Let’s face it – Apple sometimes likes to boast about it’s products hardware being the fastest in the class. While it might seem true to some extent depending on what you use the iDevices for, the founding member of Raspberry Pi, Eben Upton, has stated that the Raspberry Pi should provide at least twice the performance of an iPhone 4S in a wide range of activities. Eben also throws nVidia’s Tegra mobile chip out the window.

Quoted from a interview with Digital Foundry with edits to clarify:

“I was on the team that designed the [Raspberry Pi] graphics core, so I’m a little biased here, but I genuinely believe we have the best mobile GPU team in the world at Broadcom in Cambridge. What’s really striking is how badly [nVidia] Tegra 2 performs relative even to simple APs using licensed Imagination Technologies (TI and Apple) or ARM Mali (Samsung) graphics.”

For the complete story, check out Tom’s Hardware article on the subject. The Raspberry Pi only costs $25 or $35 (depending on model), but with the graphics potiental, it could be a worthy candiate for portable ARM device projects. Some include Kids Ruby, Yoyo Games GameMaker, Python and even XBMC, a open source Windows Media Center replacement.

With the Raspberry Pi almost set for launch, it will be put head to head against our other ARM devices here at Coburn’s Domain. Stay tuned.

When the Raspberry Pi goes on sale, Coburn’s Domain will be getting one to review and also run our benchmarking suite on it. It will be put head to head against a CuBox and our faithful SheevaPlug. While the CuBox is ARMv7 and the SheevaPlug is ARMv5, the Raspberry Pi is a ARMv6 device – whatever the case, it should be rather interesting to see what the go is.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/574

Previously, we’ve talked about the Raspberry Pi and it’s glory. Sure, for a $25/$35 device, it’s not a bad gadget. However, if you’re craving some extra power, then the CuBox will satisfy.

The CuBox is from a Israel startup company called SolidRun Ltd. The device provides a cube form factor miniture PC, which provides the following features:

• 800Mhz DualCore Marvell ARMADA CPU with VFPv3, wMMX SIMD and 512KB L2 Cache
• 1GB DDR3 RAM clocked at 800Mhz
• 1080p Video Decoding Engine, allowing outputs of 1080p @ 60Fps with minimal CPU intervention
• OpenGL Embedded Standard 2.0 Graphics Engine
• Gigabit LAN, SPDIF (Optical Audio), 3Gbps eSATA, Dual USB 2.0 Ports, microSD slot
• Infrared Receiver for remote controlled applications
• microUSB for debug console

Don’t just dismiss this device without taking a look at the Solid-Run website – it could be your next PC! The best feature is that this device is unbrickable. That’s right, even if you try bricking the device or brick the device by accident, the device can restore itself back to a working state.

The 1080p @ 60Fps output makes it a powerhouse if you want a media center that can provide grunt in a tiny form factor, or want to watch your favorite shows (Anime, Drama, Casual shows, etc) on a big screen. With that being said, the CuBox makes the Raspberry Pi cry in the corner.

While one of our friends have pre-ordered one of these devices; they are hopefully going to be released early next year. In the meantime, check out SolidRun’s website – we’ll keep you posted on the device when one hits our shores.

Photo Credit: SolidRun Ltd.

Anyone remember the credits for the original Portal valve game? How GlaDOS was still alive? No? Well, the iconic song has been geekily remixed, floppy disk drive-style. As this PCWorld article shows you the proof that the song plays rather nicely on a quartet of Floppy Disk drives. Maybe minus the vocals.

It’s stuff like this that makes people wonder how awesome yester-year’s technology was back in the day. We’ve seen scanners do Beethoven songs, but this? We don’t know what to say.

Photo Credit: Sam Cox

We’ll admit that the Coburn’s Domain Labs does have a old 700Mhz G4 Apple eMac, but when this floated past our inbox, we couldn’t help but say “Cute”.

Powered by a hidden Arduino inside the basket and a infrared beam, when the cat breaks the beam, the Arduino realises it’s got a cat inside the cosy eMac shell, and supposedly “boots” up the eMac. Partner this with an LED light that cycles colors, and it provides the best sleeping experience your cat can thank you for. When kitteh exits the eMac, it’ll power itself off.

Originally, the eSleeper was going to have a DVD drive that rewards the cat with a treat, but that got scrapped due to space constraints.

Read the PC World article here for the full scoop. One of the amazing hacks we’ve seen so far.

This is the Huawei SONIC. Simply put, it’s a bargain 3.5″ Capactive touchscreen smartphone that runs Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) on a 600Mhz CPU coupled happily together with powerful GPU.

Let’s cut to the chase.

Build Quality
Despite being made in china, the phone itself doesn’t feel like it’s a toy. By that, I mean, it survives a drop off a ledge onto a lino floor that’s about 2 metres off the ground, face-down. It’s an all-round solid build and should survive a lot of drops. The touchscreen and buttons aren’t spongy nor “soft”, so that’s a plus.

Features
Huawei went into overdrive here and offered a smashload of goodies. Here’s some screenshots to show you what’s on offer.

Some apps have been installed from the Market, so the list isn’t 100% stock. One of the best things here is the Smart Traffic Monitor. It’s like a watchdog, you set how much data you want to use per day and if you break that quota, it’ll either ask you to chew into tomorrow’s allowance or switch off 2G/3G data. Also can be used to monitor your data usage on Unlimited data plans. HiSpace is a crap Android Market ripoff. There’s also a built-in Twitter and Facebook client to the right of the Dialer app (also seen in the “Streams” app).

Huawei have copied the iOS “jelly” icon editing mode and it shows – tap and hold, and the icons jiggle around like jelly. It even allows you to quickly uninstall apps by tapping on the X overlay! (Sadly, drocap2 failed to take a screenshot while in the icon jiggling mode.)

Here’s something to chew on. The instruction manual states a high-capacity eMMC card is already embedded into the device. For those who don’t know, the eMMC is a cheaper alternative for storage. Sadly though, it is not high-capacity. It’s more like 16 megabytes (yes, megabytes!) of storage. We have proof – look at the “Internal SD Card” information in the screenshot below. Luckily, the phone does come with a 2GB MicroSD already inserted into the device.

EDIT: The internal storage can be accessed via plugging the phone into a USB port and tapping “Mount SD Card”.

The phone also comes with a 3MP Camera without any Flash, and that’s pretty run-of-the-mill. The photos the camera takes can be a little ugly at times. There’s also a nice Music app, and Fast Boot – which is pretty much hibernate on PCs.

Performance
While it won’t match up to it’s big rivals, for a sub-$200 Android smartphone, it’s got a gutsy Qualcomm MSM7xxx chipset that has a 600Mhz CPU driving the show. There’s also a Ardeno 220 GPU that runs the graphics side of the phone – which offloads GPU work onto the GPU itself, to save the CPU from rendering 3D content.

Even on the stock ROM, it’s still speedy. Huawei really have taken care with the OS and tweaked it to perfection. There is a little bit of lag when answering calls, and the lock screen can be a little unresponsive. These are minor, but can be annoying when the phone decides to pause for a moment when you need a phone number.

Quirks
The Android Market also has a habit of re-downloading installed apps for no apparent reason (and I didn’t even press the update button nor is auto-updating enabled). We’re not sure if this bug is only on this device or if it affects others too.

There’s also the lag issue, but that’s been already addressed above.

Coburn’s Verdict
The HUAWEI SONIC is a budget phone that will serve the casual geek nicely. The sleek look will raise an eyebrow, and it’s powerful CPU will handle a fair amount of tasks. The SONIC’s included software is more than enough to manage your working life: there’s a calendar, notepad, Documents to Go, and heaps more.

Highly recommended. My personal comment is that it performs beautifully and having Android 2.3 on the device out-of-the-box without needing a ROM update is a bonus too.

According to a hacker under the nickname of “MSaki” on our IRC channel, who chimed in to say that unauthorised (aka homebrew) binaries have been successfully running on the Nintendo 3DS, homebrew has seen the light on the supposedly locked-down console.

We cannot confirm if the guide is genuine, as we don’t have a test Nintendo 3DS to try it on.

This is not for the faint-hearted. His instructions involve a corrupt game save, soldering iron, wire, a (electronics?) sniffer and a Serial Converter. It also butchers up a PliotWings 3DS game cart, so make sure you beat that game before you decide to hack it.

Here goes. This is a cut and paste from the channel provided by Weremuffin, and has been edited for clarification.

[17:15] <MSaki> btw open pilot wings card, solder wires to the chip pinouts on back, then attach to sniffer. Once you have the four points, mark them, then desolder other wires and disconnect from the sniffer. Build a converter, then attach said converter to your serial I/O on pc (i think you can figure the rest so ill simpilify it for you – inject a corrupt save file and leave it decrypted). The 3DS will give you a message that the card save data is corrupt do you wish to
[17:15] <MSaki> continue, tap yes, if all done correctly it should go to a black screen on top and red on touch now you may execute a binary from the serial i/o via a comunication terminal.
[17:15]<MSaki> Enjoy

While the guide seems pretty interesting, we’ll have to put the question mark on this method until we can get a brave hacker to test it out.

Spinifex Computing is the australian reseller of the DreamPlug. What’s a DreamPlug you ask? Well, basically it’s a SheevaPlug on steroids, manufactured by GlobalScale. It has dual gigabit LAN Ports, WiFi, BlueTooth 2.1 (plus EDR), Twin USB 2.0 Ports, Optical Audio Out, the standard 3.5″ audio jacks, a SD Card slot and eSATA.

Under the bonnet is a more laid-out approach to the DreamPlug’s internals, as there’s no heat issues (unlike the flawed GuruPlug design) due to the vents built into the casing. It’s a tad slower in the bootup times when putting it against the classic SheevaPlug, but once you unleash it’s hidden power, a 1.2Ghz Feroceon CPU and 512MB of DDR2 RAM, nothing will hold it back.

A benchmark of converting 40MB PNGs to JPGs using a batch PHP script took around 2 and a half minutes with the PNGs being 600dpi scans of a software manual. Another benchmark also included the same test, but resizing it to 25% the size of the scanned file dimensions which took around 3 minutes.

Now, you may be thinking, where’s the video output? The simple answer to that is the plug computing family don’t offer video outputs on the SheevaPlug line, apart from the GuruPlug Display, which has a GPU that offers impressive HDMI Output. However, one can plug in a USB touchscreen kit and after some tweaking, you’ll have yourself a nice desktop PC. Other options include running Xorg over the network, or running VNC via a SSH tunnel.

The plug family are more suited for server applications and/or the creative person, and they can run a variety of Linux distros. With the eSATA input, one could have a portable BitTorrent storage box, or even a mobile WiFi hotspot as the plug boots into WiFi Hotspot mode on stock startup. Just plug a LAN Cable into a deciated gigabit port, and you can access the internet via your DreamPlug’s WiFi on your phone, tablet or laptop.

Spinifex Computing has also been excellent in the customer service department. Shoot a question at ‘em and give them a respectable timeframe, you’ll have answers.

While the DreamPlug is showing that GlobalScale is running out of options to cram into a wall plug, one thing is for certain – a new ‘plug is on the horizon that will rewrite what plug computers can do.

One of these suckers will set you back $209 AUD, and they are terrific. If you’re looking for a low-power server, you’re looking at the right plug – this one, pictured here, is going to run Coburn’s Domain 4 when it goes gold.

Coburn’s verdict? Awesome piece of computing gear right there.

Our friends over at TechCrunch have recently published an article about the Apple iPad (the 2010 model known as the iPad 1 and the iPad 2 (2011 model)) causing unwanted interference with certain airplanes, potentially putting your life and others at risk. The iPad has also been labeled as the “Most dangerous airplane device”.

For the rundown, check out the TechCrunch article located here. The next time you’re on a airplane with an iPad, make sure you turn your device’s connectivity off (or set it “Airplane Mode”).

Via TechCrunch.

The Nintendo 3DS Hacking Wiki is a wiki deciated to portable freedom on the recently released Nintendo 3DS. By portable freedom, we mean, custom software (also known as homebrew) running on the 3DS, such as console emulation, movie players, system software mods and 3DS Linux, just to name a few.

The 3DS Hacking Wiki can be found here, at http://3ds.coburndomain.net. Of course, it’ll be a slow start, but if we all pitch in and help out, before we know it, we’ll have homebrew running on our 3DS consoles. See you there!