$100 Novo7 tablet: Android 4.0, 7" capacitive screen, USB 2.0, HDMI

http://www.ainovo.com/

by sssparkkk • 15 years ago

66 45 15 years ago

mchusma• 15 years ago

Really 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• 15 years ago

It is bizarre. The whole page is a sliced image, text included.

Scaevolus• 15 years ago

This 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.

freehunter• 15 years ago

From 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=yout...

jmarinez• 15 years ago

Here'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=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=rela...

zht• 15 years ago

As a native Chinese speaker it reads like the typical English of someone who has been educated in China.

runjake2• 15 years ago

It 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• 15 years ago

Did you actually test it ?

sigzero• 15 years ago

For $100? Do you really need to?

runjake2• 15 years ago

No 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.

jamesbkel• 15 years ago

That was my initial reaction... I mean it's no mystery that for $100, it simply cannot compete with the iPad and also be profitable.

That said, for only $100 I would be willing to give up a rich multimedia experience/gaming like the iPad for something that did an acceptable job browsing/email.

nooneelse2• 15 years ago

Also, for $100 this might be nice (read: "nice enough") for home automation and home theater control. Even if you also have a better tablet that you would always pick up given the choice, that better one might very well go with you when you leave the house. This would be the cheap one that stays at home for others to use and the kids to play with.

Or a quick and dirty POS system using Square (or whatever other payment processing people like these days).

Cheaper opens up more applications, ones that "also crappier" doesn't always preclude.

DarkShikari• 15 years ago

That was my initial reaction... I mean it's no mystery that for $100, it simply cannot compete with the iPad and also be profitable.

Not everyone in the world earns $120k/year at a Silicon Valley technology job. For much of the world, $500 is a lot of money to spend on a tablet, especially for those outside the United States. In Brazil, for example, after accounting for import taxes on electronics and difference in incomes, spending $500 on a tablet is similar to spending $5,000 on a new tablet in the US. And if you're comparing to a high-paying tech job, that might be more like spending $15,000 on a tablet.

If the iPad was $15,000, would you buy it?

Wherever there's a successful high-end product, there's an even larger space for a lower-priced, lower-end version of that product for the billions of people who can't reasonably afford it. Those who look outside the Silicon Valley bubble realize this, and know that there's a lot of money to be made, even if it's at low margins.

gruuk• 15 years ago

It doesn't need to be in the same league. Getting a "real" multipurpose tablet for the price of an e-ink reader will be compelling enough for many consumers, assuming performance is not abysmal (meaning not a heir to the Maylong M-150: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/reviews/2010/11/worst-gadget-... ).

If actual battery life 5+ hours (when watching videos) and it is just fast enough for e-reading, light browsing and most small games, I don't see why people wouldn't buy them unless build quality is really low. Then again, dubious build quality doesn't stop people from buying crappy TVs or bluray players.

unfocused• 15 years ago

Hmmm...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...

So it's probably not vaporware, but the lack of English certainly doesn't help me figure out anything.

farlington2• 15 years ago

It's hard to look at stuff like this and think that western companies have much of a future in China.

r00fus• 15 years ago

The 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.

leot• 15 years ago

One 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").

hmottestad• 15 years ago

Anyone 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• 15 years ago

I 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.

gcb3• 15 years ago

I 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• 15 years ago

In the youtube link posted by freehunter http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3320245 the tablet actually has a remote control with it.

devindotcom• 15 years ago

Wrote this up last night: 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• 15 years ago

Do you happen to know if it supports Bluetooth?

angusgr3• 15 years ago

I 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

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.

angusgr3• 15 years ago

Ah, 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.

patrickgzill2• 15 years ago

If it runs video Skype, I am in...

rikelme• 15 years ago

Video from MIPS Technologies showing this tablet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq79h-HA5lU

angusgr3• 15 years ago

It'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

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?)

$100 Novo7 tablet: Android 4.0, 7" capacitive screen, USB 2.0, HDMI

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