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$100 Novo7 tablet: Android 4.0, 7" capacitive screen, USB 2.0, HDMI
- mchusma 15y agoReally bizarre formatting on this page, looks almost like a stitching together of images. That, plus the way its worded makes me suspicious of some kind of scam (worst) or is not fully baked (likely). Does anyone know more? Anyone have the same thoughts?
- aiscott 15y agoIt is bizarre. The whole page is a sliced image, text included.
- Scaevolus 15y agoThis web development style seems to be common with Chinese/Japanese websites. It's a lot easier to style your text with the fancy effects you want if it's an image.
- jacabado 15y agoMaybe it also let's you go through China's GFW if you have some censorable content. But I'm sure the front-end developers I work with (in Portugal) are not thinking in censorship when they do that.
- caf 15y agoWell, back when browsers gave you any character set you wanted as long as it was ISO-8859-1, that was probably the only reliable way to build a web page that displayed Chinese/Japanese native script.
- freehunter 15y agoFrom a Youtube demonstration[1] it looks a little laggy. Looks like it can barely power Angry Birds at a decent speed. Oddly though, the Spiderman game looks like it runs a bit better. Not perfect, but better. I don't have sound at work, so the guy might be saying something related to his personal experience with it. It's MIPS-based, not ARM. I don't know if that gives it anything of note. The thing _does_ exist, people have them in their hands. Not saying it's a worthwhile investment, but it might be. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJb3k4fZpB8&feature=youtube_gdata https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJb3k4fZpB8&feature=yout...
- jmarinez 15y agoHere's another Youtube video I found. This one running ICS instead of the older version from the previous video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuYE_u19i44&feature=related https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuYE_u19i44&feature=rela... This one is in Spanish, but you can see the FPS performance in a number of games, flash, PDF, etc.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkDKgNBjlTw&feature=related https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkDKgNBjlTw&feature=rela...
- zht 15y agoAs a native Chinese speaker it reads like the typical English of someone who has been educated in China.
- runjake 15y agoIt goes without saying, you get what you pay for. Quality parts, which are required for a quality experience, cost money. This isn't going to be in the same league as an iPad, or even a Kindle Fire no matter what tweaks or custom ROMs you load.
- jvehent 15y agoDid you actually test it ?
- sigzero 15y agoFor $100? Do you really need to?
- draganHR 15y agoYes
- dlikhten 15y agoOk I am not expecting miracles here. How usable is it? Will it play angry birds (smoke test). Bascially, is this a repeat of the previous $100 android tablet fiasco?
- Klinky 15y agoIt looks like it has a 1Ghz MIPS CPU & a GPU that supports OpenGL ES 2.0 & operates @ 444Mhz, so I would say Angry Birds is a yes.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- runjake 15y agoNo but I'm aware of the manufacturer's costs for capacitive display technology, SoC, and other BOM (bill of material) parts, and the manufacturer's costs for even halfway decent parts is about $200. Nevermind that this manufacturer is small comparatively, and thus can't sell the number of units required for the discounts the likes of Apple, Samsung, and Motorola get.
- unfocused 15y agoHmmm...already sold out. The owner of this website is registered using the email of the domain of this company: http://ainol.com/plugin.php?identifier=ainol&module=page&action=info&pageid=1 http://ainol.com/plugin.php?identifier=ainol&module=page... So it's probably not vaporware, but the lack of English certainly doesn't help me figure out anything.
- farlington 15y agoIt's hard to look at stuff like this and think that western companies have much of a future in China.
- r00fus 15y agoThe counter examples are legion, but Apple's future growth is dominated by Asia (esp. China). Western companies selling (likely chinese-made) goods to China without investing in serious design, development and marketing (not to mention ecosystem and support) are not going to have much of a future, I agree.
- nooneelse 15y agoI'm curious about the other direction. Will the little scrappy Chinese companies be able to win over a significant fraction of Western customers, or will brand-recognition act as to much of a deterrent against them?
- TylerE 15y agoI'd imagine logistics would play into it also. Not just shipping, but things like UL certification. When your're working on the sort of razor thin margins they certainly are at that price point...
- gcb 15y agoMy motto when buying Chinese stuff is to steer clear of brands that try to be fake. Such as not buying Hyundai because their logo tries to mimic Honda's.
- leot 15y agoOne nice property of tablets is they don't need to go obsolete like laptops or desktop computers. They can be turned in to picture frames, home automation interfaces, cookbooks, mini-TVs, combined into larger interfaces, (if only they had narrower borders!) etc. The only real obstacle to making them really useful is power supply, but wireless electricity should solve that problem shortly (and tablet computers might be their "killer app").
- donnaware 15y agoMips cpu, that might explain the cheapness, ARM ipcore is not cheap. I wonder if that Will be a problem for android compatibilty?
- hmottestad 15y agoAnyone notice that it can handle 1080p, not just 720p. Not that you would be able to notice on that 7" screen. Always the option of plugging it into the tv....but I have never ever in my life seen anyone do that.
- hackernews 15y agoI plug in my Samsung E4GT into my TV to stream netflix, watch videos, and listen to music. Works well as a "HTPC". Although I haven't found a solution for a remote yet so it's like the good old days when the remote to the tv was physically tethered with a long cord.
- gcb 15y agoI have to get a phone with hdmi just to check if the cord is less of a hassle then the 200 times i have to press the A button to start my wii
- mhitza 15y agoIn the youtube link posted by freehunter http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3320245 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3320245 the tablet actually has a remote control with it.
- devindotcom 15y agoWrote this up last night: http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/05/99-chinese-tablet-is-mips-based-runs-android-4-0/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/05/99-chinese-tablet-is-mips-b... I thought it was interesting for a couple reasons, though of course at a hundred bucks you're not going to get an impressive device, merely functional. It's running a MIPS-compatible processor, which was what caught my eye.
- justanotheratom 15y agoDo you happen to know if it supports Bluetooth?
- angusgr 15y agoI thought I'd seen this all before with the $100 tablets last year, but then I noticed something that sent my jaw to the floor: http://en.ingenic.cn/product.aspx?ID=78 http://en.ingenic.cn/product.aspx?ID=78 That's the manufacturer for the JZ4770 SoC (system-on-a-chip) used in the Novo7. Their page has: - Product Datasheet (admittedly with only physical/electrical not logical details.) - Links to Android NDK, Linux toolchain, Linux source, uboot source, sample Linux rootfs for the SoC family. This is more open development information than almost any other SoC platform used in cheap Android hardware! Admittedly, it all looks a little old but even as an indication of attitude, it's a great sign. To date, nearly every vendor of these kind of designs has kept this information close to their chest and charges for it - if it's available it's nearly always because of leaks not releases. That's one of the underlying reasons why most of the cheap tablets violate GPL. Unfortunately, I can't turn up any information about the "vivante gc860" graphics engine - drivers for that will probably be binary blobs (like on nearly every other Android device, at any price point.) Anyhow, I'm excited that if Ingenic put out sufficient information about this SoC and its features, and if the hardware is "good enough", you might expect to see some interesting other uses & ports in the coming months.
- angusgr 15y agoAh, of course - the JZ4770 is the big sibling of the SoC used in the Ben Nanonote series of "fully open source" mini-netbooks, and the Dingoo A320 gaming handhelds, and the like.
- weaselspice 15y agoBefore it sold out it had $60 shipping costs. That, and the 840x400 res kills it for me. The NOVO7 Advanced has slightly better specs for $140 delivered, but no ICS yet http://www.merimobiles.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=MERI0723 http://www.merimobiles.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=ME...
- patrickgzill 15y agoIf it runs video Skype, I am in...
- rikelme 15y agoVideo from MIPS Technologies showing this tablet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq79h-HA5lU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq79h-HA5lU
- angusgr 15y agoIt's interesting that MIPS are getting behind this one, I assume they're hoping they can steal some share back from ARM in this space. However, as it's a marketing video there are approximately 4 seconds of "actual device" footage on there. Here's a video purporting to show 4.0 actually running on the Novo7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuYE_u19i44 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuYE_u19i44 Looks good, although they don't really do anything apart from navigating around menus. (Lots of videos show Novo tablets with Android 3.x, which it apparently already shipped with. Which I don't understand at all, did Google provide MIPS/Novo with sources to build Honeycomb for MIPS?)