Slashdot Mirror
Video Review of Hivision's $100 ARM-Based Android Laptop
Charbax writes "The Android laptops are coming. Thanks to cheap ARM-powered laptops made in China, and the latest, most optimized Android software, we can soon buy usable $100 laptops in all the supermarkets. In this video, I test the web browsing speed on the new Rockchip rk2808 ARM9-based PWS700CA laptop by Shenzhen-based Hivision Co Ltd. Web browsing on AJAX-heavy websites is surprisingly snappy, and could only be even faster if ARM11, ARM Cortex A8 or A9 processors were used and if it was configured with slightly more than 128MB RAM. How soon will Google release the $100 Google laptop?"
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those! Better yet, imagine a free Beowulf cluster of Google Adsense(tm)-supported laptops :)
If I can put ubuntu on it I will be interested.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
From the article: "800×480 screen, 720p Video playback support"
Someone care to enlighten me as to how you get a 720 progressive-scan image on a screen that is only 480 pixels high?
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
My $350 netbook is still expensive enough for me to be somewhat protective of it it. At $100, it becomes something that is tossed somewhat casually into a backpack, or if it's small enough, a coat pocket. I'd buy a couple.
We've been hearing about ARM laptops/netbooks/smartbooks for over a year now. They were demoed at CES 2009, and promised to be delivered during 2009. Nothing came. They were demoed at CES 2010, and promised to be delivered during 2010.
I can't wait to slap down $200 to $300 for an ultralight, long-battery life, ARM-based netbook running Linux. But until they make it out of video reviews and trade shows and into stores or online for purchase, what good are they?
Lenovo Skylight is pretty much the first firm offering we've seen, but it ain't cheap. The Touchbook seems to be a Beagleboard in a nice case, and isn't being mass-produced like other netbooks. Now that the iPad is out (with an ARM-based processor) and MSI et al. have ARM offerings in the pipeline, with manufacturers finally grow some balls, realize they can offer a non-Intel machine and still use Intel on their other machines, and offer us some cheap ARM netbooks?
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Ok, so Android is pretty resource saving. It is pretty impressive that it can display 720p videos.
But now to the problem. Android is optimised for a touch screen. So, just to give an example, as also shown in the video in the article: When scrolling while browsing, you have to grab the page and "throw" it upwards. Also, there are buttons for zooming in and out.
So it will be interesting to see how some other minimal linuxes would fare.
But anyway, for that price, it is probably still worth it.
Quite an interesting device. I might even want one myself, but only if it gets support for YouTube. I didn't see any mention of how much storage it comes with, but I would hope that it at least comes with a couple of USB ports and an SD card slot -- and isn't hampered by the limitations of built-in storage like the G1. I would also hope that it would support PDF (which might make it a reasonable e-book reader).
The demo showed the virtual keyboard, which I thought was a bit of a waste, especially since it was not clear that the display was touch-sensitive.
As for the hope that a company like WalMart would pick this up and sell it for $100 or less, I don't think that will happen. Most of the folks that shop at WalMart are not techies, and in its present form, this is a netbook only a techie would put up with. It's certainly not the iPad-killer, even though I personally would not buy an iPad (or Kindle, or any other platform that allows the vendor to "repossess" content).
Concealed Handgun License Courses in Plano, Texas
... but that doesn't change the fact that most websites suck when viewed on an 800x480 screen.
I've always felt that $100 was the magic barrier for turning a netbook into an impulse buy, and that if the barrier was ever reached it would truly become a mass market phenomenon. What I want to see now is an attempt to make the screens a little larger and obviously specs a little faster over time, all while maintaining that same price point.
Did you just try to pretend the Epic Fail that the entire computing world is still laughing at Apple over is some sort of benchmark other devices 'aspire to'???
Why would the hospital I work for block TFA at our firewall? Do they somehow know I shouldn't read it before posting?
WTF.
Yes, I see all the limitations of a tablet. But as an internet consumption device, it is an ideal form factor. And at $100, I can replace it every 6 months.
Finally, something I want to buy.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
Ok can someone please explain why a cell phone with less power then this laptop costs around 300 bucks and that apparently still does not cover the mfg costs of the device hence the locked in contracts to recoup phone costs? Yet this laptop with an arm proc and a larger screen and more moving parts can be sold at 100??? The iPhone costs $179 to mfg.. Pre $138... g1 $140
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
That is one fugly netbook with very limited memory. I might buy one as a play computer for my two year old. Otherwise - its a fail.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
netbooks suck the air out of a room, I have a drawer full. Not as good as a laptop, not as portable as a phone.
Rip the display off the laptop, stuff the electronics into it, replace the keyboard/base with a snap-on bluetooth keyboard, speakers, extended battery, slot DVD drive base. When I want a tablet, I snap the computer off the base. When I want a laptop, I snap it together and it closes like a normal laptop.
Think macbook air that comes apart. It's *so* doable with very little additional cost or engineering over what it currently is. All the connectors are in the lid/display/computer, so when it snaps off, you can connect it somewhere else. (eg: display and audio out, USB
The question is not when the $100 Google Laptop is coming, but when the "Ad-Supported" Free Google Laptop is coming.
Im installing Windows Vista on mine
You got that right.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
It would be cool to see these for sale at Best Buy for $119. Hopefully these will become a big competitor to Microshaft when it comes to netbooks.
In short a real competitor to both the iPad and Atom Netbooks. Cut out the Windows tax and Apple DRM and there's your niche. All these things are possible today with a decent dual core SoC like Tegra 2. Wake me up when such a device actually exists but be warned it won't be for $100.
Yes I know there's a detachable machine with beagleboard specs but let's see the next-gen that doesn't feel as sluggish as a desktop from 1999.
I saw that one before Christmas at my local kmart for 150 clams. Not a hundred bucks yet, but getting there
My prediction: when the $100 barrier is broken and laptops are in the supermarkets, the impact of this on the internet will be comparable to that of AOL.
... now back to the bit mines.
I saw this for sale at Kmart right before Christmas for $150.
TFA uses a simplistic economic fallacy to argue that the price will be around $100:
The price has not yet been announced officially... But you can understand that if Hivision was able to sell those types of laptops for $98 to distributors more than a year ago (when I filmed my popular video from IFA 2008), then surely the mass manufacturing price has not gone up since then. My expectation is that if a giant consumer electronics reseller such as Walmart or Best Buy approaches Hivision today to order huge quantities of this laptop, it could be sold below $100 to end users.
He's assuming that any given tech drops in price by a huge percentage every year. If that were true, IBM would still be making 8088-based PCs and selling them for a few bucks. (Take the $2K 1981 price and divide by 2 about 15 times.) Instead, you can't buy a new 8088-based system for any price — it's not worth Intel's while to even manufacture the chip, never mind somebody else to build a system around it.
There's always a certain minimum cost to any manufacturing process. Scaling up reduces costs, and so does Moore's law, but only to a point. You'll always have to pay for materials, factory space, workers, shipping, marketing, etc. Some of these things are cheaper outside the U.S., but again, only to a point.
I'm not sure what the minimum cost for manufacturing a computer is, but I very much doubt that it's much below $100. When manufacturers reach that minimum, they can't keep cutting prices, no matter how much the electronics improve, bang-for-buck-wise. So instead, they find a good price point, and provide the best product they know how to for that price. The result: low end products don't get cheaper, they get better.
I couldn't begin to guess how much these new ARM laptops will sell for. It will have to be a lot less than the competing Atom-based systems, or else no one will buy them. But I doubt if the retail price will ever go below $200, not if they're sold by anybody who's in it for the money.
Of course, even a $200 laptop would be damned popular. And a couple years after they come out, you'll be able to buy used ones on eBay for a pittance.
TFA is only speculating at the price. really, let's see this article when there's a link where this device can be purchased.
The end goal of the "net-book"/ :net-device" fad is this....they are trying to steal your right to anything you do with a computer. You write a song? No hard-drive, no personal storage, no personal storage, no proof it was ever yours! You design a new piece of software? The geek on the dark side of you desktop already has it compiled and sitting in front of several potential buyers. The fad is meant to bring about the dissolution of personal ownership (at least ownership by the unclean masses anyway) and materialism itself. Serfdom unlike any before, where a minor glitch can turn a prince to a pauper, and personal failure in EVERYTHING can not only be internally conditioned, but externally manufactured as well. In other words, 1984 is nothing compared to what they have in mind. I for one will have nothing to do with it (if I can avoid it). It might be a little harder to play computer games while in-flight, but I think I can live with that knowing that I won't have to be online just to check my available drive-storage (and paying some schmuck $29 a month for the right to access it!).
-Oz
The iPhone has far lower resolution that that and some folks seem to like it for browsing..
It has lower actual resolution, but you are really viewing websites at more like 1024x768 or so scaled down, then zooming in on portions. But even in the zoomed out view, I can read pretty much everything on the Slashdot homepage.
Without touch controls on the screen zooming is way too annoying on a laptop.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Can somebody show this to Nicholas Negroponte? Put sugar on this and you have your OLPC laptop.
From http://armdevices.net/2010/01/29/android-laptop-review-hivision-pws700ca/
"The price has not yet been announced officially because Hivision is looking for worldwide distributors who will then decide how much it will be sold for to end consumers. But you can understand that if Hivision was able to sell those types of laptops for $98 to distributors more than a year ago (when I filmed my popular video from IFA 2008), then surely the mass manufacturing price has not gone up since then."
Sorry, the author of the article may have made a big boo-boo.
The 2008 price was $98, the 2010 price may have to be over $100.
1. Price of RAM has shot up since 2008.
2. Price of LCD has also increased somewhat.
Hey, laptop designers. I'm part of a small class people kind of similar to the mutants from xmen.
We have this uncanny ability. It's called "typing by touch." We need full sized shift, backspace, and backslash keys in order to exercise our abilities.
Now, we don't expect you to change your product just to suit a small group like us, but it would be nice.
You are aware of Debian, which has supported ARM for ages, yes?
Netbook makers will maximise their profits.
If this is through selling windows / intel they will do just that.
I personally think wintel came along with appropriate inducements.
I also think that they asked themselves - does it play BB Iplayer HD / Youtube HD without stuttering at that price - and decided to come back when it does.
No point in a 100usd device if it does not work (whatever you define work to mean).
In the UK, if something like this does not work with Iplayer, it will be thought to be broken (ipad).
I've seen them at Buy.com (2), at Amazon.com, at Kmart.com and plenty other places for even cheaper.
The point of this video is to show that Android and the much faster Android web browser can make all these cheap laptops much more usable when it comes to browsing the web. The Android browser is 100x better than the one in Windows CE or the previous Mozilla-based one they would integrate in those $100 Laptops. More usable means more people will want to buy it, which means even cheaper prices.
How do the manufacturers load the OS in the first place? Seems like that is where to start looking, even to the point of tracking down the "real" manufacturer and asking them directly through a phone call or email. Maybe they need a hardhack to the mobo or something, soldered on flash, or is the OS on a ROM chip, or what? I just don't know. I notice it has USB as well, perhaps there, go from an external flash drive or optical drive? I don't know any answers there on running some flavor of linux on them, just replying that there are, in fact, ARM based cheapish netbooks out there at retail, they aren't all unobtanium yet as was suggested. Cherrypal sells some as well.
Right before I saw that thing in the store I had just gotten a new phone, so that blew my toy budget (which is a low amount of cash at any given time), else I would have gotten one for funzies.
If you can read the full Slashdot homepage on 480x320 3.5" iphone screen, then surely you could read it too zoomed on a 800x480 7" screen
Sure - but on a netbook the browser wouldn't zoom it by default. It would pull up rendering what text it could in 800x480 pixels, not scaling it down, adding a scroll bar instead (800 is wide enough I don't think you would get horizontal scroll bars happily). If you open a page in a iPhone by default you see the whole page rendered into a reasonable browsing resolution, even if you have a lot fewer pixels.
You could possibly scale the text to be very tiny on the netbook by to my experience that often screws a bit with the formatting of the page, and it's a step you have to undo when you want to see a particular section. Although I an as I said read all the text zoomed out, I usually zoom in on the story columns to read them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm still waiting for my $50 Star Trek type pad
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato