Late to the
touchscreen MID party, Chinese manufacturer SmartQ was determined not to miss another opportunity. That's why it spent the month of April touting its new R7 e-reader as -- you guessed it -- the
iPad killer. With the same ol' 600MHz ARM11 and 256MB of RAM inside as its ho-hum MIDs, that claim's quite a stretch, but our cohorts at Engadget Chinese actually found the Ubuntu-powered 7-inch SVGA touchscreen device moderately capable in a recent hands-on. Like fellow PMP / e-Reader the
Onda VX560, the device supports 1080p in most every video format under the sun, reads e-books (PDF, EPUB and CHM), and has an optional USB 3G modem for on-the-go capability. Ubuntu standbys Midori and Pidgin handle web browsing and IM, respectively, and it can even stream live video and purchase Chinese magazines through SmartQ's services. Sluggish as it might be, for $1,680 RMB (about $250) we'd say that's a pretty respectable featureset. Video after the break, specs and hands-on pics at our source links.
posted April 29th 2010 11:34AM
Sony, something, something, EVIL, something, something, NEX3, something, NEX5
@plyx
First thing I noticed too, Sony的EVIL! oh my.
@plyx that's pretty hilarious...
@fernando I'm sure 的 means "would never, ever dream of doing anything"
@plyx
'sony's EVIL cameras will be named NEX3 and NEX5'
smartQ is kind of on the expensive side.
@plyx
http://www.google.com/dictionary?source=translation&hl=en&q=%E7%9A%84&langpair=zh-CN|en
I haven't installed the Asian characters pack on my PC.(WTH? I had iPhone there before I deleted it...)
You didn't tell us what kind of touch-screen does it use. In case it's something similar to awful resistive dark screen of Camangi WebStation, I would caution everybody not to waste money and not to ruin your [first] Android experience.
@vkelman The stylus makes me suspect resistive - it's soo 2006!
Sony evil!?
What a useless screen.
I think this looks pretty nice. Ubuntu, cheap...it has SD, right? Only downside is no HDMI out and probably a cheaper screen.
If only it had a real d-pad on the left side and a couple of buttons on the right for emulation. None of the tablets ever seem to be well prepped for emulation.
SmartDevices wasn't late to the party, it was early. The SmartQ5 was out in mid 2008, while that newer V5 linked up there was actually released February 2010, and the only features were HDMI-out and more RAM.
I have the V7, the software is pretty sucky. Linux is slow and WinCE is useless, but Android works very well. Their main lacking feature is Mali Driver missing which is used for 2D and 3D which the devices can handle.
SmartQ V7 is actually a great device for its price. One issue with it though is its Wifi driver for Linux that is terrible. It bottlenecks a lot of things. I really hope they release a new driver.