[Arm-netbook] progress... allwinnertech

[Gordan Bobic]

 On Thu, 5 Jan 2012 10:32:33 +0000, lkcl luke <luke.leighton at gmail.com> 
 wrote:
> ok jimmy spoke to allwinner tech, and the plot thickens... :)
> the engineering design house is wits-tech, which explains this:
> http://www.wits-tech.com/pages/board.jsp
>
> so we have been introduced to them - apologies but it's another
> 24-hr round-trip because it's of course end-of-day already, there.
>
>
> also, it looks like the tablet market has really really tanked.
> it's not surprising to anyone who has ever owned a tablet: i'm
> kinda surprised it took this long for people to catch on - maybe
> there are more suckers in the world than i anticipated :)

 Who'd have thought!
 </sarcasm>

 Tablets work as a product if your customers are Apple fanbois that will 
 get anything with an Apple badge on it. But the reality is that once the 
 "mee too!" fad has worn off most people will realize that these aren't 
 really useful for most practical things. The cheap ones have neither the 
 battery life nor the performance to be a half-decent media consumption 
 device, and the expensive ones are going head to head with the Apple 
 product on price (albeit with better specs), but without the realization 
 on the part of the manufacturers that to pull an Apple they need fanbois 
 rather than normal users that buy a product that fits the requirements 
 rather than a product that follows the hype.

 Bottom line - to make a tablet into a semi-useful device it has to have 
 sufficiently good performance and spectacular 
 fully-powered-on-with-screen-at-full-brightness battery life. Most cheap 
 tablets fail miserably by that criteria. I must have at least half a 
 dozen various ones on my desk, and most of them are half-finished 
 half-arsed products that aren't even worth the peanuts they sell for, 
 with the semi-exception of the ones that the community has embraced with 
 custom firmwares that work orders of magnitude better than the Android 
 firmware abortions that they originally shipped with. And by this 
 criteria I actually put the likes of Gome Apad/IRobot/Flytouch 
 lightyears ahead of the StorageOptions' Scroll that only has a shiny 
 aluminium back to show for it's 3x pricetag, while I am shocked that 
 StorageOptions, being a western (UK) company, has even failed to comply 
 with the GPL and release the required kernel sources.
 </rant>

> luckily, we're designing around a flexible product concept...

 This is actually to the advantage of this project because it means 
 there will be plenty of spare manufacturing capacity, which means faster 
 fabrication timescales and possibly lower production costs, too.

 Gordan