We’ve seen a lot of cheap Android tablets come out of Taiwan and China over the past year, but most are burdened with low power processors and cheap plastic resistive touchscreen displays. Charbax at ARMDevices got a chance to check out an upcoming tablet called the Suli SL-7 that will sell for around $250 and which comes with a capacitive glass screen.
The SL-7 also has a 600MHz Rockchip RK2818 CPU, which still isn’t exactly a speed demon, but it should provide better performance than the Rockchip RK2808 which was all the rage a few months ago.
The tablet can handle 720p HD video in MP4 and RMV formats, and in the demo video after the break you can see that it also supports as many as 5 simultaneous touch inputs at once — although there seems to be a bit of lag between the time when the user moves their hand and when the screen reacts. It’s not clear from the video whether that’s a hardware or software issue.
You can find more details and photos at ARMDevices.net.
The issue for Rockchip is, well, Rockchip itself. Their history is in low-power ARM chips for MP3 and PMPs. Only in the last year have they jumped onto the Android tablet bandwagon. I know nothing about optimizing software, but Rockchip has been notorious for their my-way-or-the-highway approach: MP3 and PMP manufacturers in China could always prettify the UI, but the core functionality was all Rockchip. Older Chinese players always had trouble with ID3 tags and album art and that was all Rockchip, not the manufacturers. I’m guessing you tear open any one of these RK2818 tablets and the guts will be near-identical. Same for all the Telechip tablets. These “solution providers” have been the death of the once-vibrant and crazy Chinese marketplace…there’s still a mind-boggling array of choice, but tear them down and you can group them into a much smaller number of reference designs.
That kind of lag is typical for Android. Of course on faster hardware there is less lag, but it’s still there. Compare these tablets to iOS devices (the iPad has fairly decent hardware, but nothing extraordinary) and you’ll see that there is lots of room for optimizing the software. Android has *no* hardware acceleration for the UI and obviously isn’t optimized much. Hell, even a first gen iPhone from 2007 has no lag. It’s all in the software which means it’s fixable.
And to the “tablets are toys” guy: For the majority of casual computer users such tablets do everything they might want to do with a computer. Right now those users often find that even smartphones do most of what they used to use a computer for.
Hey, what’s all the fuzz about that crap? Archos 70 internet tablet costs 280 US$ and has all i want in years! multitouch 7″-LCD, bluetooth, HD video playback etc. Currently the Archos internet tablet 70 is the best buy for the money!
Of course its a toy. Why would anyone be serious about a tablet? If popular tech sites are gonna only report on ‘serious’ tools, nobody would be reading them. If anyone actually thinks that the mass market is out to shop for a ‘need’ then they are seriously deluded. Keep up the good work lili.
The issue is: should the site provide a record of everything manufactured (or sometimes just rumored) or whether the site should focus on what might be useful? I realize that the latter must be a matter of opinion, but readers ought to be able to expect an editorial filter to eliminate junk.
You are worried about screen lag on this piece of junk?
I know people are going to jump all over me for this but I can’t stand this. I don’t think I’ll visit this blog anymore. Like everybody else I really don’t get why this has become a tablet blog. I know that there are a lot of tablets out new and they are small computers which is what this site is supposed to cover. But these computers with Android are dumb toys. There’s nothing that they can do that you can’t do with another computer. And even they can do not even as much. They’re just a new fad for people who chase after gadgets. I’m sorry but these tablets aren’t the next big thing. Their the current dumb thing. Just because they’re there doesn’t mean that you have to put them up on your site. It’s ruining the site because instead of being about compact computing it’s about cheap, popular, toys. The problem isn’t the hardware. I’d love to have a good tablet and like the tablet shape but I can’t afford one of the nice tablets and these cheap tablets could be useful but the software is just terrible. The only people who like Android are people who don’t understand what’s wrong with it. It’s like how everybody except for the people who eat at Tabo Bell know that it’s disgusting. You’ll probably never be able to upgrade to a different version of Android, which doesn’t even matter because you’ll probably never be able to install real software on Android that’s been properly developed, constantly maintained, and stable for years. These are toys. They’re just toys. And you can take your toys seriously but they’re just toys. I’m fine with that, but the problem that you have with this device is that “there seems to be a bit of lag between the time when the user moves their hand and when the screen reacts”. That’s the least of our concerns. I guess if you want to cover tablets then go ahead but if you are going to hold up junky computer after junky computer as if it deserves our notive or money then I don’t need to come back. I guess I’m just one reader, but if you won’t want to lose more readers than maybe you should stop and think about what you’re doing before keeping up this trend.
Hey flyboy this site is like any other tech blog site out there, it’s just that they only covers laptops and tablets. Seriously look at say Engadget, they cover the good and the bad, there just happens to be a crap-load of bad or early tablets available now.
Seriously though with all that whine what are you expecting the site to be covering at the moment. Ok maybe we should be reading about the iPad, as if there is something else to be told about it.. no it’s been out already, good or bad the job here is to inform the public about new devices.. suck it up or leave already.
They’re dumb toys because you can’t do anything with them that you can’d do with a computer?
huh, that’s strange. I was under the impression that the modern cpu/ram combo was Turing complete…
Honestly, these cheap “toys” are a good thing. And coverage of them is good as well. If you don’t want to read it all, it’s not too hard to skip an article.
Android is not the fad. iCrap is the fad. It’ll only take one or two good android tablets and iPad will be yesterday’s news (Actually, I’m pretty sure it became yesterday’s news after all of the fanbois went out and got their iPad, since they’re the only ones who wants one). We’re already seeing it go that way with android phones.
And also, I’ll have you know that you can’t do everything with ANY MOBILE DEVICE (tablet, phone, netbook) that you can do with a powerhose desktop. For that matter, desktops can’t match the processing power of a supercomputer cluster. So what exactly is a toy? I’m willing to bet everything you own is a “toy” compared to something your own military owns, for example.
New and progressing != toy. Android is still in it’s infancy and already surpassing the iPhone. The rate of development is incredible which leaves phone manufactures behind causing the fanbois to cry “fragmentation” because that’s the only problem they can find with android. Android tablets will be better than iPad once Google tackles the problem (honeycomb), rest assured.
I realize that flyboy never says anything about Apple stuff, but he’s either that, or he’s waiting for a good window’s tablet. In which case, we can safely ignore him. Anyone with half a mind knows Windows tablets don’t stand a chance.