Hi all, Fred and me plan to buy a Mini210. We have contacted armdevs and we can get a lower price if we order in quantity. For 100pcs, the price can be $249USD instead of $360USD (for a mini210 + 5" display)! The more we will be, the lower the price will be. So I propose to each interested person/company to join us and order with us. In a first step, leave your mail and required quantity in this thread. Thanks
why dont just buy this then http://www.amazon.com/Herotab-C8-Samsung-Capacitive-Multi-touch/dp/B004W... is $186 and it has the same chip with a 7" Capacitive Multi-touch display,
>>why dont just buy this then This is not a devboard.
Good news, the minidevs(armdevs) Support our activities. If you don't want to leave your mail on this forum because of the Privacy and the Spam. You can book the mini210 on their website: http://minidevs.com/mini210order.html At present, only boot it, no need to pay it.
Interesting. As a mainland China business (HK, but I'm sure Core Wind's work is done in Shenzhen) they are not supposed to be selling outside China to areas with distributors. The discounts they offer are crazy unless it is one-man office with other income (no comment). I'm sure they intend to try to negotiate a price with FriendlyARM AFTER you send the money, because FA has specific reseller pricing on the Mini210, unlike previous boards, and it never gets anywhere near that low. Also note that $25000 is a small order for FA. Remember that in China, if you have a business dispute the police will give you the name of someone you can hire to go beat up the other people. That is the extent of business legal infrastructure. That and Rule Number 1: Don't embarrass the Party.
By the way Screwface, what you are proposing is that you become a distributor of FA products by buying through a second party and reselling in volume. Why not contact FA directly? Are you inviting people from anywhere to buy? Are you shipping anywhere? What is your warranty policy and how will you handle returns? Can someone buy 50 at that price and sell them on eBay (and royally screw up the product distribution with an eBay price war that puts the company out of business)? It is bad enough that so many people base embedded pricing expectations on the phone market. Why do you think a Nintendo DS costs more than the retail price of an iPhone3G? Because Apple in reality gets $381 due to the 2 year service contracts. They actually get $620 for an iPhone 4, not $200. No one can run a business selling embedded with retail phone pricing, unless you are ready to pay a monthly charge to use the boards. And you can't count the factory dumping strategies below cost like TI and Beagleboard or Broadcom and the Pi.
Hey TheRegnirps, what are you requirements on a embedded board? the TI Beagleboard is a very expensive board for what it does, what everyone looks for in an development board? besides low cost, cause you can find most of the stuff you need on the tablet pc I posted,
Hello Andre. I agree in many ways. I wrote a brilliant long answer, clicked your link to the tablet to check something and it didn't open in a new tab. Lost all my typing :-( So I'll summarize. The places the tablet won't work out are limited space, need SPI, I2C, A/D inputs, all I/O with sockets along one edge of board. And most important from an embedded designer's standpoint, it won't be available long enough. The embedded market needs products with a 5 to 8 year production lifetime. Tablets come and go in months. The low pricing of the one you pointed to is in part because the 210 is already obsolete as far as tablets makers are concerned (they have moved on to dual core A8 Mx 1.5GHz or whatever hit the fan yesterday)and in part because an amazing number of Chinese manufacturers jumped into the tablet market and many made the mistake I mentioned earlier. They assumed they could use pricing like phones with similar technology. They did not understand the phone business model is fundamentally different from tablets (or embedded). Some even include the cell modems in the tablets and seem to have never noticed that an unlocked iPad or similar tablet has to cost 3 or 4 times as much! As for the BB's. I don't consider them too expensive. Compare to the cost of bringing an equivalent custom board into a product in a company big enough to have an engineering department. Costs are at least $250 an hour plus you get purchasing, inventory, and everyone else involved. True costs are very easily $50K. That may be hard to believe if you are a hobbyist and could do it in a weekend, but it is true. So, if you use less than 1000 units a year it is much better to buy the BBs - or make them since they are open hardware, but it still might be better to buy them. The interesting thing is that I never see design wins with BB or BBone. Yet the Mini2440 and Mini6410 are being used in equipment by companies who need 1000 to 2500 a month. There is something about the FriendlyARM designs that appeals to the small to medium volume embedded users.
HI TheRegnirps you are right that chip is obsolete so I don't understand why friendlyarm they are wasting their time selling an obsolete chip when they could sell something better, I don't know if you ever open one of this tablets but if you do, you would notice, is just a 2 layer board with a flat module similar to the tiny2440, http://arpandeb.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/iballslidecompleteboard.jpg so you have access to all the pins you want. I looked into the dual core chip, origenboard.org and they have it here for almost the same price as that mini210, but I will just hack the tablet, development kits are nice but I think they are way overprice which I don't understand why cause us, the developers, are the one who would make the chip useful, and the reason companies don't use TI chip(omap) because is just an arm chip that you can get from any other company for lower cost. you can get a chip with the same power or more from samsung for a lower cost.
Hi TheRegnirps, I don't plan to be a FriendlyARM reseller. I'm just a hobbyist. I was just looking for a solution to get the mini210 cheaper than the price at which we can find them on websites. Mindee has indicated a price of $249USD in a previous post. I wondered why we can't get mini210 at this price. I just proposed to make a global order to armdevs because they proposed this price for 100 mini210. That's all, nothing more
I think PV210 devboard there will have a crazy growing up in 2012. but until now, there is no better way to play the board like Superboot do. Not only for Linux/android/...., but also for wince or NO-OS. Superboot can help you to develop easily and quickly, save your time. mindee
Forced by market pressures, we decided to cancel the Order activities for the 249USD with 100 people. If you have fill the "order form" for booking in our website, You can contact us(market@armdevs.com) for some compensation. Thanks Screwface and Fred again. Sorry for that.
On balance, I decided to buy the board pandaboard because the mini210 is much more expensive and less effective. Thanks.
Pandaboard is cheaper and more powerful than mini210 but you're not on the same need I think. It depends on what you plan to do with it. Pandaboard has no expansion connector, only pads to solder it as far as I know. Only 2 leds and 1 button, nothing to experiment ADC, SPI and so on. But I think the biggest difference is pandaboard has no touchscreen (and also no power adaptor, cables and so on, even if it is not the bigest part of the price gap between the two boards) I think mini210 is more a devboard than pandaboard. After, if you don't plan to use GPIO, screen and other hardware stuff, I think pandaboard is better for computing as it uses a dual core cortex A9 instead of the single core cortex A8 of the mini210
Comparing Panda and FriendlyARM is a bit like apples and oranges. Panda is OpenHardware and no certifications. FriendlyARM has international certs, RoHS, etc. Distributors are free to offer warranty based on their own experience. For instance, ARMWorks has a 2 year warranty. I'm sure Core Wind has a warranty but I don't know what it is. The Mini2440 and Mini6410 have been extremely reliable - reports are that after initial test, somewhere less than 1 in 2000 boards are returned in the first 2 years. And very important for the embedded designer, if the S3C2440 is EOL'd by Samsung, there are newer binary and pin compatible parts that run at the same speed. The only difference is they use faster RAM and a few things like that. This means a 5 to 8 year production cycle can be counted on with small performance improvements along the way. Prices will not go down with age because the economy of scale reached a limit for these parts quite a while ago. You can buy/make systems with newer chips, but how do you know they are going to hold up? Just look at some of the huge problems Intel has had over the years with bugs that didn't show up until months after they started shipping their processors? Above, Andre complained that the chip in the Mini210 is obsolete. It is "obsolete" as far as designers of new tablets are concerned. For embedded designers it is yet to prove itself. Embedded sales don't really pick up until the hardware is 2 years old. No one is going to bet their career on untried products. That is what you bleeding edge early adopters are so important ;-)
@Andre, How far have been now for hacking the herotab c8? I'm also planning the same approach as with you as the mini210 is quite expensive. Thanks, Speed
