This looks pretty decent for the price. Obviously it's not an iPad, and it probably has a resistive touchscreen, but if the screen is ok (some are better than others) and it really is an Cortex A9 then it might be the best of the Chinese tablets.
I see a lot of those capacitive styluses, and the thing that bothers me is that they look too wide at the bottom, as if they're designed to mimic the area of a fingerprint. If I wanted to do more intricate and accurate work, I'd like to have the finer point that a traditional stylus provides.
You might as well splash out on a device you're going to use
I have two of that device's immediate predecessor, the $100 WM8505, and I support this assertion.
I've used them mostly for messing around, reverse engineering, and playing with and actually hacking on (most of mine spend most of their time in pieces with a serial header soldered on them.)
They're fun for that, although even that can be a little tiring due to (a) crappy hardware quality, (b) crappy vendorware closed software.
It seems like a cool toy, something you don't have to worry about breaking. (But then again, $150 is a bit much for a toy.) Trying to use this instead of an iPad or Xoom is probably a path to misery, you shouldn't buy it with that expectation.
Chinese Android tablets have actually been around for quite a while now - google 'Apad'. They're all really quite awful - awful battery life, bad touch screens, and really poor build quality have been the rule.
This will change, of course - but for now just don't expect that you're going to get a Xoom/iPad quality tablet for really cheap.
People always forget about battery life. It's nice to have a device with good numbers, but if it can't hold a charge for longer than two hours it's pretty useless.
I noticed something fishy. The /proc/cpuinfo BogoMIPS value reads off as 569.5 in the video. A PandaBoard 1Ghz Cortex-A9 reads around 2000 per processor[1]. I realise the Bogo means _bogus_ but AFAIK within a CPU model it should still scale linearly against clock speed.
Probably a sensible explanation for this, but at the same time this is the class of device where there really is no guarantee between spec claims and reality. For instance the advertised "600 & 800Mhz" WM8505s turned out to be 350Mhz CPUs in reality.
If you look at the CPU info it also shows it supports a range of frequencies from 200Mhz to 800Mhz and that the current running speed is ~280Mhz.
So presumably the CPU scales between 200 and 800Mhz based on demand to improve battery life and the bogomips score was produced at a lower clock speed.
Except cpufreq (kernel CPU frequency scaling) isn't running during the early boot stages when the BogoMIPS value is calculated.
Like I said, it's possible the bootloader starts up at @250Mhz or so and leaves the kernel to later switch up to 800Mhz. I don't know why you'd design a board like that though (normally you want to boot nice and quick), but you never know.
Also, even though cpufreq reports in Mhz those values will be extrapolated in the kernel from a base frequency & clock multiplier registers somewhere else, so it can easily be out by a constant factor.
Once some benchmarks come out it should become more obvious if there's anything to this.
I doubt it's "as powerful as a PS3", but it shows the console-killer potential of phone+HDMI. A PS3 has 8 (faster) cores, so Moore says wait 4.5 years.
Of course, it's the games that count; and of course sony/ms/nintendo saw this threat long ago, and have their own phone-consoles plans (IHMO).
Yes; the crucial question is whether consoles will exceed what customers can use (i.e. overserve/overshoot).
There exists evidence that it's happening already: xbox360 and ps3 are quite old, but still selling very well, despite PCs growing more and more powerful (a longer gap than previous generations); the popularity of nintendo wii (though I believe sales are much less now); the popularity of simple online flash games; the popularity of xbox "arcade" games (some of which were web games). This has been discussed on HN before.
If your customers don't need more performance, it doesn't matter how more you offer them. Yes, disruption.
PS1 sold well into the life of the PS2 though. There will always be a need for more power in gaming, I beleive because the peripherals will need that power.
While it is no iPad, the price point is certainly interesting. It could easily be a laptop substitute in third world countries, especially if the battery life is anywhere close to Apple's iPad. I could also see a lot of businesses (especially mom & pop shops) opting for one of these devices.
Obviously I watched the video. My question was about the need to connect a mouse to a device that has a completely usable touch screen interface. Connecting the external display device via hdmi should not blank out the tablet and force the use of a mouse. Rather, one should be able to use the tablet's screen as the control interface.
I'm not sure it does "blank out the tablet and force the use of a mouse".
If you've got your video going to an external display then that is where you're going to be looking.
It's not possible to interact using the touch panel if you aren't looking at the touch panel itself. So either plug in a mouse or keep glancing back and forth between the TV and the device.
* Making the entire devices touch screen a big trackpad during HDMI output would probably be nice though!
You see the touch functionality at the start of the video. It looks like it doesn't drive the onboard display and the TV at the same time, which explains the need for another input method (though emulating a trackpad on the screen, if possible, would be nicer).
I think the best cheap one currently available is this: http://www.dealextreme.com/p/1080p-7-touch-screen-lcd-google... That is a Cortex A8 1GHz, with capacitive touchscreen for ~$200.
If you want cheap, and shipping now then this is ~$100: http://www.dealextreme.com/p/7-touch-screen-lcd-google-andro.... It might be fine for a single-use application (recipe browser in the kitchen, etc), but it's pretty underpowered for much else.