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Eurotech and Freescale Semiconductor announced a partnership to develop COM Express boards based on Freescale's multicore, PowerPC-based QorIQ system-on-chips (SoCs). Eurotech also recently announced a $1.5 million medical device win for its Linux-ready, ARM9-based Sphere II single board computer.
NEC is preparing an Android 2.1 tablet for the Japanese market based on an ARM Cortex-A8 processor. The LifeTouch offers a seven-inch, WVGA touchscreen, a SDHC slot, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, sensors, and a three-megapixel camera, says NEC.
Avnet announced a product bundle for those wanting to experiment with Xilinx's Spartan-6 FPGA (field programmable gate array). The “Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA PCIe I/O Reference Design” includes an Intel Atom-powered module and baseboard from Kontron, a PCI Express-based Spartan-6 board, and a video output adapter, the company says.
Samsung announced two low-end Android handsets — the 3.2-inch Galaxy 3 (I5800) and the 2.8-inch Galaxy 5 (I5500) — as well as two Bada OS phones called the Wave 2 and Wave 2 Pro. Meanwhile, Samsung is prepping a keyboard version of its Galaxy S Android phone called the Galaxy S Pro, says AndroidCommunity.
Motorola is prepping two high-end Android phones for summer release on Verizon — the 4.3-inch Droid X and a keyboard-enabled Droid 2 — say reports. Meanwhile, LG will ship 20 Android phones this year, and Sony Ericsson is readying a mid-range Xperia X8 Android model, say other reports.
Open source electronics firm Liquidware has released a kit for attaching a 4.4-inch Liquidware BeagleTouch OLED touchscreen to a BeagleBoard to construct a Linux-based, tablet device. The Beagle Embedded Starter Kit also incorporates a BeagleJuice battery module and a 4GB SD card.
Samsung's upcoming, 7-inch Galaxy Tab Android tablet will offer a 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor, says Tinh te. Meanwhile ARMdevices.net reports on a five-inch, Android tablet from Acorp selling for $88 in volume, and one Canonical exec says it will release a tablet version of Ubuntu Linux early next year, while founder Mark Shuttleworth says it won't.
Witech Ltd. announced a low-cost ARM11 SOM (system on module), bundled with a development kit that includes a 4.3-inch display. The TE6410 and OK6410 feature a 667MHz Samsung S3C6410 processor, 128MB of RAM and 256MB of flash storage, USB host/slave ports, an SD slot, plus support for available Wi-Fi, camera, GPS, and GPRS modules.
AT&T and HTC announced a mid-range Android 2.1 phone due to ship exclusively on AT&T's network this weekend. The HTC Aria offers a 3.2 inch HVGA capacitive touchscreen, a five megapixel camera, HSDPA, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, an optical joystick, plus the latest version of HTC's Sense UI layer, says AT&T.
The Amarino project has released source code for Amarino 2.0, a development kit that lets Android phones control mobile devices based on Arduino microcontrollers via Bluetooth. The Amarino 2.0 Android library enables control of multiple Bluetooth devices in parallel, says the project.
Ibase released a 3.5-inch single board computer (SBC) built around the single-core Intel Atom N450 or dual-core Atom D510. The Ibase IB891 SBC offers two gigabit Ethernet ports, eight USB 2.0 ports, four serial ports, and dual-display capability, says the company.
Imagination Technologies announced a graphics core that will bring DirectX 9 to smartphones and embedded devices, and can also support stereoscopic 3D displays. The Powervr SGX544 IP for GPUs (graphics processing units) can be implemented as a single core, or in multiprocessor configurations from two to 16 cores, the company says.
An annual survey released by the Eclipse Foundation, which oversees development of the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE), shows that 32.7 percent of respondents use Linux as their primary desktop development system, an increase of almost six points from 2009. Among other findings, Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distro among Eclipse developers (18.3 percent), says the Foundation.
Motorola co-CEO Sanjay Jha announced that his company will release an Android smartphone equipped with a 2GHz processor by the end of the year, say industry reports. Also this week, Apple announced the iPhone 4, Sprint amended its sales estimate for the launch of the HTC Evo 4G, and the Samsung Galaxy S debuted in Asia, says eWEEK.
AppliedMicro is sampling the first member of a 1GHz Power Architecture (PowerPC) system-on-a-chip (SoC) family for network attached storage (NAS) devices and media servers. The APM 821xx processor uses just 3.5 Watts, providing RAID 5 acceleration and a TCP/IP offload engine for networking applications, the company says.