ASUS ROG Phone II with Snapdragon 855+ | High Performance Gaming Phone

ASUS ROG Phone II Active Cooler

ASUS officially announced the launch of their new gaming phone, the ROG Phone II. The device will become the world’s first gaming phone to be powered by the new Snapdragon 855 Plus Mobile Platform. ASUS first gaming phone, the ROG Phone, launched in 2018, and it was quite popular. This ROG Phone II is an improved upon version of the first one. A unique feature of the new device is the Kryo 485 CPU in the Snapdragon 855 Plus. The CPU will run at up to 2.96GHz — a 4.2% improvement compared to the 2.84Ghz of the Snapdragon 855, while the Adreno 640 GPU is clocked 15% faster than in the current Snapdragon 855 Mobile Platform. Specifications of ASUS ROG II phone Here are the highlights of the features and specifications. Display 120Hz FHD+ AMOLED display 240Hz touch sampling rate, 49ms touch latency (compared to 87ms on the Samsung Galaxy […]

ASUS Tinker Edge R Pico-ITX Board to Feature Rockchip RK3399Pro SoC

ASUS Tinker Edge R

Just a few days ago, we wrote about ASUS Tinker Edge T board and other products from ASUS featuring Google Coral Edge TPU which were showcased at Computex 2019. It turns out the company is working on another Tinker with a processor featuring an neural network accelerator. Meet ASUS Tinker Edge R Pico-ITX SBC powered by Rockchip RK3399Pro hexa-core processor equipped with a 3.0 TOPS NPU. One of the reasons it did not get noticed is that ASUS may not have had a sample for display at the event, but instead only described the board in a brochure. [Update: ASUS Tinker Edge R was also showcased at Computex 2019] ASUS Tinker Edge R SBC preliminary specifications: SoC – Rochchip RK3399Pro hexa-core big.LITTLE processor with 2x Cortex A72 cores up to 1.8 GHz, 4x Cortex A53 cores @ 1.4 GHz, an Arm Mali-T860 MP4 GPU up to 800 MHz with OpenGL […]

ASUS Tinker Edge T & CR1S-CM-A SBC to Feature Google Coral Edge TPU & NXP i.MX 8M Processor

ASUS CR1S-CM-A SBC

A few months ago, Google introduced its Coral development board and USB accelerator powered by their Edge TPU delivering up to 4 TOPS and optimized for Tensorflow Lite. ASUS and Google have now partnered to bring more solutions powered by Coral Edge TPU namely ASUS Tinker Edge T board for makers and hobbyists, CR1S-CM-A SBC for industrial projects, and even a full computer fitted with a Google Edge TPU PCIe card. ASUS Tinker Edge T ASUS Tinker Edge T preliminary specifications: SoC – NXP i.MX 8M quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor with Arm Cortex-M4F real-time core,  GC7000 Lite 3D GPU ML accelerator – Google Edge TPU co-processor System Memory – 1GB LPDDR4 RAM Storage – 8 GB eMMC flash Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet port, Wi-Fi 2×2 MIMO (802.11b/g/n/ac 2.4/5GHz), and Bluetooth 4.1 Video Output – MIPI DSI connector, and HDMI output Camera I/F – 2x MIPI CSI 2 interfaces for stereoscopic […]

Top 5 Raspberry Pi Alternatives in 2019

Raspberry Pi Alternatives 2019

The Raspberry Pi boards are great little Arm Linux SBC’s with a low price and great community support. But the Broadcom processors used in the boards are also fairly old so they may not be suitable for some projects. If your application needs or would benefit from modern features such as memory over 1GB RAM, an actual Gigabit Ethernet port, USB 3.0 port(s), 4K video output, or H.265 hardware video decoding you’ll have to find Raspberry Pi alternatives. I’ll point out 5 alternative single board computers in this post from the point of view of existing Raspberry Pi users, who will want good software support and a board with the same or similar form factor as Raspberry Pi 3 Model B/B+ in order to reuse their add-on boards and/or enclosures. Price has to be competitive as well, so nothing above $80 will be mentioned. The boards are not listed in […]

Android 10 Beta 3 Now Available on 15 OEM Phones

Android 10 Dark Theme

Google introduced Android Q in March with the first beta and preview SDK release. The new version of Android introduced more privacy protections, support for foldables, sharing shortcuts, connectivity improvements (e.g. WPA3 security), new camera and multimedia features such as dynamic depth photos and AV1 media codec support, as well as an updated neural network API, higher ART performance, and security improvements. Google has now announced Android 10 Beta 3 with a few new features over the first preview release, and support for 15 OEM phones on top of the 6 Pixel phones already supported. Some of the new improvements in Android 10 Beta 3 include: Scoped Storage feature giving users control over files and preventing apps from accessing sensitive user or app data. See the corresponding developer page for details. Update of BiometricPrompt authentication framework to support biometrics, e.g. face recognition, at a system level. Project Mainline described as […]

Ubuntu 18.04 Now Boots on Some Snapdragon 835 Arm Laptops

Snapdragon 835 Ubuntu Arm Laptop

The first “proper” Windows 10 Arm laptops were unveiled at the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018, all based on Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor with always-on LTE connectivity, 20+ hour battery life, a fairly expensive price tag, and somewhat underwhelming performance. Qualcomm was not interested in supporting Linux, but there was interest from the community, and now it seems Ubuntu 18.04 images are available for Lenovo Miix 630, HP Envy x2, and ASUS Novago TP370 thanks to Aarch64-laptop project currently hosted on Github. Now the prebuilt images are not really ready for end users since UFS storage and WiFi are not working on any laptop yet, the touchpad is not working on the ASUS laptop, and accelerated graphics needs to be implemented. Interestingly WiFi is related to UFS on those laptops, and Marc Gonzalez is said to be being actively worked on UFS upstream support, which should enable for […]

The First 802.11ax WiFI 6 Routers are Now Shipping for $350 and Up

Netgear RAX80 WiFi 6 Router

802.11ax WiFi, to be known as WiFi 6 for consumer, promises a much higher throughput up to 10 Gbps, and a better ability to manage high density scenario (i.e.). crowded places where may users connect at the same time. ASUS announced several 802.11ax routers at CES 2018, and the entry-level model – ASUS RT-AX88U – with a combined maximum throughput of 6000 Mbps (referred to as AX6000) is now sold on Amazon for $349.99. NETGEAR has also unveiled their own WiFi 6 routers with respectively Nighthawk AX80 (RAX80) and Nighthawk AX120 (RAX120) routers. I’ve already covered ASUS routers in a previous post, and the 12-stream RAX120 will only become available in Q1 2019, so I’ll focus on the spaceship looking 8-stream RAX80 router since it’s available now. RAX80 WiFi 6 router specifications: SoC –  Broadcom BCM49408 quad core Cortex-A53 processor @  1.8GHz with network packet co-processor @ 800 MHz WiFi […]

ASUS ZenBook Pro 14 UX480FD Laptop Replaces the Touchpad with a 5.5″ “ScreenPad” Display

ASUS ScreenPad Laptop

Touchpads is a feature found in most laptops,  but AFAIK there’s not been much innovation recently apart from maybe support for multitouch and gestures. But I’ve just found out ASUS started to showcase laptops without touchpad a few months ago, instead integrating what the company calls a ScreenPad, a 5.5″ touchscreen display placed at the location where you’d normally expect a touchpad. The company’s latest (and second) laptop with a ScreenPad is Asus ZenBook Pro 14 UX480FD, which comes with a 14″ display, processor up to an Intel Core i7-8565U Whiskey Lake-U processor, up to 16GB DDR4 RAM, and up to 1TB PCIe SSD storage, as well as an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Max-Q graphics,  802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 5.0, and more. You can visit the product page for the full specs, as I’ll focus a bit more on the ScreenPad in this post. The ScreenPad in this laptop is a […]

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