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Marvell® ARMADA® PXA168 based XO laptops and tablets from OLPC with $185 and target $100 list prices respectively
CES: One Laptop Per Child – The New XO v3.0 [Jan 11, 2012]
The new OLPC XO v3.0 laptop is unveiled at CES 2012. Demoing at the Marvell booth (the company that developed the processor found on board the XO) Giulia D’Amico, Director of Business Development [at One Laptop per Child], talks about some of the features found on the new device.
Related information: Marvell’s SMILE Plug for the “Classroom 3.0” initiative [Feb 1, 2012]
One Laptop Per Child XO-3 [Yves Behar’s fuseproject news blog, Jan 9, 2012]
6 years of design development with Nicholas Negroponte and the non-profit organization he founded, One Laptop Per Child, has led to the next generation XO-3 tablet. More than 2.4 million children in 25 countries received the original XO Laptop, and these kids have been our inspiration to create the next generation of this educational tool.
One Laptop Per Child is a technology story about how to provide low-cost educational tools to millions of children. For those children, and for us, it is also a creative story about how to design specifically for young students. Every decision made by the OLPC engineering team and the design team at fuseproject has been about adapting technology to children’s needs at a cost that makes the tablet affordable for developing countries.
The first impression of the XO-3 is its extreme simplicity. The focus is on the screen, while the surrounding green rubber border provides a safe tactile grip for children’s hands. The back surface has a bumpy texture and integrates a rear-facing camera. The connectors, power switch and speakers are arranged on the bottom edge, facing the user. Our approach has been to minimize complexity, while delivering a high quality, and a heightened touch feel. There is playfulness in the way one can adapt the cover to different needs, while each design detail and material is chosen to deliver maximum value.
Fuseproject Unwraps The Third-Gen One Laptop Per Child: A $100 Tablet [Fastcompany’s Co.Design blog, Jan 10, 2012]
With the XO-3, OLPC unveils a design that will allow it to be customized for myriad markets.
Let’s get this out of the way. The OLPC XO-3, the $100 tablet addition to the One Laptop Per Child family, newly launched at CES 2012, is much thicker than the concept tablet, which they showed in 2009. Plus, it’s missing the ring!
The original XO-3 concept, featuring a slimmer design and that lovely ring.
See the earlier information on this blog here: Marvell ARMADA with sun readable and unbreakable Pixel Qi screen, and target [mass] manufacturing cost of $75 [Nov 4, 2010 – July 20, 2011]
“They’re still the ultimate goal,” says Yves Béhar, founder of fuseproject and OLPC Chief Designer. The key component that enables the thinness of the concept tablet is flexible color e-paper, and that has been slow to come to market. When it does, the OLPC team anticipates that the robustness and low power consumption will make for an ideal very thin and lightweight tablet.
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Testing and getting back reports of usage on the ground is a core part of the OLPC design process. From their previous experience, they knew localization would be key for this product. For instance, one of the benefits of a tablet form factor is that keyboards and other interfaces are entirely done in software, so it’s easy to swap them out for different languages and milieus. Easier than doing it in hardware, anyway.
There is localization in the hardware as well. This is localization not for language but for the infrastructural conditions of the places where the tablets will be used. Every XO-3 comes with a removable cover. “The cover is the multiple personality side of the tablet,” says Béhar. They can be simple passive protection, but depending on the needs of a particular locale, other capabilities can be built in.
For example, one version of the cover comes with a solar panel on the inside along with a thin battery. When you are in school, using the machine, you can leave the cover out in the sun to power the battery. When you put the cover back over the tablet, the battery connects and recharges the machine. Béhar says they are also working on a version of the cover with antenna that will enable the tablet to communicate with satellites. There are more accessories to come. “We learned a lot with the original OLPC XO,” says Béhar.
Marvell and One Laptop per Child Unveil the XO 3.0 Tablet at CES
Also: The first Marvell ARMADA powered XO 1.75 laptop will begin shipping in March to school children in Uruguay and Nicaragua [Marvell press release, Jan 8, 2012]
Marvell (Nasdaq: MRVL), a worldwide leader in integrated silicon solutions, and One Laptop per Child, a non-profit organization whose mission is to help every child in the world gain access to a modern education, demonstrated a fully functional version of the much-anticipated XO 3.0 – a low-cost, low-power, rugged tablet computer designed for classrooms around the globe – at the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show.
“We’re proud to introduce the XO 3.0 tablet, showcasing the design, durability and performance features that make it a natural successor for our current laptops, which have been distributed to more than 2.4 million children in 42 countries and in 25 languages,” said Edward McNierney, Chief Technology Officer of One Laptop per Child. “The XO 3.0 builds on many of the technology breakthroughs we made with the XO 1.75, including the use of the Marvell® ARMADA® PXA618 processor, resulting in a significant decrease in power consumption–a critical issue for students in the developing world.”
“Marvell is committed to improving education–and the human condition–around the world through innovative technology for Smartphones, tablets and a myriad of new cloud-delivered services. Partnering with One Laptop Per Child is one way we can deliver a revolution where it matters most–to benefit children in some of the poorest places on the planet,” said Tom Hayes, Vice President of Corporate Marketing at Marvell Semiconductor, Inc. and a member of the OLPC advisory board. “Marvell has been with One Laptop per Child from the start and we’re doing whatever it takes to help the organization realize its mission of providing meaningful educational opportunities to the 500 million school-aged children around the world.”
Marvell and One Laptop per Child also announced today that the XO 1.75 laptop will begin shipping to customers in March 2012. Over 75,000 units of the XO 1.75 have already been ordered by OLPC projects in Uruguay and Nicaragua. The XO 1.75 uses the Marvell ARM-based ARMADA PXA618 SOC processor, which compared to the earlier XO 1.5, maintains performance while using only half the power. The XO 1.75 features a sunlight-readable screen and all the other features and design characteristics of the two previous versions of the XO laptop.
The XO 3.0 tablet will also feature the Marvell ARMADA PXA618 SOC processor and Avastar Wi-Fi SOC. Other features include:
- Unique charging circuitry; the XO 3.0 is the only tablet that can be charged directly by solar panels [see that above as built into the internal side of the protecting cover], hand cranks and other alternative power sources
- Standard or [a somewhat more expensive] Pixel Qi sunlight-readable display
- Android and Linux operating system support
A First Look at the new XO 3.0 tablet from One Laptop Per Child [Jan 10, 2012]
A Look At OLPC’s XO 3.0 Tablet’s Solar And Kinetic Chargers [Forbes, Jan 8, 2012]
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Due to the simplicity of the model, McNierney expects to see a lot of interest in the solar cover. Since the panel produces 4 watts of energy and the tablet uses 2 watts, one hour of solar charging should enable 2 hours of tablet run-time.
The hand crank charger is more experimental. Like the solar cover, it is separate from the core tablet but connects via a port. It also hearkens back to the first concept designs for OLPC which had built-in hand cranks on their sides. That feature was eventually dropped for structural weakness reasons.
That history may make OLPC customers leery of the new hand cranks. McNierney acknowledged that most customers may bypass the hand cranks but he insisted they are usable. (Six minutes of hand-cranking should produce an hour of run-time.) To test the feature, the organization took out the tablet batteries to see whether the devices could run just by hand crank. The test worked, said McNierney. “If something can generate DC power, we can use it,” he added.
OLPC isn’t specifying which energy source customers need to use. McNierney pointed out that different countries will have their own preferences, based on culture, climate or other factors.
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This effort goes back quite a time: Marvell ARMADA with sun readable and unbreakable Pixel Qi screen, and target [mass] manufacturing cost of $75 [a collection of information on this blog, Nov 4, 2010 – July 20, 2011]
One Laptop Gets $5.6M Grant From Marvell to Develop Next Generation Tablet Computer [Xconomy, Oct 4, 2010] [see that as built into the internal side of the protecting cover]
The One Laptop per Child Foundation and Santa Clara, CA-based semiconductor maker Marvell have cemented a partnership announced last spring, with Marvell agreeing to provide OLPC with $5.6 million to fund development of its next generation tablet computer, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte tells me. Negroponte says the deal, signed in the past week or so but not previously announced, runs through 2011.
“Their money is a grant to the OLPC Foundation to develop a tablet or tablets based on their chip,” he says. “They’re going to put the whole system on a chip.”
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– One Laptop per Child and Marvell Join Forces to Redefine Tablet Computing for Students Around the World [Marvell press release, May 27, 2010]
– Marvell Joins ‘One Laptop Per Child’ Initiative [Marvell press release, May 8, 2006]
OLPC XO-1.75 Costs $185 and Starts Shipping in March [OLPC News, Jan 7, 2012]
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With regard to the price I confirmed with OLPC Association’s CFO Bob Hacker that the XO-1.75’s list price will be $185. As with the XO-1 and XO-1.5 the exact price depends on a number of variables such as the specific hardware configuration (RAM and NAND flash for mass storage) and other details.
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An interesting detail here is that it seems like Uruguay decided to go for 8GB of NAND flash for mass storage while Nicaragua opted for 4GB.
XO-1.75, XO-3, Nell? – What Will OLPC Show at CES 2012 Next Week? [OLPC News, Jan 8, 2012]
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The XO-1.75 looks identical to the XO-1 and XO-1.5 from the outside yet its hardware guts are quite different as OLPC switched from an x86 architecture to an ARM platform. I had previously expressed doubts whether this move would really led to a much improved battery life. However reading an e-mail that Richard Smith (OLPC Foundation’s Director of Embedded Engineering) sent out in November it seems like my guesstimates where quite off as he mentions feeling…
“…safe in saying that regardless of what you do on the 1.75 you are going to get 3.5 hours of battery life. Period.”
Additionally he wrote:
An interesting data point is that the 1.75 is the first laptop of the XO series that has ran 100% from a solar panel for an extended period. During my solar testing I often swap in different batteries. The 1.75 can consistently survive battery removal under moderate solar conditions when connected to the OLPC 10W solar panel.
Aside of these promising power characteristics the XO-1.75 also includes a three-axis accelerometer which people like Bert Freudenberg and Saadia Husain Baloch have already used for some cool things such as this little eToys project or an “etch-a-sketch” program in Turtle Art.
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XO-1.75 [wiki page on laptop.org, Dec 12, 2011]
The XO-1.75 laptop is a refresh of the XO-1 and XO-1.5 laptops. In our continued effort to maintain a low price point, OLPC is again refreshing the hardware to take advantage of the latest component technologies. This design, while separate from the XO-3 tablet effort, uses the same very low power electrical design. It continues to use the same industrial design and batteries as XO-1. The design goal is to provide an overall update of the system within the same industrial design and external appearance. Overall, the target was to greatly improve the power consumption while reducing the purchase cost.
XO-1.75 machines will ship with a new software release based on Fedora 14, including both Sugar and GNOMEsoftware.
XO 1.75 C1 [wiki page on laptop.org, Dec 5, 2011]
XO-1.75 Laptop C test model 1, also known as C1.
The C1 are the last prototypes of the XO-1.75 built. Electrically, these are very similar to the B1 prototypes. A small number were made in September, 2011, for final testing.
These are the first XO-1.75 laptops marked as such. XO-1 laptops have a smooth hinge cover, and XO-1.5 laptops have three small raised dots inline on each side of the hinge cover. XO-1.75 laptops have seven small raised dots on the hinge cover, arranged in two rows.
While three version of C1 were built (SKUs 200, 201, and 202), testing out various alternate component suppliers, from a software and functionality point of view all versions should be identical. Unlike the B1 prototypes, all C1 laptops provide SDRAM for the DCON.
Photographs:
If you disassemble the laptop (instructions), you will see:
The XO-3 tablet debuts at CES [the official OLPC blog, Jan 7, 2012]
Our XO-3 prototype is debuting at CES this weekend, and will be shown off next week at the Marvell booth. …
If you are heading to CES, you can stop by and see it yourself! Ping Giulia to set up an appointment, or drop by the Marvell booth. Charbax of olpc.tvwill be on site as always, recording some video and interviews.
The XO-3 will sport a 1024×768 Pixel Qi screen, half-gig of RAM, and a Marvell Armada PXA618 chip. Some of the soft cover designs proposed so far include a built-in solar panel. More updates coming over the next week; for now, here is our CES press release.
The XO-3 is still planned to enter production at the end of this year.
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[debuting at CES >>>] The $100 OLPC Tablet Is Really Real [Gizmodo, Jan 7, 2012]
Building on its success with laptops designed for developing countries, the One Laptop Per Child project is set to unveil a long-awaited tablet at CES next week. Here’s what you get for $100.
The OLPC has been kicking around the idea of a super-affordable tablet for over a year. Originally known as the XO-3, but now dubbed the XO 3.0, the tablet will feature an 8-inch 1024×768 screen with some models also offering a PixelQi 3qi display that mimics E-paper. A Marvell Armada PXA618 chip and 512MB of RAM reside in the tablet’s ruggedized shell and will run either Linux Sugar or Android OS.
With a bare-bones feature set, the OLPC tablet should cost about $100 per unit—up from the original estimated price of $75, but still way cheaper than virtually any other tablet on the market.
The coolest feature that the XO 3.0 can be powered by hand-cranking—to the tune of 10 minutes of run time for every minute of work. Why isn’t this available on, well, everything? I’d gladly spin a handle for a few minutes if it meant I wouldn’t have to beg for outlet time at coffee shops, carry spare chargers, and constantly dread the “low battery” notification. [Electronista]
XO 3 A1 [wiki page on laptop.org, Dec 12, 2011]
XO-3 Tablet Alpha test model, also known as A-test or A1.
The A1 was the first prototype of the XO-3built. The bring up happened in early December 2011.The number of boards obtained was small, and distribution was limited to demonstrations, hardware testing, and UI development. Much of the software development is being done on XO-1.75 laptops, due to the similarities.
- Bare circuit board, no case or display
- Rev. A motherboard
Photographs:
Please understand that this motherboard is still in the process of slimming down, and despite being less than half the area of an XO-1.75 motherboard, will continue to get smaller in coming months. We also intend to restore an internal SD slot, allowing for storage expansion and repair of motherboards with failed eMMC devices. –wad
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Marvell ARMADA 618 Application Processor
1GHz, 1080p Encode/Decode, 16MP ISP, 45 MTPS 3D, Security Enabled
[Marvell product brief, May 3, 2010]
PRODUCT OVERVIEW
The ARMADA™ 618 processor is Marvell®’s latest application processor targeted for next generation, high-definition (HD)-capable smartphones. Featuring a gigahertz-class CPU, integrated full HD 1080p encode and decode, an integrated ISP capable of 16MP image capture, an integrated audio processing engine for extremely low power audio playback and exceptional high quality sound and advanced 3D graphics, the ARMADA 618 consumes extremely low power, while maintaining high processing performance at attractive price points. This allows manufacturers to deliver high-performing features in lightweight form factors, with the extended battery life that consumers look for in their smartphones.
The ARMADA 618 is based on a 1GHz Marvell-designed ARM v7-compatible CPU offering best-in-class performance. An integrated 3D engine renders 45M triangles-per-second for an immersive gameplay experience, via a complete floating point pipeline and unified vertex and fragment/pixel shading, to generate contrast-rich scenes in high definition resolution and color, ensuring complete compatibility with the most hotly anticipated mobile game titles.
With respect to video, the ARMADA 618 features Marvell’s award-winning Qdeo™ technology with an integrated video accelerator that can seamlessly encode and decode h.264 High Profile 1080p video at 30fps. In addition, the ARMADA 618 incorporates a complete Image Signal Processor which can capture high resolution color pictures as well as stream 1080p video at 30fps. This enables smartphones to access the latest HD content from the web, record and playback HD videos and capture high quality images previously only seen in SLR-class cameras.
The ARMADA 618 offers support for high performance LPDDR memory, a highly flexible display controller capable of four simultaneous displays at up to 2K x 2K resolution and a highly robust security subsystem that includes a secure execution processor. The ARMADA 618 also features support for the next generation of peripheral interfaces, through support for MIPI DSI display, MIPI CSI camera, MIPI HSI and MIPI SLIMbus. Additional peripheral interfaces supported include USB 2.0 HSIC, SD/SDIO/MMC, eMMC, HDMI w/PHY and a standard set of lower bandwidth peripherals. Legacy peripherals such as Parallel LCD and Parallel Camera interfaces are also supported. The ARMADA 618 offers optimized OS support for Linux, Android™, Windows Mobile and Flash® 10, as well as industry standard APIs. Available in both a 12x12mm POP and a 12x12mm Discrete package, ARMADA 618 customers will have one of the broadest, most flexible choices of platform in the industry to create truly innovative and marketable products.
BLOCK DIAGRAM
Fig 1. Marvell ARMADA 618 Application ProcessorAPPLICATIONS
The Marvell ARMADA 618 platform offers customers a development platform for creating ARMADA 618 based smartphones. The platform incorporates the ARMADA 618 processor, the Marvell Avastar™ 88W8787 for 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0 and FM tuner support as well as a Marvell 3G baseband for high speed cellular data and voice access. The platform demonstrates the full suite of Marvell technologies for smartphone applications in a compact form factor that is easy for developers to use with powerful expansion options for adding more platform capabilities.
Social Good Summit : Day 1 : Nicholas Negroponte [Sept 28, 2011]
One Laptop Per Child Redux [Jeff Shear on Miller-McCune, Dec 23, 2011]
Declared dead just two years ago, the plan to provide every child in the developing world with a computer shows signs of life.
The New York Times called it, “The Laptop That Will Save the World,” while the renowned Computer Graphics Laboratoryat Stanford University referred to it as “a monumental feat of engineering and design.”
Dressed up like a toy in a Kermit-the-Frog green and white plastic shell, this durable little computer was the progeny of the nonprofit organization, One Laptop Per Child.
When the laptops went into mass production in November 2007, OLPC’s ambitious plan aimed to place a free computer into the hands of the world’s 1 billion impoverished children. Education is the exit ramp off the endless road of poverty, the organization argues, and because young people naturally take to computers, the idea is to use them as a way to bridge the so-called “digital gap” between the haves and the have-nots. The little laptop is seen as both a virtual classroom and teacher, with playful software designed for self-learning and an Internet connection to the Internet Archive, which has a dedicated OLPC gateway to its 1.6 million book library.
But in 2009, Scrooge came knocking on the organization’s door, accompanied by One Laptop’s own three ghosts: rough economic times, soaring costs, and technical glitches. Tumbling financial markets crippled donations, while its skittish supporters, chiefly philanthropies and foundations, abandoned it for greener pastures. Desperate to stay afloat, it fired half its staff, and cut pay to the 32 who remained.
These days, the company has been reorganizing, rehiring, reinventing, and aggressively making its way into the developing world. As many as 3 million of the nonprofit’s laptops are now in the hands of children and educators in 46 countries spanning 25 different languages. The company has staffed back up to 53 employees, although some are temporary software writers.
And in early 2012, a new super-low cost tablet, the XO-3, will debut, with a promised price-point of $75 for the nonprofit. Significantly, the XO-3 will be available outside OLPC. One Laptop hopes to prod the big manufacturers into using their distribution channels for their own branded versions of the tablet.
This is a big change for OLPC, an acknowledgement that they aren’t the only kid on the cheap-computer block. While iPads, Kindles, and other low-cost computers and tablets are sweeping the market, none of them are designed specifically as educational devices for primary and secondary school students. Intel’s Learning Series does make the Classmate netbook, but even discounted it goes for $505.
How does a computer designed for education differ from one used for education? “A child can do anything to this software and never break it,” explains Walter Bender, a co-founder of OLPC and a former director of the MIT Media Lab that created Sugar, the XO’s user interface. “Why? When you make mistakes you’re learning. When you don’t, you’re being incremental. Yet if penalty is high for making mistakes, you stop taking risks, you stop learning. We try to give kids a safe place to do trial and error, to go out there and do it in a way they can’t screw up.”
OLPC turnaround has reignited its bravado and swagger, stunts included.
Next week, the company plans to drop XO-3 from a helicopter — Santa has gone high tech — into the hands of some the poorest 5-to-8-year-olds in the remotest regions of the world. (Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Liberia are likely candidates ) In a recent interview appearing in New Scientist, the father of OLPC Nicholas Negroponte explained that the idea is to discover how much a child working on his own can learn from a computer with just “modest” intervention. In turn, OLPC will learn from the kids. After two years, trained researchers will return to the site to evaluate its effects.
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Negroponte is recognized as one of the forefathers of the digital revolution. As chairman of MIT’s renown Media Lab, Negroponte announced the birth of the One Laptop Per Child project in January 2005 at the World Economic Forum. He carried around a prototype of a $100 laptop to meetings, and by the time he had packed his bags to fly home, he had collected letters of intent from several national leaders to buy as many as 9 million. That was very good news because the resulting economies of scale lowered costs to OLPC.
Negroponte soon sadly discovered that a letter of intent was a long way from a hard-boiled contract. Manufacturers who saw the original numbers and leapt on board to churn out laptops for $100 reversed themselves when actual orders came in for fewer than 800,000 machines, and their prices doubled.
The price hike hurt Negroponte’s grand design and also scuffed his reputation. He failed to deliver on his out-sized promises. At a well-attended technology conference in 2006, he told his audience his year-old operation — which had yet to begin mass production — would not launch without five to 10 million units in the first run. Further, he predicted that by 2008, OLPC would have 100 million to 200 million computers in place around the world.
Negroponte was both boastful and crotchety, a formula for making enemies. He was rude, too, scoffing at the idea of offering test runs to prospective countries. Speaking before a large audience, he said, “When people say we’d like to do three or four thousand [OLPC laptops] in our country to see how it works. [We say,] ‘Screw you. Go to the back of the line. …’”
And it wasn’t just Negroponte’s attitude that didn’t sit well with partners. A $100 computer selling for more than $200 looked to them like a raw deal. Some donors thought that the high cost of the laptop was eating up money better spent immunizing children from measles and providing mosquito netting to fight off malaria.
Even Miller-McCune piled on with a widely quoted story by Timothy Ogden titled “Computer Error,”which suggested that the downfall OLPC might be a blessing in disguise. Ogden argued that, “If the goal is improving education for children in the developing world, there are plenty of better, and cheaper, alternatives.”
In the world of foundations and philanthropies, charities with donations under seven-figures, view organizations like OLPC as a zero-sum game. A dollar spent here is a dollar unavailable to spend there, a large part of Ogden’s thesis. Holden Karnofsky, co-executive director of GiveWell, which evaluates charities says, “If someone only has $100,000 to donate, they’re not going to buy computers. They’re going to give to a proven global health program.”
Large foundations, however, don’t see giving as a zero-sum game. “They look for programs that work,” says Rob Reich, at the Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford University. “To use a phrase from a different realm, they want to maximize their return on investment.”
And that’s exactly what Negroponte was trying to do as he pulled OLPC out of its 2009 tailspin. That September, he split OLPC into two nonprofits. One was a cutting-edge research foundation based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which he chaired. The other was an association based in Miami and run by Rodrigo Arboleda Halaby, a longtime Negroponte associate and former classmate at MIT.
The business end of OLPC was left to Arboleda, whose mantra is, “OLPC is a mission and not a market.” OLPC has ever been out to make money. The association doesn’t talk about sales; it talks about “deployments.” A high-powered entrepreneur and former trustee of Save the Children, Arboleda made two significant changes to OLPC. First, he focused the association’s energies where it had its earliest and greatest successes: Eighty-percent of OLPC’s first million sales came from Latin America.
Arboleda also looked to Latin America to restaff. He hired Roberto Interiano, a former vice minister of foreign relations for El Salvador, to manage overseas operations. Dr. Antonio Battro, an Argentinian researcher in the field of “neuroeducation”became the association’s chief education officer. It was a good fit; OLPC already used his research, while Battro says, “We believe the computer gives the child access to higher levels of logical thinking.”
Arboleda’s second big move was to take OLPC off life support. “Our original financial model was devoted to donations,” he says. “You can’t go with hat in hand begging.” The association is now a contract-driven enterprise, working chiefly through governments.
And one more thing: the new tablet being introduced early next year aims square at Africa’s sweet spot. Rwanda has already deployed 110,000 OLPC laptops as part of an effort to create an industrial/service-based economyby 2020. Ten years into the program, its Ministry of Education claims nearly universal school enrollment and a dropout rate falling from 47 percent to 25 percent. Arboleda says he is thinking about dubbing 2012 the Year of Africa.
Matt Keller, OLPC’s “global advocate,” and his family will be moving to Addis Abbaba, Ethiopia, where he plans to make the Horn of Africa his base in the next nine months. “What we’re asking ourselves,” says the former legislative director of Common Cause and senior program officer for the U.N.’s World Food Program, “is whether children in non-literate communities with no access to schools can teach themselves to read by using the XO-3.”
A hundred million African children have no access to schools, let alone electric power. The back of the XO-3 tablet is a solar panel used for re-charging.
“The XO-3 is a world in a box that can be accessed by any child anywhere. My chief aim is to reach kids off the grid in remote sub-Saharan Africa,” he says of the project also being backed being backed by the artificial intelligence unit at MIT. “We want kids to be connected to other kids everywhere.
“It’s not a choice between mosquito netting, health and education,” he insists. “It’s not a zero-sum game. When kids are educated, good things happen. A generation of children who learn to think critically, analytically and rationally will change the status quo.”
Happy New Year! Reflections on OLPC in 2011 [the official OLPC blog, Dec 31, 2011]
As we prepare for 2012, here is a quick look back at the past year of OLPC. We distributed our two millionth laptop (now 2.5M), and our largest programs in Latin America (Peru) and Africa (Rwanda) grew steadily. Austria’s Julieta Rudich and Journeyman Pictures produced a fine documentary about Plan Ceibal in Uruguay (the world’s first complete olpcprogram), and Peru provided XOs and compatible robotics kits to all of their urban schools.
In East Africa, we expanded our work with African nations and donors to improve education for children across the continent. We were invited by both the African Union and the UN to open an OLPC office in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Addis is a major hub for African diplomacy, and the support there for our mission has been stunning. We have become a full partner of the East African Community in Tanzania, and our recent country report on Rwandahas driven further interest in the region.
A Rwandan student workshop in KigaliIn the Middle East, we continued working with the Palestinian Authority, Israel and the UN to provide thousands of Palestinian children with XO laptops, integrating them into schools. It took ten months to work the laptops through customs in Gaza. But at a forum in Ramallah in June, teachers from Bethlehem and Gaza showed how OLPC was helping to end isolation and to excite learning for their children. Third grade girls in refugee camps are teaching others and writing computer programs. The testimony of these women to the power of persistence was extraordinary.
In Afghanistan, we founded a regional OLPC Afghanistan office, and briefed General Petraeus on the project. We believe that one laptop per child and connectivity, across the country, will transform this generation and their communities. Today we are working with the Education Ministry to support four thousand children in 10 schools, and are looking into expanding in Herat Province.
On the technical side, we focused on driving down laptop power needs by switching over to ARM chips in the XO-1.75 and upcoming XO-3 tablet. The tablet should be chargable by a solar panel that could serve as its carrying-case. We are studying new waysto help children learn to read, including where there are no schools at all.
In society, the idea that every child should have access to their own computer and to the Web – as a basic part of learning, whatever their family income – continued to spread. In addition to ongoing national programs in Argentina, Portugal, and Venezuela (for secondary students), two full-saturation laptop programs for older students are developing in India – an inexpensive tablet is being distributed to university students, and in Tamil Nadudual-boot laptops from six different manufacturers are being provided to secondary students.
Reaching the least-developed countries in the world remains our goal and our most difficult challenge. While our largest deployments are funded directly by implementing governments, rural successes may be driven by foundations, NGOs, and individual donations. OLPC Rwanda, today one of the largest educational technology projects in Africa and part of a ten-year government plan, was seeded with ten thousand laptops given by Give One, Get Onedonors.
So to our supporters: thank youfor your development, contributions, and collaboration, your feedback from the field, and your encouragement! This is all possible thanks to you.
Happy New Year to all — may 2012 bring you inspiration and discovery. We have some excellent surprises planned for the new year. And we would love to hear your reflections as well — please share stories from your own school projects in 2011.
OLPC’s XO-3 Tablet to Debut at CES [IDG News, Jan 7, 2012]
One Laptop Per Child’s XO-3 tablet is ready to ship after years in the making, and working units will be shown next week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, OLPC founder and chairman Nicholas Negroponte said.
The tablet has an 8-inch screen and will be priced at less than US$100 as originally planned, Negroponte said via e-mail. Like OLPC’s XO-1 laptop, the XO-3 will be offered as an educational tool for children in developing countries. Negroponte declined to say if it will also be sold at retail.
The XO-3 was first announced in late 2009 with availability targeted for early 2012. At the time, skeptics questioned OLPC’s mission, accusing it of losing its educational focusin favor of designing hardware at unachievable price points.
The XO-3’s on-time release will help erase unpleasant memories of the XO-1 project, for which the laptop shipped late and at double the promised $100 price tag.
The XO-3 uses a Marvell chip with an ARM-based CPU running at 1GHz and will run Linux-based software such as Google’s Android or Chrome operating systems. It will be offered with optional technologies, such as a power-saving Pixel Qi screen and a solar charger for the battery.
“[The XO-3] price will be $100 or lower. But this time there are options, so we cannot guarantee the final price,” Negroponte said
The tablet provides about eight to 10 hours of battery life, though some audiences may choose a smaller battery capacity to reduce the purchase price, said Ed McNierney, chief technology officer at OLPC.
The internal batteries can be charged by “just about anything that produces DC power,” he said. The charging options include solar panels or hand cranks, and a study is under way to see if the battery can be detached and the tablet powered directly through a solar cell.
“Our ability to accept erratic, variable, noisy power inputs is extremely important to us, and something no other tablet has even attempted,” McNierney said.
The tablet is also available with a traditional LCD screen. But the optional Pixel Qi display absorbs ambient light to brighten the screen, reducing power consumption and extending battery life.
Eight inches is the right size for the display, McNierney said, because a 9.7-inch display is too big for children to handle, and 7 inches “seems too small to be usable.”
Microsoft’s Windows will not run on the device, only Linux-based OSes, Negroponte said. The nonprofit has abandoned its pursuit of Windows for tablets, even though Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 will work on ARM processors. Negroponte has said the tablet on display at CES will run Google’s Android OS.
OLPC didn’t share further specifics, but the tablet may include a camera and USB ports, according to some design details shared with IDG News Service in July, .
The XO-3 ultimately will replace the XO-1.75 laptops that are currently shipping, Negroponte said.
OLPC is not dependent on a specific manufacturer for the tabletand will work with “whomsoever wants to roll-out the tablet, for whatsoever purpose, at a very large scale,” Negroponte said, adding the objective is to see prices plummet.
As part of a two-year project to study educational development among young children in developing countries, researchers will collect data from XO-3 tablets used by three-to-eight-year-olds in India, Tanzania and Sierra Leone. Software on the tablets will record audio and video and adapt a reading platform to the needs of the children without human intervention. The project will study how children interact with the tablet and will aid in the study of tools for self-learning and critical thinking among children. One goal is to provide basic comprehension and reading, which is important in countries where teacher training is inadequate.
“In the reading experiment, where we ask can a child learn to read on his or her own, we imagine many hours of use per day, as many as six or eight. Frankly, the reading experiment may be the most important thing I have ever done….if it works,” Negroponte said.
The study will be run out of the MIT Media Lab and be conducted in partnership with Tufts University, Newcastle University, and OLPC.
OLPC XO-3 tablet delayed [networkworld, Nov 3, 2010]
OLPC XO-3 Tablet Delayed [IDG News, Nov 3, 2010]
Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of One Laptop Per Child said that the XO-3 tablet computer will debut sometime in February 2011, about 45 days later than originally planned.
Negroponte said that he wants the screen to be flexible so that it is more resistant to breaking, but that it doesn’t need to roll up.
“The issue has been really finding an unbreakable material, which may not be plastic, it may be glass or some flavor of glass,” he said during a video interview at MIT.
At first the XO-3 won’t be branded OLPC, rather made by Marvell, with the actual XO-3 to follow.
The tablet will eventually cost US$75 and during a May 2010 interview, Negroponte said hitting that mark wouldn’t be a problem.
Sitting in his sparse office in the MIT Media Lab, which he founded 25 years ago, Negroponte said that the job of the XO-3 is “pushing where normal market forces wouldn’t otherwise.”
“We’re going to push down on price, we’re going to push on non-breakable, we’re going to push particularly on power because we want to hand crank these things,” he said. “Our characteristics are ones that the market wouldn’t do normally, but that we will bring sooner or prove that can be done.”
Once the XO-3 tablet does debut, it will co-exist “for some time” along with the original laptop.
“It is unclear to us now both in the labs and imagining the future if the haptic version of the tablet keyboard is going to be sufficient to allow you to use it as a general purpose computer,” Negroponte said.
Nick Barber covers general technology news in both text and video for IDG News Service. E-mail him at Nick_Barber@idg.com and follow him on Twitter at @nickjb.
Pixel Qi’s first big name device manufacturing partner is the extremely ambitious ZTE
Latest update: ZTE Light Tablet with Pixel Qi screen [June 3, 2011]
While this is not yet with the anti-glare anti-reflective coating and the reflective mode for touch is not yet implemented in this ZTE sample, this is how the ZTE Light with Pixel Qi might look like, the fully optimized version should be shipping in the third quarter [end of Q3] of this year.
(See also: Pixel Qi solar powered [June 3, 2011] and Shizu Pixel Qi Tablet shown at Computex 2011 [June 3, 2011])
++ Pixel Qi Joins with Shanghai Shizhu Technology to Develop a Family of Multimedia Devices Based on Pixel Qi’s Low-Power, Sunlight-Readable Displays [Oct 9-13, 2011]
Leveraging Pixel Qi’s technology, four tablets will be launched for China’s growing e-reader market, and are being shown at GITEX in Dubai. Combining Pixel Qi’s displays with Shizhu’s design creates an excellent multi-media experience in a slim, lightweight design with extended battery life. Shizhu has a key partnership with Southern Media Group, whose paper publications reach millions of subscribers daily, and whose media set the pace for investigative journalism, popular and gossip content, and online presence in China.
(See also: Content Really Matters for Tablets [Mary Lou Jepsen’s blog, Oct 12, 2011])
Latest update: Pixel Qi launches 10.1″ super thin 1280×800 screen [May 31, 2011]
Here’s a new comparison between Pixel Qi and the iPad followed by Mary Lou Jepsen’s status report on the latest Pixel Qi news, their first showing of the new 1280×800 thinner 10.1″ wide view screen.
[10:20 — 10:25]:
“We think our technology will be the dominant display technology in 5 years.”
[11:17 — 11:41]:
“It’s bit market driven from our customers because we get to exist and to engage some of the largest factories that have ever been made, and for that to work their economics need very high volumes. We need to have customers who really commit to large purchase orders almost before we start to design.”
See also: Mary Lou Jepsen of Pixel Qi at TEDxTaipei [May 9, 2011] (emphasis is mine)
Also watch: John Ryan COO of Pixel Qi and John Watlington Vice President of Hardware Engineering at OLPC
You have to consider, while it has been 23 months ago that I [i.e. Charbax] published my first Pixel Qi interviews from Taiwan (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), (10), (11), (12), (13), (14) while that might sound like a long time, in the display industry, 2 years is peanuts. Things move rather slowly there. Since then, there has been an economic crisis and a sort of re-focus from netbooks to tablets, although netbooks have sold more than 100 million units in 3 years, the display investments are focused on tablets. The display business can be considered to be the worlds biggest non-profit industry, the 5 biggest LCD makers who produce 90% of the worlds LCDs, produce for $120 Billion in screens every year but can only make small profit margins out of that because of the strong competition and the large volumes shipped. Those companies that produce the worlds LCD screens have very high costs, very high risks, little flexibility. Let’s hope Pixel Qi has amply well convinced the big LCD makers like Quanta, CPT, Chi Mei, Samsung, LG, Sharp, Sony, Foxconn, let’s hope that they have all signed with Pixel Qi and that they are all right now in the process of tuning the mass manufacture of millions of these screens for all the worlds upcoming Chrome OS notebooks, ARM Powered Macbooks, Kindle4s, iPad3s, a solution for using the interactive UIs of Android on all the worlds e-readers. It would also be nice to double the battery runtime and improve outdoor readability on all the worlds Smartphones using Pixel Qi.
On Mobile World Congress 2011 the Chinese ZTE Announces Smart Terminal Strategy Aiming At the Middle-to-High-End Markets [Feb 15] (emphasis is mine):
The smart terminal strategy signifies ZTE’s accelerated move to embrace the middle-to-high-end markets, while demonstrating its commitment to offering an entire range of star products in the smart device market. The product portfolio will span from smart personal devices to smart home and business products. Currently very few companies in the industry can offer smart products in all three categories.
…
The latest IDC report shows that ZTE was among the top five in the world in terms of the sales volume of handsets in 2010. According to analysts, ZTE’s previous terminal strategy focusing on middle-to-low-end products obviously no longer fits with the current competition landscape and the company’s own position in the industry.
ZTE, with its dominant presence in the smart terminal arena and deep understanding of smart technologies trends, has been increasing its investment in this field. In the last two years, it has become a mainstream player in the global smart terminals markets with the introduction of star products including the first WM6.5 smartphone, Bluebelt 2, the Blade Android smartphone, and the Light tablet PC. The great performance of the Blade in high-end markets including Europe and Japan has also proved its operational ability in the smart products market.
Smart terminal devices at MWC 2011
ZTE is showcasing an entire range of smart terminal products to the industry at this year’s Mobile World Congress, including the Skate Android smartphone with its 4.3-inch super-large screen, the Amigo Android slide-cover phone specifically designed for young and fashionable users who like social networking; the Blade Android smartphone and the Brew MP handset, the F952, which is based on the WAC (Wholesale Applications Community) standard, as well as the Rugged Blade which incorporates “three proof” (dustproof, waterproof, and shockproof) functionality.
ZTE also showcased the Light series tablet PCs – including the 7 inch Light which is popular in Europe, Australia, and Russia, the Light 2 which will be the first tablet that uses the Pixel Qi’s sunlight-readable liquid crystal screen and DOLBY sound system technology, and the Light 10-inch, which features a faster processor, supports Android 3.0 and will be launched in Q3 2011.
In addition, with the Internet TV Box, ZTE is able to integrate TV as a consumer electronics product for home use into the camp of smart terminal products as it uses multiple Internet access modes including 3G, HSPA+ and WiFi to make it a novel integrated terminal combining Web surfing, HD movies, video calls, gaming, and DLNA at the same time.
Latest update: Pixel Qi launches new displays at Computex [May 19]
At Computex 2011 we will show two new additions to our family of sunlight-readable low-power displays. Both the new 7″ display (1024×600 resolution) and the new 10″ display (1280×800 resolution) build on Pixel Qi’s award-winning technology delivering excellent rendering of multi-media and e-reader content under any conditions – and at a power savings of up to 80% over conventional LCDs.
Latest update: Pixel Qi takes aim at Android tablets with higher-res 10-inch and 7-inch reflective LCDs (hands-on) [May 31, 2011]
… the team has returned to Computex with the 7-inch (1024 x 600) panel that was teased in December last year and a new higher resolution 10-inch (1280 x 800) panels offering an 80 percent power savings over conventional LCDs, according to Pixel Qi. In fact, the 10-inch panel consumes just 2.7W in color mode or 0.4W in reflective “eReader” mode.
We had the chance to see the new displays up close here at Computex and were immediately struck by the improvement in pixel density on the 10-inch panel. Making the leap to WVGA has been a major boon, as identical images looked sharper and better-defined than on the 1024 x 600 current-gen Pixel Qi display. The brightness on the new screen is lower than on its predecessor, but that’s because the company still hasn’t finalized things — we’re promised significantly better readability with the backlight off in the final product and brighter pictures when it’s on. The 7-incher, originally intended for mass production in the second quarter will now sample in Q3, to be followed by the more pixel-dense 10-inch model, which will hit production in Q4. Scope out the newness in the gallery below or jump past the break for video.
This is extremely good news for Pixel Qi trying to pursue device manufacturers to use its outstanding screen technology for more than a year already. Their press release is quite proud to announce that ZTE introduces 7” Tablet PC with Pixel Qi’s Sunlight Readable Low Power Display [Feb 14] (emphasis is mine):
Leveraging leading edge technologies from both companies, the Light 2 tablet combines the features and performance of a 1GHz processor running the Android operating system with a 7-inch high-resolution Pixel Qi display to offer an excellent multi-media experience in a slim, light weight design with extended battery life.
“We are excited to partner with Pixel Qi to bring their innovative display technology to market,” said Adam Zhang, VP & President of ZTE Mobile Broadband Device. “It brings a new level of performance to our family of tablet PC’s, rendering excellent images under any light conditions.”
“Working with ZTE, a world-leading telecommunication company with a global customer base, provides us with an extraordinary opportunity to address a world-wide market,” added Dr. Mary Lou Jepsen, CEO and founder of Pixel Qi. “We look forward to a long-lasting partnership.”
The display is manufactured in a Pixel Qi partnership with CPT (Chunghwa Picture Tubes Ltd.). Based in Taoyuan, Taiwan, CPT manufactures nearly 40 million displays per month and is the #2 manufacturer of small and middle sized LCDs in the world. [See more on that in my post Pixel Qi and CPT alliance for sunlight readability [Dec 22, 2010]]
The ZTE Light 2 tablet PC features a 12.6mm super slim design, Android 2.2, a hi-speed 1GHz processor and 4GB of memory. The 7-inch low-power Pixel Qi display has multi-touch capacitive touch screen and a screen resolution of 1024×600 pixels delivering a pixel density of 170 pixels per inch.
Pixel Qi’s award-winning 3Qi display technology renders quality full-color images plus full-motion video and, in high ambient light levels, its reflective mode contributes to the image allowing the backlight to be turned down or off. This delivers significant power savings and a very comfortable reading experience.
Update: Why Amazon Will Enter the Overcrowded Tablet Market [May 23, 2011] (emphasis is mine)
In a recent interview with Consumer Reports, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was asked if Amazon would make a tablet. He coyly responded with the comment “stay tuned” but gave no other specific details about a product of this nature. He basically confirmed, however, that something like this was in the works. He also pointed out that if Amazon made a tablet device, the reading experience would be at the center of its design.
My sources in Taipei say that the actual product is set to debut in time for the holidays and that the device will use a display similar to the one in the Nook and the Galaxy Tab. They also tell me that the original RFQ wanted a screen that could switch between an easy-to-read black and white E Ink-like display and a color LCD, but that this type of screen, which is already in the works by at least two vendors, will not be ready for the market until at least 2012 or early 2013. So Amazon was forced to use a 10-inch screen that was available now, which is LCD-based. It will also reportedly have a 7-inch model. And I am hearing it will sport a new version of Nvidia’s Tegra quad-core chip and will be using Android as its OS.
So at least quantity wise there are still problems with PixelQi manufacturing.
More information on this update:
Amazon Tablet PC with E Ink Holdings’ Hydis FFS screen [May 3, 2011]
The new 7” display has already been shown at CES 2011. See the detailed First look at Pixel Qi’s 7 inch display, new netbooks, tablets [Jan 6] report from Liliputing and the video from them:
Pixel Qi’s displays can function both as full color LCD screens and as high contrast, grayscale displays which are viewable without a backlight by relying on ambient lighting — much like an E Ink display. The difference is that while E Ink screens have slow refresh rates, a Pixel Qi display can handle full motion video whether the screen is in color or grayscale mode. The only difference is whether the backlight is on or off.
Turning off the backlight not only makes a netbook, tablet, or other device with a Pixel Qi screen readable in direct sunlight — it also drastically reduces the amount of power used by the display — which is often one of the most power-hungry components of a computer.
The new, smaller display has the same 1024 x 600 pixel resolution as the 10 inch model. Pixel Qi has also improved the viewing angles — although they’re still not great. With the backlight off, you can view the screen from pretty wide angles. But in full color mode, the colors start to wash out pretty quickly when you view the screen from the side, which is a bigger problem with tablets than netbooks.
And here is a report from the press conference on ZTE Looking to Break Into High-end in 2011 With Smartphone, Tablet, & STB Selection [MWC] [Feb 14] (emphasis is mine):
I attended ZTE’s press conference – it wasn’t the most popular at this event, of course. But they’ve done exceptionally well with their smartphone push in 2010 and are looking to up the stakes in 2011. They will do this with a selection of new smartphones and tablets geared toward the high-end.
….
ZTE’s campaign plans becoming somewhat clear from their companion press release ZTE Unveils Skate Smart Phone at GSMA Mobile World Congress [Feb 15] (emphasis is mine):
Inspired by the skateboard, the ZTE Skate is fashionably thin and lightweight at only 120g, featuring a large 4.3-inch screen to provide an optimal web surfing experience to consumers. It uses the Android 2.3 operating system, an 800MHz processor and the Adreno 200 graphics processing unit (GPU) to support the widescreen, high-definition display. In addition, the ZTE Skate also incorporates a 5MP camera, multimedia Bluetooth extension, A-GPS capability, hardware compass, and G-sensor.
The open Android operating system ensures that Skate can run an extensive range of apps, meeting not only the in-depth customization needs of operators, but also providing a user-friendly UI, and convenient and powerful multimedia features. Skate supports GSM/GPRS/EDGE at 900/1800/1900MHz and HSDPA/UMTS at 900/2100MHz, as well as WiFi internet access.
The ZTE Skate is expected to be available from May 2011 in markets worldwide. The smart phone launch also kicks off ZTE’s “Light Your Smart World” smart product strategy.
…
An IDC report shows that ZTE has become one of the world’s top five handset makers – in 2010 the company’s global shipment of handsets reached 60 million units and terminal products over 90 million units. Signature models such as the ZTE Blade and ZTE Light became bestsellers across multiple markets, achieving outstanding sales records in more than 30 countries including Europe and Japan, within a very short period of time. The ZTE Blade was also frequently referred to as the “Most Valuable Smartphone” by media in these markets.
Pretty impressive numbers which – also given ZTE’s very close releationship with the operators – is giving a pretty good chance that the Pixel Qi based tablet will become a bestseller quite soon.
ZTE has outstanding position and extraordinary market aspirations which could benefit Pixel Qi’s long unfulfilled aspirations as well . This could be best understood from the following press releases and reports:
China’s ZTE aims for top 3 in telecom gear [Reuters, Feb 14] (emphasis is mine):
It would be a major move for ZTE, which is smaller than its better-known Chinese counterpart Huawei, and holds roughly 5 percent market share in wireless gear, according to Bernstein Research.
“We want to be in the top three in terms of revenues and market share,” said Xu Ming, vice-president of wireless services in an interview at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Founded in 1985 in the southeastern Chinese city of Shenzhen, ZTE earned about half of its revenues outside China last year by selling both handsets and fixed and wireless network gear.
It benefits from a low-cost base like Huawei, but its margins are lower because of its lack of scale in many business lines, according to analysts.
…
ZTE Records RMB100 Billion [US$15.2B] Contract Sales in 2010 [Feb 15]:
The fastest-growing vendor in the global telecom sector
14 February 2011, Shenzhen – ZTE Corporation (“ZTE”) (H share stock code: 0763.HK / A share stock code: 000063.SZ), a leading global provider of telecommunications equipment and network solutions, today announced that in 2010 it secured contract sales worth up to RMB100 billion and a growth rate of 26%, making ZTE the fastest-growing vendor in the global telecom sector.
ZTE made this milestone achievement despite the current economic turmoil. The global market and domestic market in China both experienced a deterioration in 2010, with an annual decline in telecom investment in each market by 3% and 14% respectively.
According to a Frost & Sullivan report, “Insights on 2010 Market Performance”, ZTE has the highest compound annual growth rate (CAGR) among the top vendors in the global market. It recorded a CAGR of 28.01% between 2008-2010 and 37.48% between 2006-2010.
ZTE has achieved 29% growth of its contract sales in overseas markets especially in Europe and North America. A growing number of leading players such as France Telecom, América Móvil, MTN and Softbank embark on co-operation with ZTE and appreciate the firm’s commitment to excellent delivery. ZTE’s terminal products — Blade, Racer and Light — were sold out in the European market for the first time, highlighting the company’s strong brand reputation.
The 3G investment in China market slowed compared with the peak of 2009, and fell from RMB 160 billion in 2009 to RMB 122 billion in 2010. However, tri-network integration boosted the investment in fixed networks which enabled ZTE to achieve 22% growth in the domestic market.
Stabilization in its market share of wireless product s and focus on the 3G terminal market will consolidate ZTE’s market position and guarantee its steady and sustainable growth in the future.
ZTE Announces Preliminary Financial Results for 2010 [Jan 28] (emphasis is mine):
(Hong Kong, 27 Jan 2011) – ZTE Corporation (“ZTE” or the “Group”) (H share stock code: 0763.HK / A share stock code: 000063.SZ) today announced its 2010 Preliminary Financial Results.
Applying PRC ASBEs, during the year under review, the Group’s revenue from principal operations was approximately RMB70,332 million [US$10.7B], representing an increase of 16.69% compared to 2009. Net profit attributable to shareholders of the company was RMB3,254 million, representing an increase of 32.39% against 2009 and earnings per share amounted to RMB 1.18. The increase in net profit was mainly attributable to Group sales growth and the recognition of investment income from the listing of one of the company’s associates, Nationz Technologies Inc. by way of an initial public offering.
As of 31 December 2010, the total assets of the Group increased by 20.40% to RMB 82,287 million compared to the end of the previous year; Shareholders’ equity attribute to the owners of the company increased by 37.28% to RMB 23,097 million compared to the end of the previous year, which was mainly attributable to an increase in retained profits during 2010 and the growth in share capital and capital reserves following the company’s placing of new H shares in January 2010 and the exercise of the company’s A share Warrants in February 2010.
ZTE says 2010 net profit up 32 pct on better sales [Reuters, Jan 30] (emphasis is mine):
ZTE 2010 net profit 3.25 bln yuan vs 3.1 bln yuan f’cast
* After extraordinary items, net profit down to 2.8 bln yuan (Adds details, background, analyst quote)
HONG KONG Jan 27 (Reuters) – ZTE Corp (0763.HK)(000063.SZ), China’s No. 2 telecoms equipment maker, reported a better-than-expected 32.4 percent rise in 2010 net profit on Thursday, helped by improving demand for infrastructure projects.
ZTE said it expects to make a net profit of 3.25 billion yuan [US$0.5B] for the full year 2010, better than expectations for a 3.1 billion yuan net profit, according to a poll of 21 analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
The company made a net profit of 2.46 billion yuan in 2009, it said in a statement posted on the Hong Kong stock exchange. It also had to take a one-time extraordinary item that lowered its net profit to 2.8 bln yuan, but did not give any further details.
“The bottom line results look fairly positive,” said Alen Lin, an analyst with BNP Paribas in Hong Kong. “Looking at the revenue figures, it’s likely that India has already contributing to the company’s numbers.”
New Delhi banned Chinese telecoms equipment on security concerns for most of last year and only allowed sales to resume in September, hitting revenues at ZTE and its bigger rival Huawei Technologies [HWT.UL].
Together the two companies grew up selling equipment to the Chinese mobile market but have increasingly become formidable players on the world stage scoring major contracts in Europe and some developing countries.
In the United States, however, there has has been opposition from some factions that have raised concern about the security threats posed by a Chinese company selling telecoms equipment to U.S. operators.
“The U.S. has never counted much for ZTE, and I think this will likely remain the case for at least this year,” said Lin at BNP Paribas. (Reporting by Kelvin Soh; Editing by Hans Peters)
Pixel Qi and CPT alliance for sunlight readability
Could this alliance produce a screen which consumes only 0.5 watts in mono mode with backlight switched off and 1.25 watts in color, half of Pixel Qi’s current 2.5 watts, when the backlight switched on? Moreover a screen which is sunlight readable in both modes? We will find out at the CES 2011 exhibition in Las Vegas in early January 2011.
Follow-up: Pixel Qi’s first big name device manufacturing partner is the extremely ambitious ZTE [Feb 15] and the screen for it is manufactured by CPT
Latest updates:
1. Pixel Qi launches new displays at Computex [May 19, 2011]
At Computex 2011 we will show two new additions to our family of sunlight-readable low-power displays. Both the new 7″ display (1024×600 resolution) and the new 10″ display (1280×800 resolution) build on Pixel Qi’s award-winning technology delivering excellent rendering of multi-media and e-reader content under any conditions – and at a power savings of up to 80% over conventional LCDs.
2. CPT expects input of glass substrates for small- to medium-sized panels to exceed 50% of total input in July [May 27, 2011] (emphasis is mine)
Taiwan-based TFT-LCD panel maker Chunghwa Picture Tubes (CPT) has received increasing orders for small- to medium-sized panels from Samsung Electronics, white-box handset vendors and vendors of tablet PCs, and expects input of glass substrates to make such panels to exceed 50% of total input of glass substrates in July, according to the company.
CPT shipped 350 million small- to medium-sized panels in 2010, 139.1 million panels in January-April 2011, and is expected to see 2011 shipments grow by about 40% from 2010, according to industry sources.
Currently, CPT has a 6G plant with a monthly production capacity equivalent to an input of 110,000 glass substrates, two 4.5G plants each with that of 90,000 substrates and a 4G plant with that of 70,000-75,000 substrates.
In addition to TFT-LCD panels, CPT has stepped into production of touch panels through making touch sensors at domestic plants and then delivering them for production of touch panel modules at its plant in Fuzhou, southeastern China, with production of such modules accounting for 10% of total revenues currently. CPT is setting up integrated production lines of touch panels at the Fuzhou plant, and hopes that touch panel production can make it become the largest Taiwan-based maker of small- to medium-sized panels.
3. CPT looks to strong tablet PC panel shipments starting 3Q11 [June 2, 2011]
Chung Picture Tubes (CPT) is expected to see its shipments of 7- and 10.1-inch flat panels for tablet PC applications increase substantially starting the third quarter as the company’s panels have entered design-in for more than 20 tablet PCs to be launched by PC vendors soon, according to market sources.
CPT has stepped into production of touch panels in order to provide a total panel solution for tablet PCs and therefore win more orders, the sources said. Other panel suppliers that also adopt a similar strategy include Chimei Innolux (CMI) and HannStar Display.
CPT now produces 1-1.5 million panel modules for tablet PCs, the sources indicated. The company is also outsourcing tablet panel production to meet customer demand.
Only Apple and Hewlett-Packard (HP) have products featuring a 9.7-inch panel, while other vendors including China’s white-box players focus on 7- and 10.1-inch models, the sources commented.
Annual demand for tablet PCs is estimated at more than 50 million units, the sources said, adding that Apple currently grabs an almost 60% of the market. The remaining 40%, or 15-20 million tablets, is being shared among the other system vendors.
4. Pixel Qi takes aim at Android tablets with higher-res 10-inch and 7-inch reflective LCDs (hands-on) [May 31, 2011]
… the team has returned to Computex with the 7-inch (1024 x 600) panel that was teased in December last year and a new higher resolution 10-inch (1280 x 800) panels offering an 80 percent power savings over conventional LCDs, according to Pixel Qi. In fact, the 10-inch panel consumes just 2.7W in color mode or 0.4W in reflective “eReader” mode.
We had the chance to see the new displays up close here at Computex and were immediately struck by the improvement in pixel density on the 10-inch panel. Making the leap to WVGA has been a major boon, as identical images looked sharper and better-defined than on the 1024 x 600 current-gen Pixel Qi display. The brightness on the new screen is lower than on its predecessor, but that’s because the company still hasn’t finalized things — we’re promised significantly better readability with the backlight off in the final product and brighter pictures when it’s on. The 7-incher, originally intended for mass production in the second quarter will now sample in Q3, to be followed by the more pixel-dense 10-inch model, which will hit production in Q4. Scope out the newness in the gallery below or jump past the break for video.
Pixel, Qi and CPT announce manufacturing partnership [Dec 21]:
Pixel Qi and CPT (Chunghwa Picture Tubes) announce today their LCD manufacturing partnership. Together the companies are developing three new screens of various sizes which will reach the market at various times in 2011.
This alliance started early last summer when CPT showed a transflective screen of its own design at a Taiwanese trade show. Discussions between the two companies at that show made it apparent that Pixel Qi and CPT should work together to bring stronger product to market faster. A close alliance was formed and the teams have been working together quietly all fall. They have created samples of a 7” 1024×600 screens scheduled for mass production in early Q2 2011, which will be first publically shown at the CES 2011 exhibition in Las Vegas in early January 2011. This represents an expansion of Pixel Qi’s manufacturing strength beyond its first LCD manufacturing partner who has been shipping Pixel Qi’s 10” screen.
CPT commented this afternoon: “We are excited to be working with Pixel Qi to bring their new transflective LCD technology to market. The combination of Chunghwa Picture Tubes expertise in volume LCD manufacturing and Pixel Qi’s innovative low power and sunlight readable display technology promises innovative LCDs for smartphones, tablets and notebooks in 2011.”
CPT, based in Taoyuan, Taiwan, manufactures nearly 40 million screens per month, and is the #2 mid-size LCD manufacturer in the world.
Dr. Belle Fu (傅珮倫 ), vice president of manufacturing at Pixel Qi, said ”This great alliance will bring out a robust sequence of exciting screens during 2011 and it’s an exciting development for the whole industry”
Pixel Qi, based in Taipei, Taiwan (Neihu) and San Bruno, California , is the first fab-less LCD designer in the world and focuses on high-performance, low-power, innovative LCDs. Its technologies have won multiple display-industry and electronics innovation awards. Pixel Qi is a spin-off of One Laptop per Child where this screen technology was initially developed for the $100 laptop; nearly 3 million screens using this new technology have shipped in the last three years.
CPT/Pixel Qi co-develop low-power transmission TFT-LCD panel to start mass production in 2Q11 [Dec 24]
CPT confirmed its cooperation with Pixel Qi but added that there is no specific time-frame for either mass production nor capacity.
…
Regarding its cooperation with Pixel Qi, CPT noted that it is optimistic about reflective panel technology, and hopes launch the panel as soon as possible because of demand for small- to medium-size mobile devices, but CPT added that the Pixel Qi panel currently is still in development.
…
However, Pixel Qi’s technology still requires backlighting and production yields are still a major concern.
CPT small- to medium-size panel shipments exceed 350 million units in 2010 [Jan 7, 2011]
… and the company aims to ship 500 million units in 2011.
CPT has increased its market share in the global small- to medium-size panel market to over 13% from 7.3%.
CPT has announced consolidated revenues of NT$5.25 billion (US$179.37 million) for December, down 8.8% sequentially and 13.4% on year.
…
CPT noted that the company is strategically reforming its production line in order to meet product developments and client demand. The 4.5G (LA1) line resumed production in 2010 and some of the capacity was transformed for the production of capacitive touch sensors. CPT has entered the supply chain of first-tier handset vendors and monthly shipments of touch sensors have reached three million units.
CPT SunLight Viewable Low Power Screen Technology [Nov 5]
Now they have produced another screen technology that is so new that they all haven’t even named it, they just call it: SunLight Viewable Low Power Screen Technology. I’ve actually been holding off on this story for about two weeks trying to get more information on it, like how much power it actually consumes. They claim that it’s less then 1/2 the amount of a normal screen but by looking at it there is no way you’d think this is possible.
Colorful Sunlight Readable Screen at the event Taitronics Show in Taipei. Unfortunately, the company has not yet provided details of technical specifications and has not clearly defined the energy consumption. By comparison, other technology as interesting and promising is Pixel Qi, which consumes only 0.5 watts in mono mode with backlight switched off and 2.5 watts in color, with the backlight switched on.
CPT offers Transflective Screen [June 11]
… it’s a 1366 x 768 resolution transflective panel that its makers claim has a pixel pitch of 0.16305 x 0.16305. CPT further said their display panel has a contrast ratio of 400, reflectivity of 5 and viewing angle of 170/170. The new CPT display panel can boast of a color gamut of 60% MTSC while also having a brightness of 200 nits, all this while being 50 percent more efficient than a regular LCD display. These figures, CPT says translates to a brighter display while having a higher contrast ratio and an easy readability even in bright sunlight conditions.
However, in spite of all the high words, the display still seems to be a notch below that of the Pixel Qi screen and its energy efficiency is not in the same league as that of the former as the Pixel Qi technology is known to be 5 times less power sapping with backlight turned off than the CPT screen that promises to bring down power consumption by only 50 percent. While a 50 percent less power drawn from the battery can’t actually be termed bad but what can be said is there is still scope for development.
But there is one area where CPT scores comprehensively over Pixel Qi and it is in them being already a screen manufacturer. So producing the new transflective screen won’t be much of a problem for CPT. Pixel Qi is however is not as fortunate and latest reports is pointing to them having difficulty on zeroing in on a manufacturer that would give shape to their 3Qi screens. Pixel Qi is a more refined technology but if its products are nowhere in the market, than it comes to a naught. And it is where CPT has a distinct upper hand
See also: Marvell ARMADA with sun readable and unbreakable Pixel Qi screen, and target [mass] manufacturing cost of $75 [Nov 4]
Marvell ARMADA with sun readable and unbreakable Pixel Qi screen, and target [mass] manufacturing cost of $75
Update: OLPC plans solar charging, satellite Internet for XO-3 [July 20, 2011]
The XO-3 will become available early next year or perhaps sooner, and price is still being determined, but it will still be under $100, Negroponte said.
The tablet will also include a camera on top of the screen, placed inside the bezel surrounding the display. A microphone will be placed in the bezel under the screen, and USB 2.0 ports and a headphone jack will be on the sides.
Decisions are still being made about the display, which is holding up development of the device, Negroponte said. OLPC wants a transflective screen, much like the current XO, but with improved richness in e-ink and transmissive modes. OLPC plans to use spin-off Pixel Qi’s hybrid screen …
The original post:
Pixel Qi’s problems with mass manufacturing are well described in the latest June 3. update of Pixel Qi’s first big name device manufacturing partner is the extremely ambitious ZTE [Feb 15, 2011].
This all comes together in a prototype form to be shown sometime in the middle of February 2011 as per OLPC XO-3 Tablet Delayed [Nov 3]. Product delivery would be ready by the end of 2011 in a form suitable for developed countries, then a year later in another form for developing nations of the world. While an advanced cloud client capability based on then latest version of Google’s Android operating system will be perfect for the 1st world countries, the 3d world will get a next generation version of the current XO-1 and XO-1.5 computer from OLPC .
Follow-up: High expectations on Marvell’s opportunities with China Mobile [May 28, 2011]
Update: that plan is going well with the progress as best reported by XO-1.75: cutting through the nonsense [Jan 11, 2011] referring to the corrections by the VP of Hardware Engineering at OLPC to errors in a CES 2011 report, and also comments throughout the blogosphere regarding the absolutely coincidental announcement by Microsoft of their ARM support:
There were several errors in that [CES 2011] news article [with title: OLPC cuts price of XO 1.75 laptop to $165, power by half [Jan 7, 2011]] which I would like to clear up:
- the XO-1.75 will not have an 8.9” screen, but will continue with the sunlight readable 7.5” screen designed by Mary Lou Jepsen (now at Pixel Qi) used in the XO-1 and 1.5.
- the $165 price is fiction (BOM price hasn’t been finalized), but probably not very far from the truth for the non-touchscreen equipped version. Please don’t forget that since we don’t add any profit margin, the laptop price directly depends on the volume ordered.
- the switch to ARM was completely independent of any future support for ARM in Windows. That support was announced this week, while I’ve been pursuing this ARM design for three years, with active development over the last eight months. Furthermore, we are using the Marvell Armada 610, which won’t be supported by Windows (if you believe M$).
- Linux has shipped, and will continue to ship, on EVERY XO produced. You can believe random commenters, or you can believe the person who signs off on every SKU produced.
I’ll also add that a lot of work has gone into software development, including porting Fedora 14 to ARM and adding multi-touch support to the Sugar UI. This has been a long time in the making, and the announcement of Microsoft’s ARM port is a coincidence. Sorry, no riveting conspiracies here.
Some media reports have been implying that mass production will start by mid-year. This is incorrect. It may possibly be that the design is finalised by then, but planning and tooling for mass production and deliveries is quite an endeavour beyond that.
If you want the real information on the XO-1.75, look at the OLPC Wiki page. Right now, they’re up to Alpha test model 2. If you want to view or take part in the development discussion, head over to the devel mailing list (strictly speaking, this list is for software development, but the community are discussing the hardware there too).
Notes [Jan 11, 2011]: On the OLPC Wiki page for the XO-1.75 there is a link to the Announce: OLPC software strategy [July 7, 2010] in which you can find the following crucial statements:
XO-1.75 and beyond
XO-1.75 software development is underway. Today we’re announcing that we’re planning on using Fedora as the base distribution for the XO-1.75. This wasn’t an obvious decision — ARM is not a release architecture in Fedora, and so we’re committing to help out with that port. Our reasons for choosing Fedora even though ARM work is needed were that we don’t want to force our deployments to learn a new distribution and re-write any customizations they’ve written, we want to reuse the packaging work that’s already been done in Fedora for OLPC and Sugar packages, and we want to continue our collaboration with the Fedora community who we’re getting to know and work with well.
[Fedora was chosen more than two years ago and delivered in the very convenient Fedora 10 on SD card [Nov 28, 2008] format. This is why it has such a widespread use in the OLPC community, especially among adults who do not want to use the child focused graphical interface called Sugar but rather a desktop environment on their XOs.]
BACK TO THE ORIGINAL [Nov 4, 2010] POST:
Whatever will be delivered by Windows 7 tablets/slates with Oak Trail Atom SoC in December [Nov 1] or anything else the next XO-3 tablet effort outlined below will be an enormous threat to the current ICT establishment, everybody included (mighty Apple as well).
Two undisputed technology leaders are behind the whole engineering effort: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. for the leading System-on-a-Chip (SoC) capability and Pixel Qi Corporation for the incredible screen.
Follow up: Marvell to capitalize on BRIC market with the Moby tablet [Feb 3, 2011]
Follow-up: Kinoma is now the marvellous software owned by Marvell [Feb 15, 2011]
Update [Jan 6, 2011]: Marvell 100 series tablet [Jan 6, 2011] is giving quite a credibility to the follow-up project described in the rest of our post
[CES 2011] Marvell’s foray into the tablet market sees this rather cute and well designed model, the 100 series. Unlike other tablets that are in the market, this one comes with Android 2.2 (instead of 2.1), while sporting a rather young, all-white design with all the lines in the right places. A microSD memory card slot is there for expansion purposes, and you won’t get multi-touch support on the 10” display which is a bummer, so forget about zooming in or out in Angry Birds. There is 1GB of internal memory inside, while Wi-Fi connectivity is supported although 3G will not be present when it hits the market sometime this year for $199 a pop [with $99 manufacturing cost — see in the below video]. Of course, as with Marvell’s OLPC project, the 100 series will target the educational environment more. It is pretty heavy, but it won’t weigh a ton like most textbooks. Looks hardy enough to stand up to the rigors of restless kids, too! Interestingly enough, being an Android-powered device, it has more than the usual 4 buttons of Home, Menu, Back and Search, but will include the “Up” and “Down” buttons, too.
Update [Jan 10, 2011]: Mobylize Tablet on ABC News: Good to Know [Jan 10, 2011]
Note while watching the video that the LCD screen used in the tablet has wide viewing angle.
Update [Nov 2]: Sehat Sutardja: An Engineering Marvell by IEEE Spectrum [Nov 2, in print Oct 27 but with the title of Marvell Inside] is describing the extremely deep electronic engineering mentality lead by the CEO of Marvell Technology Group Ltd. as the secret recipe for success from the very beginning:
Sehat already had plans for the first product: a better read channel for disk drives. It sounds incredibly specialized and it is, but it’s also one of the drive’s key components. The read channel takes the analog signal coming from the magnetic head as it scans the disk, converts the noisy signal to digital, and puts that information out onto the bus that will take it to the computer. Existing read channels used a bipolar transistor on a complementary-metal-oxide semiconductor substrate (BiCMOS), but Sehat planned to use only CMOS. That way the channels could be manufactured by a chip foundry like the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., so Marvell wouldn’t have to build its own fab. Using CMOS also meant that the device would consume less power. This would, however, present an engineering challenge: Existing CMOS read-channel designs were much slower than BiCMOS.
… they convinced Seagate Technology to take a chance. Ken Burns, an executive at Seagate, told them that the company’s next-generation drive would need a read channel at 240 Mb/s—could Marvell deliver? … They told Burns yes. In less than three months the Marvell team hit the 240-Mb/s mark, and Seagate became Marvell’s first customer. … Today, in terms of units sold, Marvell has about 60 percent of the market for hard drive systems-on-a-chip.
“This little start-up, with one product line, put Texas Instruments out of the read-channel business,” Ohr [an analyst with Gartner] says.
Added later: Winner: Pixel Qi’s Everywhere Display by IEEE Spectrum [Jan 20, 2010] is well describing the innovative screen technology in a way that the leading mind behind, Ms. Mary Lou Jepsen is also well represented. Here is a key excerpt from that:
The Pixel Qi display consumes far less power than traditional LCDs, drawing a peak of about 2.5 watts, of which the backlight accounts for about 2 W, says Jepsen. Turn off that light and slow the refresh rate, and you can maintain a static image—such as the page you’re reading now—with just half a watt. That’s still more power than is needed by electrophoretic displays, the generic term for the kind made by E Ink [and used in most e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle devices]. Electrophoretic screens are bistable, which means that the pixels can maintain a static image powerlessly. But e-paper also requires a higher operating voltage than the Pixel Qi screen, which means that if future e-paper displays offer faster refresh rates, their power advantage will likely wane.
… Pixel Qi has also beat E Ink to color. In the Spectrum conference room, Jepsen cranks the backlight all the way up to show off the color and video playback. The video is perfectly watchable, although it probably wouldn’t be your first choice if movies were the primary application [like with the TV sets]. The colors don’t look as saturated as they would on a glossy cinema display, but at least the blacks in dark scenes are very black. In other words, the Pixel Qi screen offers an excellent compromise for a class of gadgets defined by their low-cost versatility.
READ ALL the details below in order to understand the reality of the – seemingly, believe me just seemingly – bombastic claim in the introduction (… this will be an enormous threat to the current ICT establishment …)!
Here is the video interview accompanying the article referred in the introduction, to start with:
This engineering effort goes back to May with announcement that One Laptop per Child and Marvell Join Forces to Redefine Tablet Computing for Students Around the World [May 27]. The most important details are (emphasis is mine):
The new family of XO tablets will incorporate elements and new capabilities based on feedback from the nearly 2 million children and families around the world who use the current XO laptop. The XO tablet, for example, will require approximately one watt of power to operate (compared to about 5 watts necessary for the current XO laptop). The XO tablet will also feature a multi-lingual soft keyboard with touch feedback, enabling it to serve millions more children who speak virtually any language anywhere in the world.
The device is also decidedly “constructionist” in nature. By design, it combines hardware and software to deliver a platform that will enable educators, students and families around the world to create their own content, and learn to read, write, and create their own education programs and share all of these experiences via a mesh network model. The device will also feature an application to directly access more than 2 million free books available across the Internet.
“While devices like eReaders and current tablets are terrific literary, media and entertainment platforms, they don’t meet the needs of an educational model based on making things, versus just consuming them. Today’s learning environments require robust platforms for computation, content creation and experimentation – and all that at a very low cost,” said Dr. Nicholas Negroponte, Founder and Chairman of One Laptop per Child.
… “Marvell has made a long-term commitment to improving education and inspiring a revolution in the application of technology in the classroom. The Moby tablet platform – and our partnership with OLPC – represents our joint passion and commitment to give students the power to learn, create, connect and collaborate in entirely new ways,” said Weili Dai, Marvell’s Co-founder and Vice President and General Manager of the Consumer and Computing Business Unit. “Marvell’s cutting edge technology – including live content, high quality video (1080p full-HD encode and decode), high performance 3D graphics, Flash 10 Internet and two-way teleconferencing – will fundamentally improve the way students learn by giving them more efficient, relevant – even fun tools to use. …”
Marvell indeed has all the necessary SoC prerequisites and credentials for such a fantastic goal (both technically and market-wise) as described in my post Marvell ARMADA beats Qualcomm Snapdragon, NVIDIA Tegra and Samsung/Apple Hummingbird in the SoC market [again] [Sept 23] (BTW the most popular post on my blog by far).
The details of the original plan were described in OLPC’s Negroponte says XO-3 prototype tablet coming in 2010 [May 27] with an accompanying video interview shown below:
OLPC and Marvell collaboration has since significantly been strengthened as evidenced by (emphasis is mine):
One Laptop Gets $5.6M Grant From Marvell to Develop Next Generation Tablet Computer [Oct 4]
Negroponte says the deal, signed in the past week or so but not previously announced, runs through 2011. “Their money is a grant to the OLPC Foundation to develop a tablet or tablets based on their chip,” he says. “They’re going to put the whole system on a chip.”
… it will form the basis of what might be called an interim step, a tablet developed by Marvell (and also apparently modeled partly on its own Moby tablet for the education market) that is intended for children in the developed world. As such, it won’t be the machine OLPC wants to distribute in developing nations. … The Marvell tablet will also utilize the Android operating system, while the XO 3 will be based on Linux, among other differences, Negroponte says.
“The first one would definitely not have our brand. It’s a First World machine,” Negroponte says. The plans are for Marvell to develop this initial machine, in partnership with OEMs and a partner in education, and release it for sale sometime in 2011, he says.
Negroponte says a follow-on version, based more completely on OLPC’s designs, will hopefully be ready in 2012. “The second one…would have our brand on it, because it will be identified with and for the developing world,” he says.
OLPC’s Negroponte: Tablets must be a ‘constructionist’ medium [Sept 30]
Tablets are all about consumption, said Negroponte. “You could say that Apple makes peripherals for iTunes,” he said. In a developing world and educational environments, you need haptics and ways to make tablets constructive. “You can’t turn these kids into couch potatoes,” he said. “You learn by making.”
Cloud computing won’t fly where OLPC plays. “Clouds are fine for us, but there are no clouds over Ethiopia, Rwanda and Gaza,” he said.
Marvell co-founder talks technology in education, R&D [Oct 7]
On her relationship with Negroponte, Dai said she met him five years ago and they talked about moral causes and technology. Marvell had the mesh networking technology used in the original XO. “The priority was affordable technology for poor countries,” she said. “Nicholas set a bar. In many ways, he invented the e-book, netbook microcosm and form factor. The other piece was to make those devices affordable.”
What’s the OLPC’s role today? Dai said that in many respects the OLPC is a design shop—something Negroponte has noted after laying out plans for the next-generation XO. “OLPC sets a bar and the industry takes it and commercializes it,” she said. “It’s like the old days where Bell Labs would create and others would commercialize it.”
Marvell Delivers Vision of 21st Century Classroom Technology at NBC News’ ‘Education Nation’ Summit [Sept 27]
Marvell to Fund Next Generation Education Apps [Sept 27]
Marvell, one of the world’s largest chipmakers, announced today that it’s launching a competition to recognize and fund the most clever new education apps for classroom tablets. The challenge invites ambitious, intelligent software developers around the world to create apps that transform the way students learn. Three winners will share prize money totaling $100,000, along with access to Marvell’s considerable engineering resources for support and testing.
The $100K Challenge, unveiled at the NBC News’ Education Nation summit, is a part of Marvell’s Mobylize campaign, the company’s long-range commitment to mobilizing technology innovation, speeding education innovation and bringing to students everywhere the inexpensive yet powerful tools they need to learn, connect and collaborate in new ways.
The campaign and the $100K Challenge were inspired by Marvell’s new Moby tablet reference design. The classroom-friendly Moby tablet reference design is a high-performance, low-power device based on Marvell’s ARMADA™ application processor and Google’s Android™ operating system. It’s the platform for which developers enter the $100K Challenge will design their applications – and it’s perfect for the part. It’s equipped with 1080p HD, advanced 3D capabilities and full Flash internet. For developers, the Moby tablet reference design provides far-reaching possibilities. For students, it opens vast horizons, at a price school districts can afford.
Ms. Dai is the only woman co-founder of a major, public semiconductor company in the world, and has helped lead Marvell’s 15 years of growth from start-up to a current market capitalization of $12 Billion.
… Today, Marvell is the third-largest fabless semiconductor company in the world, and ships more than a billion chips per year. Marvell provides two out of every three chips used in storage media critical to the infrastructure of the Information Age; its broad portfolio of leading network and communications solutions and high performance, low-power chips have rapidly become the technology of choice behind a broad range of connected electronics — such as tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices. From a half dozen employees in 1995, Marvell has today more than 5,700 employees on four continents.
“It is my passion to work to bridge my two homelands – China and the U.S. – and try to promote cooperation and economic growth in both powerful nations, particularly in the areas of semiconductor, communications, education and green technologies,” said Weili Dai, Marvell’s Shanghai-born co-founder. “For that reason, I am very proud that the Governor chose to launch his Asia Trade Mission from Marvell’s Silicon Valley campus and then a few days later, visited our Shanghai design center. I am also proud that Shanghai government officials were able to join Governor Schwarzenegger in highlighting the exciting new developments at our Shanghai design center. It is an honor that reflects well on Marvell’s global leadership and growing industry influence.”
…
During his visit, the Governor toured demonstrations of Marvell’s latest communications, computing and consumer technology and presided over the dedication of the expansion plans at the company’s Shanghai Zhangjiang facilities, including the plans for a three-way research consortium between Marvell, China’s prestigious Tsinghua University and the University of California Berkeley. Additionally, Marvell announced its support of the Governor’s Executive Order to promote integration of advanced technologies in early education with a donation of eReaders and tablets to PS7 Middle School, a St. Hope Public School in Sacramento, California, and Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Experimental Primary School in Shanghai, China.
In China, Marvell has operations in Shanghai, Beijing, Hefei and Shenzhen. Marvell’s Japan design center is in Tokyo; its South Korea operations are in Seoul. Marvell has strategic business relationships with the world’s largest telecom, mobile, and consumer electronics manufacturers in the region.
The screen technology in question comes from Pixel Qi as per ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD AND PIXEL QI SIGN CROSS-LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR SCREEN TECHNOLOGY [March 30]. The details here are:
OLPC receives full license to all Pixel Qi “3qi” screen technology, including 70+ patents in process and all current and future IP developed by Pixel Qi for multi-mode screens. Pixel Qi is leading the design of new screens for OLPC’s next-generation XO laptops. The agreement also calls for Pixel Qi to receive full license to the dual-mode (indoor and outdoor) display technology used in the XO.
“A huge barrier to getting computers to mass use in the developing world is limited access to electricity. Pixel Qi is designing new screens for OLPC that will keep laptops going even longer between recharges and excel in long-form reading while providing color and video,” said Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of One Laptop per Child.
… Mary Lou Jepsen, founder and CEO of Pixel Qi, added, “OLPC’s focus on the need for low-cost, low-power devices led me to invent power-efficient LCD screens that are optimized for reading. Commercial tablets, notebook computers and smart phones have precisely the same needs. This is one of the few examples in which cutting-edge computer technology first deployed for developing nations benefits the developed world as well.”
Pixel Qi is actually an almost three years old start-up by Mary Lou Jepsen, former CTO of OLPC. She made a very early commitment to support OLPC further on as described in her post about the Next Generation OLPC Laptop [May 21, 2008]. It contains a HUGELY important remark:
In essence, the future of computing is all about the screens.
She was a very early pioneer of that approach for the XO-1 computer designed by OLPC. Mark Foster, who was the engineering chief there, described her particular contribution (besides her overall influence as CTO) in Mark J. Foster at Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium (Part 1) [October, 2006] as (emphasis is mine):
Another thing that’s really unusual about our machine is the LCD display. Our CTO, in fact, has created something that is really special. What this panel does is unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen reflective color, I’ve seen transflective color, I’ve seen transmissive panels, I’ve never seen anything like this. This panel is truly a reflective monochrome panel. No backlight, you see a 1200X900 dot per inch seven and a half inch LCD. And it’s dense. At 200 DPI, we’re talking very close to laser print quality. Certainly from the original laser printers. It’s really nice.
And then, magically, you turn on the backlight, and you see color. Really unusual, pixel structure, it’s all 100% Mary Lou’s invention, and this is a really neat part of the machine. Completely new text, I’m really delighted to have this component in our box, because it gives all kinds of cool benefits that we can exploit. In particular, it’s inexpensive, straight, but also very low power consumption. And this ability to instantly go between a monochrome, a very high-res monochrome mode with a great reproduction of text or whatever it may be, and immediately flip to color mode when you want to is totally cool. I wish I had brought one with me today, and show you, my apologies that I did not.
But, it’s running, it works, and in fact, just this last week, we did some [xx] on the panel, that doubles it’s reflectivity. We actually measured, and the goal of double that reflectivity worked. So it’s a really neat trick, and again, there’s no other system out there like this. And it’s something that is invention purely of OLPC. Not that someone came and told us. Mary Lou created this, pushed it into the LCD manufacturers and made it real. Really neat stuff.
And Mark Foster is the person to judge that properly since himself has been introduced in the above Stanford EE talk as a true pioneer:
He’s led different projects in portable computing at Apple, at DEC [Digital], and at Zenith. He created the first notebook with Ethernet, which was the Z-Note [introduced on the same date as Windows 3.1, see the Z-Note press release [Apr 6, 1992]]. The first true sub notebook [with 8.5-inch (viewable) black-on-white VGA], which was the Z-lite [see the press release [Nov 16, 1992]]. And the thinnest notebook in the world at the time, which was the Hi-Note Ultra [From Digital].
Indeed, there were a couple of quite innovative ideas put into the XO-1 laptop as has been described by their inventor in A Conversation with Mary Lou Jepsen [Jan 17, 2008]
It defies conventional wisdom to put a display expert in charge of a laptop architecture, but since the cost of the screen in a laptop is more than $100, it was the main barrier of entry to building a low-cost laptop.
What I’ve found coming to this project is that people who design computers don’t know a lot about displays, and in fact by starting with the display and designing the computer kind of backwards, rather than just slapping a display onto a motherboard, we can design a whole new architecture.
The architecture we’ve created is very powerful, not just for low-cost laptops, but for high-end laptops as well.
… If you look at what’s been happening in computers for the past 40 years, it’s been about more power, more megahertz, more MIPS. As a result, we’ve had huge applications and operating systems. Instead, at OLPC we focused on an entirely different kind of solution space. We focused on low power consumption, no hard drive, no moving parts, built-in networking, and sunlight-readable screens.
… we had to design a laptop that was also the infrastructure. It has mesh networking, which is the last mile, 10 miles, 100-mile Internet solution. The solar repeaters and active antennas that we’ve added into the mix cost about $10 a piece and help to relay the Internet. If one laptop in a village is connected to the Internet, they all are.
Yes, it might be just a trickle, a low-bandwidth connection from the Internet to the laptop, but between the laptops is a high-bandwidth connection through the mesh network. We use 802.11s, which is the standard for mesh.
… We use an AMD chipset, the LX-700, which allows you to turn the CPU on and off in a hundredth of a second. It’s not noticeable to the users whether the motherboard is on or off because the moment they hit the keyboard or get a Skype phone call or what have you, the CPU and motherboard are back up and running.
That also allows us to run the mesh at extremely low power: 400 milliwatts, compared with my ThinkPad laptop, which uses approximately 10 watts just to run Wi-Fi.
… We had to get rid of the hard disk, because not only is it the second most expensive component in a laptop after the screen, but it’s also a huge power hog, and the number one cause of hardware failures is hard disk failure. That’s three strikes against it. Instead, we used flash memory, which people are starting to use.
… I should also talk about the low-power display. We did something I’ve been doing for a long time in different kinds of display technology: putting memory directly into the display itself. You can’t do that with amorphous silicon, which is the standard transistor process used in LCD. To keep costs to a minimum, I used a standard process for the screen. But you can add memory in the timing controller. That means the screen can stay on while the rest of the motherboard or the chipset is off.
Why would you want to do that? It turns out that most of the time you’re using a laptop or a desktop, the CPU isn’t really doing much, even while it’s running at multiple hundreds of megahertz. Right now I’m staring at my laptop. Not a single pixel on my screen is moving. What’s the CPU doing on? What’s the motherboard doing on? The way to get to low power—the big secret—is to turn stuff off that you’re not using. But nobody has ever made a laptop with a screen that self-refreshes. You really do have to keep flipping the liquid crystal molecule; they like AC fields. The liquid crystal molecules fall apart in DC. You need to keep only two images in memory for that, and you can keep the screen on all day long.
We also put a tiny ARM core in our Wi-Fi chip. We used the Marvell chip because it’s the only Wi-Fi chip with a tiny ARM core in it, which means Wi-Fi can also stay up and running while the CPU is off.
… I came up with this idea for a sunlight-readable screen by starting with a transflective process, which was used briefly on cellphones but wasn’t very readable inside or outside (it was very dim) and so was dropped from most products. What I did differently was to put color filters over the transmissive part of the pixel only, instead of the mirror part of the pixel, and I used—get this—a colorless color filter over the rest of the pixel as a spacer.
In a transflective display, part of the pixel is reflective and part of it is transmissive. People think of it as kind of the worst of both worlds, so it hasn’t been that popular. Again, these displays are considered dim, high power, and not that readable.
Each big LCD fab had developed a transflective process, so, I thought, why not use this process and then change the pixel layout by putting a little sliver of a color filter (red, green, or blue) over part of each pixel and then changing the bulk layout of the pixel as well? For best compatibility with minimal image-generation systems, I used diagonal stripes of color so that we would get square-root-of-3 resolution in X and Y in color mode, when compared with the black-and-white (grayscale) resolution. You see, each pixel is black-and-white (grayscale) in reflection and shows a single color in transmission (red, green, or blue when the backlight is on). Strictly speaking, therefore, you get one-third the resolution in color. The human visual system isn’t digital, however. It’s analog and biological, and through this pixel layout we get higher perceived resolution—about 800 by 600 in color. You get all this with a low-cost and low-power TTL (transistor-transistor logic) interface that can be used because the true pixel count is so low. I’m just making the pixels do double or triple duty.
Soon after this interview appeared on ACM Queue Mary Lou Jepsen made the announcement that Higher resolution than we thought – the XO laptop screen [May 28, 2008]
The XO screen has been shown to be higher resolution than we thought. Michiel Klompenhouwer from Philips Research says the color resolution is effectively 984×738, even though strictly speaking straight division indicates color resolution of 692×520 (this is 1/3 of 1200×900 our black&white resolution). We have been saying for some time that the resolution is about 800×600, but his new study shows a more exact way of measuring perceived resolution. Michiel presented an analysis of our screen and other display pixel layouts at the Society for Information Display Annual Meeting this week in Los Angeles in a talk entitled “Comparing the Effective Resolution of Various RGB Subpixel Layouts” SID08.
Because of that XO design she became a true ICT industry celebrity which is well expressed by the New Statesman in The NS Profile: Mary Lou Jepsen [April 30, 2009]
The XO is the cheapest, least power-hungry notebook computer ever produced, a device that may eventually prove one of the most important educational tools of its time – and for which last year Time magazine named Jepsen one of the world’s 100 most influential people.
Along the way, her design sparked a mainstream computing revolution. Jepsen’s primary intention was to “innovate at the bottom of the pyramid”, creating a simple computer for educational use in impoverished areas. But it turned out that computer users in industrialised countries also wanted inexpensive, environmentally friendly laptops. The netbook was born. Just two years after the XO was first released, nearly every major PC brand is selling an inexpensive, low-performance mini-laptop, and analysts predict sales will have reached 50 million by the end of the year. “Every time I meet with the CEO of a big laptop company, they tell me they ‘studied’ my design,” Jepsen has said.
While some could argue that her effort had nothing to do with the birth of netbooks (attributed to Asustek alone) the fact is that Taiwanese companies were intrigued by the idea of a low-cost PC from her 2005 and 2006 attempts with different Taiwanese manufacturers to collaborate. As was described by Ministry of Information (Taiwan) article Small Laptop, Big Splash [April 1, 2008]:
In December 2005, Barry Lam, chairman of Quanta Computer, agreed to manufacture the XO-1. Then, in April 2006, a second Taiwan technology group, Chi Mei Optoelectronics, joined at the urging of the conglomerate’s octogenarian founder and philanthropist, Shi Wen-lung.
… the head of the project at Quanta is Dandy Hsu, general manager and vice president of the company’s Educational Product Business Unit and one of two OLPC board members in Taiwan.
Hsu says bringing the XO-1 to mass production took Quanta nearly two years–an eternity by original design manufacturing /original equipment manufacturing (ODM/OEM) standards.
… Obviously, the XO-1 wasn’t a typical laptop project. “Normally, when we design a commercial notebook, we have Microsoft’s Windows or other software that will run on the device,” Hsu explains. Usually hardware engineers design commercial laptops around the requirements of the marketplace’s dominant operating systems (OS) and application program interfaces (API), then use these for testing as the design work proceeds.
Software was not available for the XO-1 because it was being developed simultaneously by OLPC, which oversaw a team of volunteer engineers designing a Linux-based OS for the XO-1 and writing code for its open source application programs.
… Engineers faced other surprises. In March 2006, when the XO-1 motherboards were ready for testing, OLPC held a “country conference,” which was attended by “delegates” from the governments that intended to purchase the machine. The result was a decision to upgrade the XO-1 with a more powerful CPU. This was no minor modification.
“Change the CPU and you’re talking about a completely new machine,” Hsu says.
Then, later in March, came devastating news. Quanta had recently completed the sale of its subsidiary, Quanta Display, and new owner AU Optronics decided not to manufacture the XO-1 screen, the most critical component of the project.
The XO-1 appeared dead. OLPC’s chief technology officer, Mary Lou Jepsen, disappointed and exhausted from more than a year of intense work for OLPC, left Taiwan for home. Hours later, she was near death as well, having gone into adrenal [mellékvese] failure on the flight to Boston.
In April 2006, two weeks after her illness, Jepsen returned to Taiwan and approached the Chi Mei Group, a Tainan-based conglomerate, to ask if it would manufacture the XO-1’s display.
“Mary Lou is one of the heroes of this project–a selfless, beautiful thing,” says Scott Soong of Chi Mei subsidiary Chi Lin Technology. Soong is the other OLPC board member in Taiwan, along with Quanta’s Dandy Hsu.
… By August 2006, Chi Lin Technology had a working prototype of the XO-1’s dual-mode screen. Jepsen says that without Scott Soong, “the display would not exist. He found ways around the seemingly impassable roadblocks during the design and production process.”
“In the concept, the engineering … we did that fairly quickly; then it was tweaking and tweaking and tweaking,” Soong says.
Later, Chi Mei assembled the Taiwan-made display components at its LCD factories in China.
Another Chi Mei contribution is the plastic housing, the fabulously cheerful green and white material that makes the XO-1 so recognizable.
Summing up, Soong says, “I’ll be honest with you. What Chi Mei has done is build a world-class display nearly at cost. This is not just another project for us. Nobody wanted to let this project down. Everybody went above and beyond to ensure success.”
“That is true for Quanta, and that is true for us,” he says. “And true for all of the other partners.”
From this chronology it is quite visible that OLPC XO-1 had ample publicity for notebook manufacturers of Taiwan to pick the idea, but in not so innovative way (they could not do that either because of intellectual property rights protection). Read the local Taiwanese news article of that time High Time for Low-priced Laptops [Nov 17, 2007] to understand the launch time situation for XO, Asus EeePC, and Intel Classmate (the latter also getting the lead from the OLPC idea).
Follow-up: Pixel Qi and CPT alliance for sunlight readability [Dec 22, 2010]
Follow-up: Pixel Qi’s first big name device manufacturing partner is the extremely ambitious ZTE [Feb 15, 2011]
For the even more industry paradigm changing output from Mary Lou Jepsen’s own company, Pixel Qi, read the following posts in her blog (the posts are in backward chronology):
- DIY Pixel Qi screens – available now! [July 1, 2010]
- Computex Update – Pixel Qi [June 2, 2010]
- Pixel Qi receives SID Display of the Year Award! [May 25, 2010]
- Pixel Qi wins top IEEE award! [April 28, 2010]
- Pilots & Production plus a Nomination [Feb 1, 2010]
- CES [Jan 4, 2010]
- Pixel Qi Starting Production [Dec 7, 2009]
- Screens in Office Lighting, Part 2 [Nov 22, 2009]
- Most screens hard to read on bright office light [Nov 21, 2009]
- Pixel Qi Late? [Oct 28, 2009]
- Pixel Qi Screens debuting in Tablets [Oct 17, 2009]
- Comparing the Pixel Qi screen to others [Aug 26, 2009]
- Pixel Qi is Hiring! [July 29, 2009]
- More videos of our new screen [June 4, 2009]
- Josh Quittner’s Blog post [June 4, 2009]
- Charbax posts some videos of our screens [June 2, 2009]
- Short (very short) video of the screen [June 2, 2009]
- answering the blog [June 1, 2009]
- First pictures of Pixel Qi 3qi screen [May 28, 2009]
- Our first screens out of the fab! [May 24, 2009]
- Samples Due Soon [Apr 23, 2009]
- Netbook and Ebook blur lines [March 16, 2009]
- Product Freeze [Feb 2, 2009]
- Thanksgiving Update from Pixel Qi [Nov 29, 2008]
- Pixel Qi is Hiring [June 6, 2008]
- Upcoming Public Appearances [Apr 16, 2008]
- Traveling… [Apr 16, 2008]
- Pixel Qi is One Month Old [on Feb 2, 2008] [Apr 16, 2008]
Experiencing the Cloud 
