Can we interest you in a $10 pocket calculator powered by Android 9?
- Reference: 1677862827
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/03/03/android_pocket_calculator/
- Source link:
Want to feel old? The calculator – not a scientific one, note – is powered by a quad-core Arm chip and runs Android 9, just to provide plain standard calculator functionality. That's what is described in an [1]article on embedded and IoT site CNX Software.
To be fair, this isn't the new price. Writer [2]Li Zexi found it on a secondhand stall and warns:
Now the price of this Android calculator has increased to 159 RMB in the secondary market, I don't recommend you buy it. After all, Allwinner A50's performance can be considered really low in 2023.
That's $23, or over £19, which is nearly the [3]price of a tomato (if you can find one).
The device is branded GHLBD, who don't seem to have an international presence; we can only find Bangladeshi [4]courier and [5]shipbuilding companies, and we suspect it's not them.
[6]
The specifications of the device are actually fairly reasonable. The chip is an [7]A50 [PDF] SoC from [8]cheap and cheerful chipbuilders Allwinner . It's a 1.8GHz quad-core Cortex-A7 with a dual-core Mali-400 GPU, but the calculator makers only bundled 8GB of RAM and 8GB of Flash, so there's a puny 3GB of non-volatile storage free. A calculator with three gigs of storage for only a tenner doesn't strike us as a terrible rip-off, but then again, The Reg FOSS desk is pretty old now.
[9]Linux Mint 21.2 and Cinnamon 5.8 desktop take shape
[10]My God, it's full of tabs: Vivaldi's coolest new features shine on phones and cars
[11]Fedora 38 will still support framebuffer X11 and NIS+
[12]Bringing the IBM Thinkpad 'Butterfly' back to life
In 2012 we reported that Allwinner was [13]selling its single-core A10 SoC for $7 in bulk . By 2015, CNX was [14]reporting that they were selling a $5 quad-core device. Why run Android on it? Well, the core [15]AOSP is free, so doing it this way is cheap: someone else has done the development for you.
The calculator has no launcher, so it's not that easy to load other software, but the device comes with a calendar, a notepad, volume controls and so on. It has a touchscreen, so people have rooted it and side-loaded games on it, as well as [16]Playstation and Playstation Portable emulators .
[17]
Twenty years ago, The Reg reported on [18]Xbox hacker Andrew "Bunnie" Huang and his write-up of a $12 Gongkai [19]phone shocked a lot of people. A cellphone that could be sold, presumably at a profit, for only twelve bucks.
Well, now that kind of money buys a pretty functional Android device. [20]Koomey's Law is marching on . Conventional computers may not get dramatically faster than they are from now on, but they will get cheaper, smaller, and use less and less power. If we want real advances in performance, it has to come from smaller, simpler software, rather than just spending cheap gigahertz on running gigabytes of free bloat… just to implement a calculator. ®
Get our [21]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/03/02/ghlbd-android-calculator-mini-review-an-allwinner-a50-based-android-9-0-calculator/
[2] https://www.cnx-software.com/author/aleksib/
[3] https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/202103552410905/
[4] https://ghlbd.com/?page_id=1167
[5] https://ghl-bd.com/ghl/#aboutus
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZAJ8ErP0uVFFIAvZNVZa9wAAAIA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.allwinnertech.com/uploads/pdf/2018121113524400.pdf
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2014/07/23/allwinner_64_bit_arm_socs/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/02/linux_mint_212/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/02/vivaldi_5_7/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/01/fedora_38_legacy_tech/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/01/ibm_butterfly_repair_upgrade/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/10/product_round_up_arm_mini_computers_the_best_and_the_rest/?page=5
[14] https://www.cnx-software.com/2015/01/08/allwinner-a64-is-a-5-quad-core-64-bit-arm-cortex-a53-soc-for-tablets/
[15] https://source.android.com/
[16] https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Ne4y1W7JP/?spm_id_from=333.788.recommend_more_video.-1&vd_source=1c071942348817818731defc73b0bbff
[17] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZAJ8ErP0uVFFIAvZNVZa9wAAAIA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2003/05/09/banned_xbox_hacking_book_selling/
[19] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3107
[20] https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/11/software_versus_hardware/
[21] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Ok... I have to ask
Why a Calculator needs WiFi?
Just say NO to this POS.
Re: Ok... I have to ask
I know. Wifi, touchscreen, gigabytes of storage… it just doesn’t add up.
Re: it just doesn’t add up.
Perhaps it is slurping up all that lovely WiFi traffic and sending it to Bejing?
Avoid at all costs unless you want to do some PEN testing on an isolated network.
Re: it just doesn’t add up.
Oh, come on, if it can be rooted it's a nice tinker toy.
Re: it just doesn’t add up.
It seems that El Reg has some Chinese agents active tonight. Why else would the posts suggesting 'sending data to china' have downvotes?
Go back to Beijing... Now.
Re: Ok... I have to ask
perhaps so it can report back everything you say to the Chinese government?
Re: Ok... I have to ask
With the landfill Android factories pumping out devices that can be sold for $10, what would justify the effort of somebody designing a board without Wifi?
Re: Ok... I have to ask
Obviously, now that everyone has realised having TikTok on their phones is a security risk and they are removing it from government phones Chinese spies need another way. I guess there are millions of people in China saying things like... "Look, look... he has just multiplied Pi by the diameter of the Earth. He must be calculating trajectories for missiles."
Unfortunately for them, the government ministers they gave the calculators to are just using it to count up the commission they are making on their dodgy deals on PPE and subsidies for their owners.
Sorry... I meant "subsidies for their important British industrial partners".
Re: Ok... I have to ask
Clearly, it doesn't. It also doesn't need Android, but it has that too. My guess: either they had an engineer who was bored and tried putting together some hardware to see what would happen, or they had a bunch of spare parts they wanted to get rid of.
I say that, but some Chinese companies appear to make a business out of combining things that don't really need combining and selling them. I don't know how often this works for them, but I've seen enough examples where I say "Why would anyone need that", and then sometimes later "You know, that could be more useful than it sounded". I try to avoid buying too much cheap junk, so I tend not to buy them anyway, but there are times where I come to the conclusion that some amalgamation of features isn't as daft as it sounded at first.
Re: Ok... I have to ask
It doesn't need Android, but these days as dumb as it might seem, if somebody wanted to make a pretty touchscreen calculator, it's probably much cheaper to build a little board around a generic cheap SoC and give it an entire OS to run...
...than to design any custom silicon and create firmware for it.
"Asok has a basket containing 12 apples, Nish wants 7..."
> Why a Calculator needs WiFi?
So it can look up the supermarket prices for apples and decide if Asok should give Nish seven of them today or whether arbitrage via the international smoothies market would lead to overall better second quarter returns.
"Lucy is on the train from Temple Meads, travelling at 78mph. Susi is standing at the Box Tunnel entrance..."
Ok, this one is trickier, luckily the toaster is also on WiFi.
Re: "Asok has a basket containing 12 apples, Nish wants 7..."
Would you like some toast?
Re: Ok... I have to ask
Who the fuck voted down your question???
Just how many morons read the Reg?
Loads of tomatoes on Sainsburys along with all the other salad food. All normal price too.
Grown in Morocco.
Cheap and cheerful isn't always bad
I have a "free" tablet that I got with a magazine subscription. Given the magazine is sold less than the cover price, and posted directly to me, I'm not sure where money is being made, but one of the incentives was a little tablet.
Ten inch LCD screen, 2GB memory, 16GB Flash with SD card and headphone socket. Runs Android Go edition. It's some sort of Allwinner quad core chip driving it. It isn't particularly fast, but it's perfectly capable of Google Docs for writing stuff, and given that I'm short sighted, the thing is a good size to sit in bed watching Netflix (in the standard resolution, but the screen is 1280x800 or something so anything else would be pointless). Okay, it takes about a minute to get going, but once it's playing it works fine.
So I could definitely see a little "calculator" being an interesting toy, once it's been tweaked to be able to load custom apps. Hmm, small and cheap and has WiFi. Aircrack?
Point of order.
You might have got a $12 phone then, but you probably can't now, this side of the Great Trade Wall. Expect the same thing to happen in other technologies.
Still, I expect to see someone on here in a few months who has built a Beowulf cluster out of Chinese calculators and is using it to power their Stargate.
"If we want real advances in performance, it has to come from smaller, simpler software,"
Imagine - developers encouraged to write tight, efficient code, rather than count on an endless increase in clock cycles and available RAM? Heresy!
It is all a conspiracy by Big Charger!
the device comes with a calendar, a notepad....
Well, if it runs Android and has a touchscreen, why didn't they release it as a cut down Android tablet - and include a calculator app.
My last scientific calculator purchase was a £1 model from Poundland, and perfectly decent it is too. I just did a quick search, and it's still available there at that price.
Options?
That sound fun ... so maybe it can be updated to to Binary, Octal, and Hex math too? That would be a new HP-16C ... mine still works (icon).
And historians might like it if they can do XX * V = C too.