Hey everyone, checking in from Nuremberg, where I’m sitting at the Oracle booth at the Embedded World tradeshow. Pretty excited about something that I think a lot of you’ll appreciate:
This is the demo I’m showing people. That tablet is a Viewsonic “gtablet” (Model UPC300-2.2). The Oracle guys ripped android off of it and installed a distro of Linux called OpenEmbedded. I’m not exactly sure of the procedure, but I’m getting the instructions.
The important thing is that this thing runs full JavaSE 7 for ARM. That means it runs a Vision client like a champ, and you can pick these things up on eBay for sub $200. Pretty cool, huh?
Good question. I guess the reason it worked on the gtablet is that you can take the SD out, mount it in linux, fdisk it, and copy your own filesystem onto it. Maybe any tablet that stores the filesystem on a removable chip would work?
It is the Pactron Jade, running Java 7 as you thought. It was running the gateway and MySQL 5.1. The performance is pretty decent, and while we didn’t run real benchmarks, I had 5000 tags logging every second to a remote db without much problem here in the office.
I don’t believe Pactron sells these units commercially, but instead are looking to partner with 3rd parties to market them. For us, we’re excited by these boxes, but don’t want to get into the hardware game ourselves. Still, we’ve already taken some steps to support the ARM platform, such as updating the licensing system to support it, and hope to see it develop further.