After many months of wondering if the S5 was going to be as good as we first imagined it to be, it’s time to review the final retail version and make some conclusions. The Viliv S5 is one of the smallest tablet PC’s in the world. It includes a full PC hardware architecture and Windows XP software. The manufacturer has used a mature design from it’s PMP range and the end result is a solid, well-built pocketable device aimed at media, web browsing and, due to the built-in GPS, navigation.
The $189 Smart Devices Q7 web-pad story gets more exciting today as we’ve received some live pics of the device. ElectroWorld, the strange looking Chinese website that many of us would probably avoid, have come up trumps after we contacted them for a purchase. They also tell us they will have a device ‘next week.’ We assume this will be a sample which could mean a 1-2 month wait for the first production run. We hope we’re wrong but we’ll check it out and get back to you.
At $180, the only real question for gadget fans is, what colour? I’d go for Lime Green just to be disruptive and clash with that brown leather sofa you find in every coffee shop these days.
Click to see full size versions in our gallery.
This isn’t going to be a fast browsing device, the build quality needs to be checked out and there will be limitations on the China-focused software stack but if they get the quality right, (a big ‘if’) and offer some better colours, this is a no-brainer for the coffee-table. I’m thinking TV-Guide, auto-updating Friendfeed, Last.fm radio, public transport timetable, picture frame (tuned to the Flickr ultra mobile PC tag of course!), there must be a thousand uses. What would you do with it?
Can you imagine what a dev community would add to this? Maemo, Mer and Android communities would love it. I’m sure ARM’s partners, Techcrunch and the old Pepperpad teams are paying attention too!
Update. I have had further contact with Electroworld and have decided to order. They offered me a Paypal option so I have payed $240 inclusive delivery. Ill have German import tax of 19% on top of that. No dates yet but Electroworld have promised to send more specs when they get the sample on May 12th. First production run will, as is normal, be limited.
Update 2. Electroworld have said that shipment could be next week. Soon after 12th May.
It looks like SmartQ are going to offer their SmartQ 5 device in a 7 inch version which not only looks very attractive but could really find a useful place on the sofa or coffee table of many a modern home.
Kindle, Pepperpad, Crunchpad, Archos 7, Samsung Q1EX and Apple Tablet come immediately to mind but the Q7 is slightly different. It uses an ARM11-based core (according to reports I’m reading on translated forums around the net) which will give it a long, long battery life. It has nice styling (note that these pics are renderings.) It will be light (I estimate 1lb.) It’s targeted at Web-only usage and if the $150 Q5 is anything to go by, could come in at an extremely attractive price.
At first you might think the Q7 uses an old, underpowered platform and then you might compare it to the $200 netbooks that are around but if you think about where you might use this, on the sofa, breakfast table and in bed or even as a picture frame or constantly updating newspaper, it’s not the same ‘urgent’ usage model as you have with a MID or smartphone and it’s not for table top productive usage like a netbook is. You have more time and patience in these home-based scenarios and you don’t notice slower page loading times so much. This is something I learned when I hooked the Archos 605 up to my TV. It’s not a mobile device, it’s a home device.
Based on hardware and industrial design alone, I think this is an extremely interesting sofa surfer or information pad that could be very competitively priced. A conversion to Android or Maemo could make this even more interesting. I’ll be in Taiwan for Computex in June and if I see one of these for sale, I’ll definitely buy one.
I’ve made the assumption that the Q7 is based on the Q5 hardware and added it to the database. Take a look at the specs, think $250 (my estimation) and let me know; Is it something you’re interested in?
I spent a few hours researching and pulling together information on the SmartQ5 this morning and feel more positive about it now than I did a few weeks ago.
The SmartQ5 looks good and has an amazing price (local price in China approx $132.) It has a good screen size/resolution and with Ubuntu (ARM), an good supply of software. As a media/internet/e-book reader/photo browser/travel device, there’s definitely a lot of pocketable value there. The 667Mhz ARM11 CPU should make it faster than the Nokia tablet devices and the large 7.5wh battery should keep it running for a long long time between charges.
If it was ever available in Europe or US though, you’d be looking at something like $199 which puts it close to the offers that occasionally float around for the N810. (cdw.com have it for $226 as I write) With GPS, keyboard, camera, a healthy user-base and local-country support, the N810 is the better MID option in my eyes but that’s only if you can find an offer.
It’s difficult to comment with any authority when you’ve never even had hands-on so if you’ve been thinking about the Smart Q, keep an eye on the new SmartQ5 product page where we’ll be adding info, images and links as they come along. One of the first to be added was an unboxing photo-set from Kam Leung. There’s also an unboxing from ‘Sky’ over at UMPCFever. [translation link]
Before I say why I think Eldar Martazin didn’t see a 2011 Nokia MID, let me take the chance to tell you a little bit about ARM’s ‘Sparrow’ platform.
When I first heard news about it a few weeks ago I was a little confused about where it was positioned on the scale of ARM cores as it looked to overlap the ARM11 MPCore designs. I fired off a query to a contact in ARM and they came back with some information that has enabled me to better position it.
It’s a symmetric multi-processing platform that uses cheap (read simple) cores with the ARM V7 instructions set used in the high-end Cortex cores. I liken it to a multi-core Atom CPU which is focusing on cheap, small, low-power and ‘reasonable’ performance. ARM say that it will enable performance as you see today in the high-end Cortex devices at a much lower cost. The multi-processing element will, I assume, allow cores to be dialled in and out for either power-saving or processing power. Its going to offer 2009 high-end performance at feature-phone sizes and prices.
Three years ago today, Microsoft’s Origamiproject.com went live as a teaser website. [See original teaser page] One of the people to spot it was ‘Designtastesgood‘ who appears to have lit the fuse by sending a link to Robert Scoble who effectively posted another teaser. Engadget’s editor-in-chief at the time, Ryan Block, picked it up, added an image he’d acquired and wrote an article that evening which has 190 comments on it. If you have time, scan through them!
“So today Microsoft officially flipped the switch on the buzz machine for their Origami Project — an atypical viral marketing manuveur for a company whose products are usually known about years ahead of time. Scoble says its a device, the Internet’s lighting up with rumors — is it the Xbox portable? Well, we dunno, but as usual got our hands on some pictures. And as usual we can’t guarantee they’re the real deal, though we are pretty confident in their source. So, let’s go over it: these were sent to us detailing it as a Microsoft portable media player, which wouldn’t be too far off from what Jobs and BusinessWeek both prophesied Microsoft doing (despite being pretty broadly denied from within).”
Mobile Computer Mag had a chance to check out a prototype model of the upcoming Asus T91 tablet-netbook [Portal page] and they captured a great hardware overview, with commentary, on camera. Have a look below:
Something interesting that we see in this video is a SIM slot built into the device. As they mentioned, it isn’t clear yet if this is something they are testing, or something that will be available when the unit launches (we’re hoping for the latter). I’m excited to see the convertible tablet form factor making its way down to netbooks. It seems like a low cost tablet-netbook could be a great way to expand the tablet-PC user base. It is also good that one of the first of these that we are seeing is coming from a reputable netbook maker, Asus. It seems like it will still be a balancing act to get a good price:quality ratio compared to current netbooks when you consider the fact that you need to get the touchscreen and swiveling lid on the unit.
If you are interested to see what the software end of the netbook will look like, don’t miss this post.
Tucked away in a press release about a 10″ 19mm-thick 10″ Atom-based Netbook to be launched in April is an announcement that Archos will be bringing a 17mm-thick 9″ Tablet to the market. It will be based on the Z5xx processor (the one used in MIDs) will include an on-screen keyboard and touch pointer mouse.
Translation from German press release
Following the product launch and the ARCHOS 10s, is in the 3rd Quarter
9”a revolutionary mini-notebook Tablet launched. This provides a
integrated, virtual keyboard and handwriting recognition. The new design
make the traditional mouse and keyboard redundant [uberfluessig] and
replaced it with a touchscreen keyboard and a TrackPoint mouse.
With the new 9”Mini-Notebook Tablet ARCHOS once again exceed the
Boundaries in terms of design, form and functionality. And with a device,
the only 0.8 kg and 17 mm thick. The 9 “Mini-Notebook Tablet
is thus one of the thinnest and lightest fully-functional
Mini-notebooks in its class. He is the great competitors in nothing
after and offers a disk size from 60 to 160 GB and has also
on the Intel (r) Atom ™ Processor Z5xx the series and the Intel (r) System
Controller Hub.
We assume that this will be a Windows-based device but given Archos consumer focus, is likely to be style-oriented and presumably, well-priced. The Techcrunch tablet team will have to watch this one. The press release then goes on to talk about a Moorestwon-based product in 2010.
The processing [advances] of the Intel Atom processor in the mini-notebook line
2009, showed that in the future ARCHOS want to work with Intel platforms, such as the
“Moorestown” platform of the new generation, and the new
Products will be launched probably 2010. The performance and the
Compatibility of the “Moorestown” platform makes it possible ARCHOS, the
Innovation with increasingly smaller, thinner designs and to continue the
Purpose of the devices to constantly expand.
It looks very much like Archos is keeping it’s fingers in both X86 and ARM pies. Their recent announcement of an Android-based MID device on an ARM-based CPU leads us to believe that they might look to cover all angles in the mobile computing space from netbooks down to smartphones. It will be hard to keep the device capabilities from crossing over each other but will give Archos every opportunity to see content through their back-end content systems and attract European mobile carriers and that’s probably the real long-term focus here.
