Sunday, April 7, 2013

Motorola Lapdock Projects



When discussing possibilities of modding Motorola Lapdock into something more useful than being a cradle for some Atrix or Photon or Bionic, I was quoting that Zealz GK802 stick as more relevant with some small Linux than the whole army of cheaper 802, 808 sticks. GK802's i.MX6 performance is still very questionable though, even when modded with bigger heat sink and displayed on 1366x768 screen of Motorola Lapdock (not on "regular" 1920x1080 screen).

On the other hand, it would be unwise to expect that "big" players could be interested in manufacturing HDMI sticks with their top SoCs inside: Nvidia Tegra 4, Samsung Octo, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800, TI's whatever (OMAP5, if it's not dead already). These chips arguably can support a  Chromium OS or even a decent Ubuntu and/or Windows RT + Direct X 9.0....11.0, so they could be ideal candidates to hook to Motorola Lapdock.

Pity these imaginary high-end sticks exist only as expensive dev boards of limited distribution, if at all.

Then, there's this shown above Unuiga U28 stick reviewed here may present some hope:

SoC – AllWinner A31 quad core Cortex A7 + PowerVR SGX544MP2 GPU
System Memory – 2GB DDR3 RAM
Storage – 8GB NAND Flash + microSD
Connectivity – WiFi 802.11b/g/n
USB – 1x USB 2.0 host port, 2x mini USB ports
Reset button Build in
Video Output – HDMI
Video Codecs – Mpeg1/2/4.H.264,VC-1,Divx,Xvid,RM8/9/10,VP6
Video Container Formats – MKV, TS, TP, M2TS, RM/RMVB, BD-ISO, AVI, MPG, VOB, DAT, ASF, TRP, FLV etc.
Audio Formats – MP3, OGG, WMA, WMAPRO
Dimensions – 97*38*12mm
Weight – ~32g
With a keyboard/remote mouse, it is supposed to cost around $100, and even with very unpolished Android, it has much more promise than GK802. Will it compete with sticks based on Exynos 4412 and RK3166, only time will tell. One thing is clear: FXI can shove their $199 Cotton Candy: TI OMAP4430 chip was good only in 2011.

Meanwhile, first reports on Unuiga U28 hands-on experienes are not so good. However, I'd be advising to have some patience, as for this particular project of using "the most powerful" USB/HDMI stick with Motorola Lapdock unstable and very Chinese Android firmware is quite irrelevant. Just as the whole idea of Android laptop. So, after some thermal sink modding and building some A31 Linux for it U28 stick may turn quite usable. Then, if U28 stick will prove just bad, there's another take in Kimdecent CS868 stick. All in all, there should be no less than a dozen OEMs that will offer an A31 or RK3188 stick of their own very soon. In terms of powering Motorola Lapdock Linux development for them could be quite productive.

A different possibility is getting a laptop with dead screen (but good HDMI output) and transforming it into sort of a dock.


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