterdam this week. They have updated their website this week, where we can see their current Sigma Designs platform such as the N5200 Internet OTT adapter  and N8200 Media Center as well as the new platform based on Broadcom solutions namely: N7500 Media Center based on Broadcom BCM7230 with 1 Tuner and flash storage N8400 Media Server based on Broadcom BCM7413 with 2 to 4 tuners and HDD. In a separate presentation, they also mention the Netbox N9700 which will be released in 2012. There is no mention of the processor used (probably Broadcom) , but the device will support Netgen nCloud Core features (IPTV, Broadcast TV, Pay TV and PVR functions) and nCloud Advances features (Broadcast to 4/6 screens, download to own, download to go, multimedia NAS and convert media to mobile). You’ll also be able to play games (Gameloft) and […]

Nvidia Tegra 3 based Tablets Could be Ready for Xmas

Back in February at MWC2011, Nvidia announced its Tegra Roadmap including a demo of the Tegra 3 quad-core processor (Codenamed “Kal-El”) . Kal-El features a new Geforce GPU with 12 cores, giving 5 times greater performance than Tegra 2 and  NVidia also provided benchmark results showing that Kal-El was faster than an Intel Core2 Duo T7200. Yesterday, NVidia CEO – Jen-Hsun Huang – announced that tablets based on Nvidia Tegra 3 could be available later this year, but that quad-core smartphones would only be available in 2012. Since Android 4.0 is likely to be released sometimes in October or November, we could see quad-core Android 4.0 tablet for Xmas although the schedule is very tight. He went on to say that there are only 2 active players in the high-end mobile processor market: Nvidia and Qualcomm  (Qualcomm will ship its latest quad-core processor Snapdragon APQ8064 later in 2012). Nvidia CEO […]

Embedded Systems Conference Boston 2011 Sessions Schedule

ESC Boston 2011 will take place on the 26-29 September 2011, four days of hands-on training, educational sessions and an interactive exhibit hall. There are 5 programs during the event: ESC Boston – Embedded software development tutorials for Android, Linux, microprocessors, QA, C programming, etc… DesignCon East – Hardware tutorials, e.g. SDRAM debugging, hardware encryption… DesignMED – Embedded systems development for embedded medical devices. Designing with LEDs! – LED hardware and drivers. DesignDays – Embedded systems sessions mainly presented by semiconductor companies and hands-on tutorials on specific platforms such as Beagleboard or TI MSP430 Chronos Wireless Watch. There are simply too many sessions (over 170) to list them all here. So I’ll selected a few among ESC Boston and DesignDays that look particularly interesting: Android Jump Start (Monday 26 – 8:00 – 17:00) by William Gatliff (Consultant, Freelance) and Karim Yaghmour (CEO, Opersys Inc.) . The features that make Android a great cell […]