News & Analysis
Android set-tops, TVs, VoIP phones are coming
Junko Yoshida
4/10/2009 8:27 AM EDT
TOKYO — It's official: The Google-designed Android platform is reaching out beyond the cellphone.
Android set-tops, TVs, VoIP phones, Karaoke boxes and digital photo frames are coming soon to a retailer near you.
The world of Android is rapidly unfolding in Asia. Software developers, chip suppliers and system companies are all racing toward the same goal: enabling the development of lean and mean, efficient consumer products built on Linux, open source and free software.
Non-smartphone, Android-based embedded products may not reach the commercial market here until early 2011.
But KDDI, Japanese telecommunication service provider, for example, has been reportedly working with Motorola in developing Android-based set-tops.
This fall at CEATEC, Japan's largest electronics show, displays will include prototype Android set tops "conceptualized by Open Embedded Software Foundation (OESF)," according to the group's chairman Masataka Miura.
OESF was established here in February to create a viable Android-based platform for a variety of embedded products. The group, consisting of 25 companies, will launch several working groups, including: set-top boxes; VoIP; network and security; measurement and control; system core; application and services; and marketing and education.
Members include ARM, KDDI, Japan Cable Laboratories, Alpine Electronics and Fujitsu Software Technologies.
Miura said a growing number of semiconductor companies are also interested in participating, including Texas Instruments, Intel, Marvell, Freescale, Qualcomm and Renesas Technology.
OESF plans to open offices in Taiwan and South Korea this summer.
This year "will be a critical year to see if Android will be successful," said Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist at In-Stat. "So far, it appears to have more market momentum and fewer pitfalls than many of the other Linux-based, open-sourced solutions in the market." More important, "It has the Google brand behind it, which is very powerful," he added.
OESF has not received financial backing from Google. Google reportedly welcomes the growing interest among Asian OEMs and ODMs that are spreading Android in various embedded systems.
PC OEMs such as Hewlett-Packard and AsusTeK have made public their interest in using ARM and Linux for their netbooks, expected to be sold at lower prices than mainstream notebooks.
Android is also appearing in E-Ink's electronic paper kit. Moto Development Group, however, said it's just a technology demonstration and it is not a shipping a product.
Japan's OESF underscores how Android momentum is building much faster and broader, extending beyond netbooks. Its initial focus will be set-top boxes. Android will be used in a Motorola set top called "au Box," according to Miura. The product is essentially KDDI's multipurpose IP set top, or a home gateway, designed to drive fixed mobile broadcast convergence, he explained.
Miura also noted that Japanese consumer electronics company JVC is also considering development of an Android TV.
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junko.yoshida
4/10/2009 9:10 AM EDT
Tell us which Android-based CE devices you would like to see, and why.
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Bill SJ
4/10/2009 1:54 PM EDT
In my previous life, I have developed optimized embedded 2D graphics engine that is extremely powerful, as powerful as OpenGL or D3D in terms of 2D rendering of multi-layers of alpha blended graphics/videos with animations. Yet it uses very little CPU and hardware resource such as graphics hardware and memory bandwidth. The engine is used in two very successful set-top-box (STB) used by million plus consumers. It can do all kinds of animations at up to 60 frame/s(fps) in high-definition (HD) if memory bandwidth allowed on the output side, not graphics engine side. On one type of advanced STB with a less optimized engine, it only ues 4% of MIPS 300MHz CPU under constant animations and graphics refresh rate of 30 fps. In a fully optimized engine in another STB with 250MHz MIPS, it uses no more than 2% of CPU under constant animations and graphics refresh rate is at 60fps most of the time, only because the 2D graphics hardware is very slow (80 M-pixels/s).
The STB UI is every bit like Apple TV UI (less 3D-effect such as curving surface) but only requires minimal 2D hardware and very little CPU cycle on a SOC system that is one to two magnitudes less powerful than Intel 2GHz+ dual core with NVidia powerful graphics chip.
This is a testimony of power of optimized software architecture design can do.
The engine is also idea for most mobile consumer electronics since it will offers fancy 2D multilayer graphics with animation but use very little electricity.
The graphics engine is portable to all embedded OSes and it can support C/C++ and Java. It can come with a very good anti-aliasing font rendering engine based on freetype engine for big TV.
Now I have moved on to the biggest thing in bidding to make servers far more efficient so they can use far less electricity, thus doing my part to save the earth. If any well established CE company is interested in using this engine (however it is not a free or open source IP, unless you buy the IP outright and make it so), one can drop a note here. This would give me a little financial resource for my new venture.
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Bill SJ
4/10/2009 2:16 PM EDT
One more note, A friend of mine told me recently that he evaluated Adobe Flash player based UI that uses 30%+ CPU on a particular SOC system that would use just about a little more than 1% CPU if my graphics engine were used.
I have seen way too many PC folks pretending as embedded folks, bring the PC software design, with assumption of limitless CPU and memory, to embedded world.
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Bill SJ
4/11/2009 4:23 AM EDT
Most consumer electronics include smart phone does not need windowed (multiple windows that may or may not overlapped) graphics. Using tradition UI graphics such as Microsoft Windows GDI or Unix X-Windows API are cumbersome, inefficient, resource hogging, inflexible. Often they are very hard, if not impossible, to create arbitrary number of layers of alpha blended graphics with video/photos and with graphics objects animations, which is necessary to provide consumer with rich UI.
Using 3D graphics API such as OpenGL on 2D UI (there isn't real 3D UI except some 3D graphics object transform in UI, such as Apple TV UI) is extremely wasteful for hardware resource and electricity. Most SOC except a few recent ones from Sigma Design and Broadcom, do not have 3D graphics support.
All this UI system suffers another problem. The graphics layout and especially UI logical control are pretty much static. By that it means the UI layout, such as what kinds of graphics widgets the UI can have, and UI logical control fixed at compile time. Therefore, to add new UI or new UI behavior, or changing existing UI must require firmware update.
What if a graphics subsystem that allows UI and UI logical control specified at anytime, using description language such as XML and offers rich UI comparable to OpenG while use one magnitude less system resources. What kind of endless business opportunities could arise to these internet devices (This is sometimes called server pushed UI).
Now one can forget about using the outdated Linux UI subsystem on a consumer electronics.
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rcdawson
6/18/2009 11:14 PM EDT
Hi,
Not sure if anyone else has approached you but I would be interested in hearing more. I completely agree the trend of SOC, STB and Mobile app developers thinking like PC programmers is the wrong direction to go in. We need efficient architectures that make the most of low power and memory bandwidth efficiency.
If you are still offering or interested in speaking to me, please send me an email at jayzee54@gmail.com
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kinnar
8/27/2010 3:11 AM EDT
It seems that Google will rule the technologies on all the fronts.
Anyways Google is very kind enough to change the present licensing terminologies and it has literally changed the look of software industry.
It provides state of art technology at no cost compared to other giants.
It will be very great if Android is being accepted on other commercial devices other than mobile phones.
The world is eagerly waiting for the new change.
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