Tizen Releases Source Code and SDK Previews

Tizen, a new Linux based HTML5 operating systems aimed at mobile and consumer devices, was announced at the end of September 2011 without much detail. Today, Tizen has posted a set of pre-release tools, source code and related documentation to give application developers an early look at Tizen. Tizen Alpha (pre-1.0) is a very early preview and is not yet designed for use to create production applications. They specifically released the following items: Tizen source code preview – Operating system source code, including middleware, basic UI, and menu interface Tizen SDK preview – SDK & APIs: Web IDE, Emulator, Web API documentation, and Toolchain If you plan to try Tizen SDK, you development machines should match or exceed the following requirements: Ubuntu 10.04/10.10/11.04 32-bit (Windows and Mac version will be available later) At least dual-core 2 GHz CPU (recommend VTx supported by CPU) At least 2 GB of RAM memory […]

Wind River Unveils Android User Experience, Connectivity and Medical Modules.

Wind River has introduced Wind River Solution Accelerators for Android, a series of software modules to help developers jumpstart their Android development and rapidly integrate compelling features and functionalities to their devices. Wind River Solution Accelerators for Android are currently available in three software modules: User Experience: Accelerated boot time technologies including Hyper boot enabling devices to resume from RAM in less than 1 second and from Flash in 8 seconds. This technology can speed up the Android boot time by 30%. It is hardware agnostic and can run on different hardware platforms with little or no customization effort. Multi-windowing screen navigation aimed at devices with larger screens such as tablets, automotive infotainment systems, media phones, and industrial devices. The application windows are sized based on the remaining portion of the visible screen and users can minimize, resize, and arrange them as they wish. (See Picture on top) Media Center […]

Marvell Armada 1500 Google TV Reference Design

Marvell announced that its Foresight Platform, powered by Marvell ARMADA 1500 HD Secure Media Processor System-on-a-Chip (SoC), will be officially used by Google TV (replacing Intel CE4100 SoC) and be introduced at CES 2012. The company said Google TV smart TVs, set-top boxes (STB) and blu-ray players based on its platform would be available later this year. The Foresight Platform uses Marvell’s Qdeo video processing technology designed to deliver improved 3D video, rich audio, 3D graphics and TV-friendly Web content thanks to noise reduction, de-interlacing, low bit-rate internet video enhancement and other enhancement techniques such as Adaptive Contrast Enhancement (ACE) and Intelligent Color Remapping (ICR). ARMADA 1500 (codenamed 88DE3100) contains Marvell’s ARM v6/7-compatible PJ4B SMP super-scalar dual-core CPU. The chip is designed to enable PC-like processing power to support Web browsing with support for Flash and other key technologies – with the aid of more than 6000 Dhrystone MIPS of […]

Intrinsyc Launches OPEN-6 Platform for Freescale i.MX6

Intrinsyc Software International announced the OPEN-6 Design and Production Platform  that leverages Freescale i.MX 6 multi-core Cortex-A9 processors. Intrinsyc’s OPEN-6 DPP product line will deliver a platform for device makers focused on tablets, eReaders, automotive infotainment (IVI), and industrial handhelds. The platform will include support for: Android 4.0 or Windows Mobile 6.5 Production BSP Advanced Power Management 3G and 4G communication module options, with Intrinsyc’s RapidRIL technology Combination Bluetooth, WLAN, and GPS Capacitive multi-touch display with multiple options including daylight readability Multiple high resolution cameras Full suite of sensors Device Management through Intrinsyc’s i.Device Manager The OPEN-6 DPP product line includes the following solutions: Licensable Production Package – includes production software in source format and cost optimized hardware design that can be licensed by OEM’s and ODM’s for device acceleration Development Kit – solution for application developers and device manufacturers to evaluate, develop, test, and deploy applications that utilize the […]

MIPS Releases Android NDK 7m

MIPS has just announced the release of the Android Native Development Kit version 7. It has the same APIs as the Android NDK revision 7 released in November 2011 (for Android 4.0), but adds support for MIPS architecture and the MIPS ABI . The NDK is available for Windows, Linux and MacOS. The NDK allows developers to use C/C++ code either to reuse existing C/C++ code or to improve the performance over code developed with Java. Note that MIPS states that “using native code does not result in an automatic performance increase, but always increases application complexity. If you have not run into any limitations using the Android framework APIs, you probably do not need the NDK.” The NDK can be downloaded for: Windows Linux Mac You’ll also have to download the Android MIPS SDK, if you want to use the NDK. Strangely, the Mac SDK is not available for […]

AllWinner A10/A1X Processor Resources, Development Board and SDK

AllWinner A10 (part of A1X series) is an ARM Cortex A8 SoC targetting multimedia products such as tablets, HD STB or digital signage. It is currently found in some low cost Android tablets such as Momo9C and will be used in Rhombus Tech’s Raspberry Pi alternative. The processor features an ARM Cortex A8 clocked at 1.5 Ghz with a Mali-400 GPU. It can support 1080p encoding/decoding, provides HDMI, Component, Composite, VGA and LVDS video outputs,  USB2.0 ports, a SATA 2.0 port and more… Here are the key features of the Allwinner A10: VPU (Video Processing Unit) HD Video Decoding (Super HD 2160P/3D Film) Support all popular video formats, including VP8, AVS, H. 264 AVC, VC-1, MPEG-1/2/4, … HD Video Encoding (H.264 High Profile) Support encoding in H.264 format DPU (Display Processing Unit) MULTI-CHANNEL HD displays Built-in HDMI YPbPr, CVBS, VGA LCD interfaces: CPU, RGB, LVDS up to Full HD Memory […]

Special Developer Edition (SDE) for Archos G9 Tablets

Back in October, Archos released the GPL source code for Archos G9 Tablets and at the time the Special Developer Edition (SDE) was not released even though it is available for G8 devices. Now the SDE has still not been officially released, but I found a forum post on XDA Developers Forum explaining how the SDE Menu could be enabled by following the instructions below. Root your device with Paul O’Brien’s root here. (it won’t work if the device is not rooted) Unzip the content of gen9_enable_sde.zip to a directory. Launch the script enable_sde. Reboot into recovery mode, you should have the SDE menu now, you can flash your own kernel+initrd the same way it was done on previous generation. One trick: the initramfs should be still named initramfs.cpio.gz, but it should be compressed with lzma with current kernel. Another trick: to get rid of paul’s root as it messes up […]

Qt Labs Releases Qt 4.8.0

Qt Labs has just announced the release of Qt 4.8.0 featuring Qt Platform Abstraction, threaded OpenGL support, multithreaded HTTP and optimized file system access. Here are some of the new key features  in Qt 4.8.0: Qt Platform Abstraction (QPA) QPA restructures the GUI stack to enable easier porting of Qt to different windowing systems and devices. Previously called Lighthouse. Threaded OpenGL supportEnables developers to render OpenGL from more than one thread concurrently. See Threaded OpenGL in 4.8 for more details. Multithreaded HTTP HTTP requests are now handled in a separate thread by default. This should make application guis smoother, as networking will no longer use the main event loop. Optimized file system access The file system stack received some heavy lifting under the hood. The result is better I/O performance, achieved by reducing the number of system calls performed for I/O and by better use of cached data, when available. […]