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Evolio announces the Quadra, its first quad-core Android 4.1 tablet for Romanian locals
The buy local movement has plenty of appeal, but the philosophy often extends more readily to tomatoes than tablets. Not so in Romania, where Evolio has served up its share of slates and laptops for the home crowd. Now, the company is back with its first quad-core tablet offering, the 10.1-inch Evolio Quadra. The slab of aluminum and glass weighs in at 1.18 pounds (535 grams), and is outfitted with a 1.2GHz quad-core Cortex A9 CPU and the Vivante GC1000 GPU, which sits on the lower end of Vivante's offerings. Other specs are largely standard fare, such as a 1,280 x 800 IPS LCD, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of expandable storage and Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean). The Quadra's 5,000mAh battery is on the weaker side, and its connectivity is limited to WiFi (outside of an external 3G adapter), but that's what you'll get for 999 Romanian leu (roughly $296). This slab of Eastern European engineering is available for pre-order now on Evolio's website, and it's said to hit store shelves in mid-June.
Marvell announces PXA1088 quad-core SoC for globetrotting phones and tablets
Marvell made waves last year with its 802.11ac wireless chips, but the company's looking to make a splash in 2013 with a new quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 SoC. Called the PXA1088, the new silicon's calling card -- other than those four CPU cores -- is its ability to beam 3G data to mobile devices anywhere in the world thanks to auto-roaming and compatibility with 21Mbps HSPA+, TD-HSPA+, EDGE, and WCDMA networks. In addition to those cellular radios, it also has an Avastar 88W8777 chip that brings WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0 and FM radio, plus it has a GPS and GLONASS location processor on board. Worldwide connectivity isn't the PXA1088's only trick, either. It's got some serious video chops thanks to a hardware 1080p encoder and decoder, and a GPU from Vivante compliant with OpenGL ES 2.0 and 1.1 as well as OpenVG 1.1. Can't wait to get your grubby mitts on a phone packing Marvell's latest? The company tells us that several well-known OEMs will be rolling out devices with the PXA1088 in the first half of the year. Of course, we're hoping to see a few of them ourselves next week at Mobile World Congress, so stay tuned.
