Well, I've got a few years invested in Android usage, and a bunch of Android app-store apps, so I guess it'll take a lot to move me from Android. I'm sure the same goes for many other Android users (what else was that 10p an app promotion for over Christmas for, if not locking in users to the platform for a couple more years - over the next phone upgrade), and of course the same goes for iOS users.
So you would have to not already have a smartphone, or be really cheesed off with your current one, to want to look elsewhere for the next upgrade you get.
So the market for WinMo7.5 phones is mostly new smartphone users. And you are fighting against the iPhone, and Android devices that are available at a wide range of pricepoints. And people aren't saying bad things about those devices - whereas people remember their old Nokias and the old WinMo, and they associate the name and platform with feature phones at best, and stress and anger at worst. Couple that with lukewarm responses to the first WinMo7 release, and hardly anybody they know owning a WinMo phone so the recommendations they will receive will not be WinMo, and it's just going to be a really couple of tough years for Nokia.
It's sad about the N9 not being sold more widely and showing the board and shareholders where they should be going. Not too late to drop WinMo in my opinion.
But where will you find 100,000 Americans within 30 minutes of a mega-factory that can hold 100,000 people on an assembly line? Where those Americans are willing to work 60 hour weeks on a shift basis doing extremely repetitive assembly work?
The fact is that the scale of production required cannot be done in the west right now. People aren't willing to work in these conditions any more. So improving conditions will also increase the assembly cost. Dealing with the union's pay demands, high staff turnover, building the factories, logistics, etc - Foxxconn and China has them all sorted out.
Then you get to other issues - for example the UK has a tax on component imports but not assembled devices. Until this is reversed you actually have the situation where your own government is against the desire to create work and growth in the menial assembly of products industry in their own country.
Clearly someone has to make a go of it, even if it is only 10% of production for a few years. Let's see the consumer put their wallet where their mouth is.
Because singling out one company would be stupid when all the other companies are also using the same companies to assemble their products as well. Often without the checks that Apple is doing - which are also clearly not enough to stop abuses in the name of profits (for the manufacturer).
The solution is to assemble the products in your own country, which has several issues - (1) the cost of the goods would go up; (2) how many people want to work doing this type of role in the West, doing fiddly, repetitive factory work? Unions would inevitably occur, and then it's all rubbish; (3) Hundreds of thousands of people are employed to make Apple's products alone. What western city can provide that level of labour force within a year?
(1) isn't an issue if all companies have to do the same, as it results in a level playing field, even if every computer/tablet/phone gets 50% more expensive. That isn't going to happen without government intervention, namely an import tariff on Chinese-made electronics. That's not going to happen either because of politics.
And how much performance per clock are you going to get out of a 22,000 transistor chip, with what looks like 3 registers (and 3 shadow registers)?
One of the issues they had to deal with was that DRAM is usually made on a 3 metal layer process, whereas CPUs usually take a lot more layers due to their complexity.
This will have to compete with TSV connected DRAM, which will be a major bandwidth and power aid to conventional SoCs.
Of course a lot of the houses remaining from 1860 are the houses that were built well.
Again, it doesn't mean that every house built in 1860 was built well, it's just that with such a lot of redevelopment and some destructive wars, a lot of the shoddy buildings aren't around any more.
Solid walls - yes, but the lack of an air gap means water can penetrate straight through, and insulation is rubbish. Furthermore screw that wireless signal.
And enjoy having mice running behind those 1ft high skirting boards, because to save money they didn't plaster behind them, and with an inch or more of plaster those mice are having parties.
Good things: Cellars. Quality Floorboards. Period Features (unless stripped out by some nobber, turning the house into a faceless, boring, cold, unappealing thing).
Personally I'm moving from a Victorian villa (converted into flats, screw sound protection, insulation, etc) into a decent 60s house.
Europeans use Polish workers (and other East European nationalities) for building work. Not Arabs. Where did you get that from?
The reason they're used is that they get the job done quickly and efficiently, and they do it well. Due to a lack of investment in construction workers by the government the home-grown 'talent' is few and far between.
Unfortunately a large amount of the cost of a house is the land it is built on. Hence why cities have apartment blocks - the land they're on is tens of millions, so they needs tens of houses on that land, and you would only fit a few houses on that land area. This solution isn't meant for that type of development - at least not now.
Admittedly manual bricklaying work does take time and money which this could reduce - although I expect that the cost of hiring the machine will probably come to the same overall cost. Also I'm unsure as to the cost of bricks versus concrete as a raw material.
This will be useful in disaster zones, where you want to rapidly build a lot of small dwellings (of the 200sqft variety). I also wonder if the printers can use a mud/concrete mix, or adobe - I guess you don't want fields and fields of empty hard-to-demolish concrete huts ten years after a disaster. Alternatively, if the disaster buildings are created to be a useful 'base' of a home that can be extended later on then this shouldn't be a problem.
Javascript benchmarks test software, not hardware. They are useful for comparing the same software on different hardware. Anand has fallen for Intel's marketing again.
Samsung are making 32nm Exynos chips now, so Intel's process isn't even going to be better than the ARM chips it will be competing against.
And the figures Anand is presenting are a result of his own tests? Nope, they're from an Intel marketing slide.
That could be down to the screen technology or other components in the SoC (a GPU that is significantly more advanced, for example) rather than the CPU core in the SoC. Also, we're talking about figures presented by... Intel.
AnandTech has been trotting out Intel press releases as articles for a while now. It's the new Toms Hardware. It's a real shame as otherwise the site is excellent.
In this case they trotted out the same old single-thread Javascript benchmarks, as if they're representative of the hardware underneath. They're not, they're representative of the Javascript runtime underneath - and x86 Javascript JITs are more mature than the ARM ones. In addition the single-threadedness benefits a single-core high IPC design over a quad-core slightly lower IPC design like the ARM SoCs coming out this year which will compete with Medfield.
We will see how it performs in reality when the phones get into reviewers hands and they can run a wider spread of benchmarks. Right now 720p encode is rather lame, and the SGX540 GPU is looking rather warty next to a 543MP2 in the year-old A5, for example.
Intel is using 32nm LP process for this processor. 22nm LP is not ready yet, and probably won't be for a year - Intel has only just got 32nm LP ready for this processor. 22nm HP is not suitable for low leakage chips like this SoC.
Most non-disabled people don't understand disability. They probably think they do, but they certainly don't understand intermittent disabilities or non-visible disabilities or illnesses until they experience it themselves or have someone close experience it. Most people don't undertake any form of reflective practice on their actions and choices throughout the day either. Every so often you will read a story about someone with a mild motor function disability get arrested and put in the cells for being drunk (when they hadn't been drinking), and I doubt that the policemen that did that were ever disciplined or forced to reflect on their assumptions.
If you can't see more than 2m in front of you, then you are pretty fucking blind. In this case you can't see because of a neck injury (as opposed to other physical ailments like cataracts, etc).
So go and get yourself registered blind, and refuse to leave until they accept that your injury makes you effectively blind (and/or affects your mobility). Do your eye test standing up.
You might want to employ an advocate to plead your case.
Meanwhile I am already in the store shopping because I went straight for an obvious empty space and was parked and on my way to the store as they were on the first round of the car park. I'm also first out of the car park when I leave. I simply don't understand people who spend time trying to find a car parking space thirty yards closer to the entrance.
Actually the problem here is that there is no parking bay for unloading goods (i.e., a 10 minute stay).
Of course I find it odd (as a non-American) that students can afford the luxury of a car. Walking twenty minutes with the shopping from the stores was common for me, and pretty much everybody else I went to university with. I guess the real issue is that in a society where you need a car, however much the cost of having a car is, you can't afford to not have one.
But this device can hold every textbook that a student ever needs. It can view every educational image, animation or video that a student ever needs. With a keyboard it will let the student take as many notes as they desire, to write essays and email them to the teacher, to communicate with other people. Maybe it can teach communities new ways to build cheaply to resist storms and avoid floods.
Eventually they will evolve to western standards, stuck in front of a computing device all day getting a bad back, in the dark, not communicating with people in real life, and eating fast food delivered to their front door. And granny will still be recovering from seeing something involving a cup.
Damn right. And this tablet can actually play 1080p video, because the Conexant SoC it uses incorporates a hardware decoder - I guess the chip was aimed at low-end "smart TVs". It's actually a modern chip from 2010, that originally retailed for $9 a piece - so getting it for $5 in late 2011 was probably easy enough when you promise millions of sales.
So what if the device is equivalent to a low-end PC from 2000 or so? People did a lot with systems like that, they ran full-featured business software, they played games, they developed software... and it's portable with a battery too! I did loads on my first laptop - a HP Omnibook 4100 running at 266MHz with 64MB RAM.
Maybe this will let the entire indian subcontinent get onto Etsy to sell their products at prices they couldn't even dream of to middle class bored housewives and househusbands.
When the local farmers in the first world are using computers to help them with their crop planning, having access to a cheap portable computer in the second and third worlds will be a great help to the local farmers there to increase their yields and plant the optimal crops for the forthcoming months.
This company isn't sitting still. Apparently they will release the Aakash 2 in early 2012. This is getting an 800MHz CPU, 1GB RAM and a front-facing camera, for the same price. Even if that's an 800MHz ARM11 (to keep costs down), that is significantly faster than the current device.
Even the current SoC has a GPU and video decode acceleration - that Flash video experience might not be too bad, even on the 366MHz device.
I seem to remember having a solidly great quality experience with my 4MHz Z80 based computers in the 80s, then my 8 and 14MHz 680x0 computers in the early 90s. With proper software, a ARM11 (I presume) 366MHz system will feel great too. Especially when you consider the IPC of each of those processors. And with tens of millions of users, this software will come.
Although I guess they'll need an Android application development system that runs on the tablet itself...
WikiPedia also says there is a higher spec UbiSlate 7 made by the same company with an 800MHz ARM Cortex A8 CPU, for a bit more money. I guess that's the difference between using a $5 SoC and a $10 SoC.
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Well, I've got a few years invested in Android usage, and a bunch of Android app-store apps, so I guess it'll take a lot to move me from Android. I'm sure the same goes for many other Android users (what else was that 10p an app promotion for over Christmas for, if not locking in users to the platform for a couple more years - over the next phone upgrade), and of course the same goes for iOS users.
So you would have to not already have a smartphone, or be really cheesed off with your current one, to want to look elsewhere for the next upgrade you get.
So the market for WinMo7.5 phones is mostly new smartphone users. And you are fighting against the iPhone, and Android devices that are available at a wide range of pricepoints. And people aren't saying bad things about those devices - whereas people remember their old Nokias and the old WinMo, and they associate the name and platform with feature phones at best, and stress and anger at worst. Couple that with lukewarm responses to the first WinMo7 release, and hardly anybody they know owning a WinMo phone so the recommendations they will receive will not be WinMo, and it's just going to be a really couple of tough years for Nokia.
It's sad about the N9 not being sold more widely and showing the board and shareholders where they should be going. Not too late to drop WinMo in my opinion.
But where will you find 100,000 Americans within 30 minutes of a mega-factory that can hold 100,000 people on an assembly line?
Where those Americans are willing to work 60 hour weeks on a shift basis doing extremely repetitive assembly work?
The fact is that the scale of production required cannot be done in the west right now. People aren't willing to work in these conditions any more. So improving conditions will also increase the assembly cost. Dealing with the union's pay demands, high staff turnover, building the factories, logistics, etc - Foxxconn and China has them all sorted out.
Then you get to other issues - for example the UK has a tax on component imports but not assembled devices. Until this is reversed you actually have the situation where your own government is against the desire to create work and growth in the menial assembly of products industry in their own country.
Clearly someone has to make a go of it, even if it is only 10% of production for a few years. Let's see the consumer put their wallet where their mouth is.
Because singling out one company would be stupid when all the other companies are also using the same companies to assemble their products as well. Often without the checks that Apple is doing - which are also clearly not enough to stop abuses in the name of profits (for the manufacturer).
The solution is to assemble the products in your own country, which has several issues - (1) the cost of the goods would go up; (2) how many people want to work doing this type of role in the West, doing fiddly, repetitive factory work? Unions would inevitably occur, and then it's all rubbish; (3) Hundreds of thousands of people are employed to make Apple's products alone. What western city can provide that level of labour force within a year?
(1) isn't an issue if all companies have to do the same, as it results in a level playing field, even if every computer/tablet/phone gets 50% more expensive. That isn't going to happen without government intervention, namely an import tariff on Chinese-made electronics. That's not going to happen either because of politics.
And how much performance per clock are you going to get out of a 22,000 transistor chip, with what looks like 3 registers (and 3 shadow registers)?
One of the issues they had to deal with was that DRAM is usually made on a 3 metal layer process, whereas CPUs usually take a lot more layers due to their complexity.
This will have to compete with TSV connected DRAM, which will be a major bandwidth and power aid to conventional SoCs.
Of course a lot of the houses remaining from 1860 are the houses that were built well.
Again, it doesn't mean that every house built in 1860 was built well, it's just that with such a lot of redevelopment and some destructive wars, a lot of the shoddy buildings aren't around any more.
Solid walls - yes, but the lack of an air gap means water can penetrate straight through, and insulation is rubbish. Furthermore screw that wireless signal.
And enjoy having mice running behind those 1ft high skirting boards, because to save money they didn't plaster behind them, and with an inch or more of plaster those mice are having parties.
Good things: Cellars. Quality Floorboards. Period Features (unless stripped out by some nobber, turning the house into a faceless, boring, cold, unappealing thing).
Personally I'm moving from a Victorian villa (converted into flats, screw sound protection, insulation, etc) into a decent 60s house.
Europeans use Polish workers (and other East European nationalities) for building work. Not Arabs. Where did you get that from?
The reason they're used is that they get the job done quickly and efficiently, and they do it well. Due to a lack of investment in construction workers by the government the home-grown 'talent' is few and far between.
Unfortunately a large amount of the cost of a house is the land it is built on. Hence why cities have apartment blocks - the land they're on is tens of millions, so they needs tens of houses on that land, and you would only fit a few houses on that land area. This solution isn't meant for that type of development - at least not now.
Admittedly manual bricklaying work does take time and money which this could reduce - although I expect that the cost of hiring the machine will probably come to the same overall cost. Also I'm unsure as to the cost of bricks versus concrete as a raw material.
This will be useful in disaster zones, where you want to rapidly build a lot of small dwellings (of the 200sqft variety). I also wonder if the printers can use a mud/concrete mix, or adobe - I guess you don't want fields and fields of empty hard-to-demolish concrete huts ten years after a disaster. Alternatively, if the disaster buildings are created to be a useful 'base' of a home that can be extended later on then this shouldn't be a problem.
Well, it isn't the usual techy website video with logos that "slam" onto the image whilst burning, etc, I guess.
But, what early 80s voice synth did they dig up there?
Javascript benchmarks test software, not hardware. They are useful for comparing the same software on different hardware. Anand has fallen for Intel's marketing again.
Samsung are making 32nm Exynos chips now, so Intel's process isn't even going to be better than the ARM chips it will be competing against.
And the figures Anand is presenting are a result of his own tests? Nope, they're from an Intel marketing slide.
That could be down to the screen technology or other components in the SoC (a GPU that is significantly more advanced, for example) rather than the CPU core in the SoC. Also, we're talking about figures presented by ... Intel.
AnandTech has been trotting out Intel press releases as articles for a while now. It's the new Toms Hardware. It's a real shame as otherwise the site is excellent.
In this case they trotted out the same old single-thread Javascript benchmarks, as if they're representative of the hardware underneath. They're not, they're representative of the Javascript runtime underneath - and x86 Javascript JITs are more mature than the ARM ones. In addition the single-threadedness benefits a single-core high IPC design over a quad-core slightly lower IPC design like the ARM SoCs coming out this year which will compete with Medfield.
We will see how it performs in reality when the phones get into reviewers hands and they can run a wider spread of benchmarks. Right now 720p encode is rather lame, and the SGX540 GPU is looking rather warty next to a 543MP2 in the year-old A5, for example.
Intel is using 32nm LP process for this processor. 22nm LP is not ready yet, and probably won't be for a year - Intel has only just got 32nm LP ready for this processor. 22nm HP is not suitable for low leakage chips like this SoC.
Most non-disabled people don't understand disability. They probably think they do, but they certainly don't understand intermittent disabilities or non-visible disabilities or illnesses until they experience it themselves or have someone close experience it. Most people don't undertake any form of reflective practice on their actions and choices throughout the day either. Every so often you will read a story about someone with a mild motor function disability get arrested and put in the cells for being drunk (when they hadn't been drinking), and I doubt that the policemen that did that were ever disciplined or forced to reflect on their assumptions.
If you can't see more than 2m in front of you, then you are pretty fucking blind. In this case you can't see because of a neck injury (as opposed to other physical ailments like cataracts, etc).
So go and get yourself registered blind, and refuse to leave until they accept that your injury makes you effectively blind (and/or affects your mobility). Do your eye test standing up.
You might want to employ an advocate to plead your case.
Meanwhile I am already in the store shopping because I went straight for an obvious empty space and was parked and on my way to the store as they were on the first round of the car park. I'm also first out of the car park when I leave. I simply don't understand people who spend time trying to find a car parking space thirty yards closer to the entrance.
Actually the problem here is that there is no parking bay for unloading goods (i.e., a 10 minute stay).
Of course I find it odd (as a non-American) that students can afford the luxury of a car. Walking twenty minutes with the shopping from the stores was common for me, and pretty much everybody else I went to university with. I guess the real issue is that in a society where you need a car, however much the cost of having a car is, you can't afford to not have one.
But this device can hold every textbook that a student ever needs. It can view every educational image, animation or video that a student ever needs. With a keyboard it will let the student take as many notes as they desire, to write essays and email them to the teacher, to communicate with other people. Maybe it can teach communities new ways to build cheaply to resist storms and avoid floods.
Eventually they will evolve to western standards, stuck in front of a computing device all day getting a bad back, in the dark, not communicating with people in real life, and eating fast food delivered to their front door. And granny will still be recovering from seeing something involving a cup.
Damn right. And this tablet can actually play 1080p video, because the Conexant SoC it uses incorporates a hardware decoder - I guess the chip was aimed at low-end "smart TVs". It's actually a modern chip from 2010, that originally retailed for $9 a piece - so getting it for $5 in late 2011 was probably easy enough when you promise millions of sales.
So what if the device is equivalent to a low-end PC from 2000 or so? People did a lot with systems like that, they ran full-featured business software, they played games, they developed software ... and it's portable with a battery too! I did loads on my first laptop - a HP Omnibook 4100 running at 266MHz with 64MB RAM.
Maybe this will let the entire indian subcontinent get onto Etsy to sell their products at prices they couldn't even dream of to middle class bored housewives and househusbands.
When the local farmers in the first world are using computers to help them with their crop planning, having access to a cheap portable computer in the second and third worlds will be a great help to the local farmers there to increase their yields and plant the optimal crops for the forthcoming months.
The $52 is with the company's sales margin on top. Parts and assembly are $35-$40 or so.
At this price you could have a two way video entry system on your house for under $100 - if someone writes the software.
This is the chip used: http://www.conexant.com/products/entry.jsp?id=626 - it can actually do HD 1080p decode, and the graphics performance is 200Mpixels/s.
This company isn't sitting still. Apparently they will release the Aakash 2 in early 2012. This is getting an 800MHz CPU, 1GB RAM and a front-facing camera, for the same price. Even if that's an 800MHz ARM11 (to keep costs down), that is significantly faster than the current device.
Even the current SoC has a GPU and video decode acceleration - that Flash video experience might not be too bad, even on the 366MHz device.
I seem to remember having a solidly great quality experience with my 4MHz Z80 based computers in the 80s, then my 8 and 14MHz 680x0 computers in the early 90s. With proper software, a ARM11 (I presume) 366MHz system will feel great too. Especially when you consider the IPC of each of those processors. And with tens of millions of users, this software will come.
Although I guess they'll need an Android application development system that runs on the tablet itself...
WikiPedia also says there is a higher spec UbiSlate 7 made by the same company with an 800MHz ARM Cortex A8 CPU, for a bit more money. I guess that's the difference between using a $5 SoC and a $10 SoC.
Both products are sold out apparently, even future production. Then soon there will be the Aakash 2 which will have a 800MHz CPU and 1GB RAM. http://www.hindustantimes.com/technology/PersonalTech-Updates/Better-faster-Aakash-2-to-be-launched-in-Feb-2012/SP-Article1-764394.aspx
It sounds like there are a lot of problems with the first version - overheating apparently. Overheating! In a 366MHz ARM11 device!
C64 owner? :-)
The thing about the C64 was the BASIC was so bad people learned how to poke and then assembler, leading to a lot of programmers for the platform.