Android News - Page 245 of 376 - CNX Software

October 11, 2014July 7, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 143 Comments

MXQ S85 Android TV Box (Amlogic S805) Review

MXQ S85 (aka MXQ OTT TV box) and EM6Q-MXQ are two main Full HD H.265 Android media players based on Amlogic S805 currently selling on Chinese online stores. I’m lucky enough to have received both, and I’ve already completed the review for EM6Q-MXQ, so today I’ll complete MXQ S85 review and compare both devices. I’ve already taken picture of the device, accessories, and checked out the board’s components in my unboxing post, so in this post, I’ll focus on the user interface, evaluate performance, and test most hardware features of this media player. First Boot, Settings and First Impressions I’ve started by a quick test of the IR remote control, and it works as expected after inserting two AAA batteries, before switching to Mele F10 Deluxe air mouse for convenience. I’ve connected all ports of the device except the S/PDIF output: Ethernet cable, HDMI and AV cables, micro SD card, […]

October 10, 2014October 10, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Android L x86 64-bit Developer Preview Emulator Image Released

Several weeks ago Linaro posted instructions to run Android L ARM 64-bit in QEMU which takes some efforts to setup, and at the time lacked OpenGL support (not sure about the status now). Google has now releases their own 64-bit Android L preview image for the x86 emulator, and hopefully they’ll release a 64-bit ARM image and NDK sometimes in the near future, as 64-bit mobile devices are expected for Q1 2015. That means developers can now test the 64-bit version of their apps build for x86 using Google emulator. Java only apps should most probably work without issues, but apps relying on native code (C/C++/assembler) will certainly require a little bit more work. The latest Android NDK (r10b) support 64-bit code, and apps can be built with x86_64 build target, or using APP_ABI=all64 in Application.mk. 64-bit support increases addressable memory space, provides a larger number of registers, and new instruction […]

October 9, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Camera Not Working on Your Smartphone? No problem, Massage It!

I bought ThL W200 last year as my main (and only) phone, and my review was rather positive, because after testing the phone for a week or so I did not encounter some of the issues. After a short while I found GPS was not working very reliably, so I had to find instructions to fix GPS on Mediatek phones, then the first battery died after about 8 months, maybe that’s normal for my usage, but I was expecting it to last longer. Finally, after a while both front and rear cameras started to have issues such as green screen, color lines, or simply refusing to work with the message: “can’t connect to camera”. In all of this the good news (for me) was I was not alone, and I saw some instructions saying, you had to terminate the camera app, clear all data, and restart the phones. It seemed […]

October 8, 2014October 8, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

Kaiboer Q8 Android Media Player Features USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet, and a 2.5″ SATA Bay

Kaiboer Q8 may look like an alarm clock radio, but it’s definitely an upcoming Android media player powered by Mstar 9810 SoC with 2GB RAM, 16GB eMMC, USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, and an internal 2.5″ SATA bay. The company had previously launched three MSO9810 Android STBs, two of which did not support hard drives, and one with a 3.5″ SATA bay, so this new product fills the void for 2.5″ hard drives. Kaiboer Q8 specifications: SoC – Mstar MSO9180D1R Quad core ARM Cortex A9 @ 1.5GHz with a quad-core ARM Mali-450MP GPU. System Memory – 2GB DDR3 Storage – 16 GB eMMC + microSD card slot + internal SATA bay for 2.5″ drives Video I/O – HDMI in, HDMI out (All models) Audio I/O – HDMI in/out, optical S/PDIF Video Codecs – Up to 4K. MPEG-1/2, MPEG-4, DivX, H.264, H.265 VC-1, H.263, Real Media, MVC, etc… Audio Formats – […]

October 5, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 18 Comments

Unboxing of MXQ S85 Android Media Player Powered by Amlogic S805 Processor

Gearbest sent me MXQ S85 Android media player powered by Amlogic S805 quad core processor with 1GB RAM, 8GB internal storage, and Ethernet/Wi-Fi/Bluetooth connectivity. MXQ S85 looks very similar to EM6Q-MXQ, another Amlogic S805 based Android STB, which I reviewed last week, but these are two distinct hardware platforms. Today, I’ll take some pictures of the devices, and the board to see which components are used, and who made the board, and I’ll write a full review in a few days. MXQ S85 Pictures I’ve received the parcel via DHL in the nameless package below where they just indicate it’s and Android TV box with a quad core processor, quad core GPU, pre-loaded with XBMC, and supporting HEVC / H.265 The package contains the box, HDMI and AV cables, an OTG adapter, a 5V/2A power supply, an IR remote requiring two AAA batteries, and a user’s manual in English. The […]

October 4, 2014May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 13 Comments

Current Performance and Stability Issues on AllWinner A80 OptimusBoard Development Board

Sine A80 OptimusBoard is the first ARM hardware that supports both USB 3.0 and Gigabit that I’ve ever owned, so I though it might be interesting to see what performance I could get with a USB 3.0 hard drive through the USB 3.0 OTG port of the board. For testing purpose, I bought a USB 3.0 OTG adapter on Ebay, but I did not look closely enough as it turned out to be only a USB 3.0 OTG to USB 2.0 female adapter capable of USB 2.0 speeds… Kind of useless item since you can plug a standard USB 2.0 OTG adapter into a USB 3.0 OTG receptacle. But I tried my hard drive anyway, and quickly realized write performance was very poor at 3 MB/s on the NTFS partition, whereas most other devices can handle at least15 MB/s, and usually over 25 MB/s. So I contacted Allwinner with this […]

October 4, 2014May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

How to Upgrade Allwinner A80 OptimusBoard Firmware

After informing Allwinner I had some rather slow write speed (3MB/s) to the NTFS partition of my USB drive on my A80 OptimusBoard, they kindly provided a new compressed Android firmware image (sun9iw1p1_android_optimus_v1.2_20140930.img.7z) with some NTFS optimizations that can be downloaded from baidu (password: x2tz), mega.co.nz or simos.info (please only use this link, if the other two do not work as it’s a private website and monthly bandwidth may be limited). I vaguely remember tools like LiveSuit (Linux) or PhoenixSuite (Windows), and I ended up on sunxi-linux Livesuit wiki as I’m running Ubuntu 14.04 on my PC, but you should be able to flash the firmware with PhoenixSuite if you run Windows. The instructions below can also be used for other Allwinner based devices. First you need to install LiveSuit, and build Allwinner USB drivers as follows:

sudo apt-get install dkms git build-essential
git clone https://github.com/linux-sunxi/sunxi-livesuite.git
cd sunxi-livesuite/awusb
make
sudo cp awusb.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/
sudo depmod -a
sudo modprobe awusb
cd..

sudo apt-get install dkms git build-essential

git clone https://github.com/linux-sunxi/sunxi-livesuite.git

cd sunxi-livesuite/awusb

make

sudo cp awusb.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/

sudo depmod -a

sudo modprobe awusb

cd..

In order to use LiveSuit as a normal user, you also have […]

October 3, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 23 Comments

Review of Tronsmart Orion R28 Meta 4K/H.265 Android TV Box

It’s been a little while since I unboxed Tronsmart Orion R28 Meta Android TV box, but since the product was still consider “beta” by GeekBuying, I wanted to wait for a OTA firmware update (109k4), which was released at the beginning of the week. Since I’ve already listed the technical specifications, and showed pictures of the board and device, I’ll focus on feature tests and benchmarks results in the review. First Boot, Settings and First Impressions I quickly tried the basic infrared remote control, inserting two AAA batteries, and it does the job, but for Android, you really need a pointing device, so I switched to Mele F10 Deluxe air mouse during testing. I’ve connected a whole bunch of cable, and peripherals to the box including an HDMI cable, a USB hard drive, an Ethernet cable, a USB webcam, and a USB hub with RF dongles for my air mouse […]