Chinese chip maker Rockchip promised to bring more than 30 tablets to the Consumer Electronics Show, and while I didn’t do a complete tablet count, the Rockchip booth was choc full of tablets and handheld devices including phones and media players.
The big news is that a number of tablets using the company’s latest 1.2 GHz RK2918 processor are running Google Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
These tablets aren’t actually manufactured by Rockchip, but by companies that are using the company’s processors — and some may not even be available to the public in China or other countries with Android 4.0 yet. But Rockchip is demonstrating the fact that they can run Google’s latest operating system, and software updates for many existing tablets should be available soon.
Rockchip has made a name for itself for providing low cost ARM processors which offer decent, but not spectacular performance. Many of the low-cost Chinese tablets that show up in the US have Rockchip processors inside.
From what I could tell, the tablets on display at CES are reasonably responsive — but not as fast as some f the high-end tablets we’ve seen at the show with chips from Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, or NVIDIA. For instance, pinch-to-zoom was buttery smooth in the photo gallery app, but not in the web browser.
Archos uses RockChip in their Arnova range, i think.
In the shop in Hong Kong I visited today about 50% of the rockchip equipped tablets were now running android 4.0. However I found the performance to be quite sluggish to respond. Things moved smoothly, just half a second behind your finger.
Some are starting to come through with the All winner A10 (still an A8) and android 4.0 on a 1.5ghz cpu. These run very nicely.
What are the price ranges of the 10″ tablets?
The 9.7″ Cube gt2 running a 1.2ghz rk2918 with 1gb ram is going for about $1500HKD that’s just under $200USD.Â
It’s got a nice IPS 1024×768 screen, 16gb storage and is almost and exact ipad 1 clone. And it’s running android 4.0
Thanks for the tip. Have to consider between this rockhip or maybe an allwinner like the Onda VI40, which could be smoother.