Taiwan suppliers scramble for ODM Ultrabook business

There's a lot of talk on the news wires today about ultra books, a Google touch-based small notebook and Taiwanese manufacturers fierce competition to supply the market with white box branded copy-cats of big brand offerings. Digitimes reports that ultra-like model shipments are expected to double in 2013.

In another report: "Although notebook brand vendors have finished most of their order placements for 2013, they are currently still releasing some sporadic orders, accounting for 5-8% of their total volumes, to the market with ODMs competing aggressively for these shipments, according to sources from notebook ODMs."

VIA and indeed VIA Labs, will surely be looking to secure some deals amongst this.

7-inch Whitebox tablet sales still going strong in China

We don't hear all that much about it in Australia these days, but no-name and not-well-known brand 7-inch tablet sales, many of them featuring VIA chips, are still selling like hot-cakes in China.

"As for the tablet market in China, excluding Apple's iPad which enjoys a high popularity in the region, players such as Lenovo, Samsung Electronics and Asustek are all having difficulty competing against the local white-box players due to their rather competitive pricing; however, the first-tier brand vendors still plan to launch 7-inch tablet models with prices around CNY1,000 (US$160) to compete for the market." - Digitimes

With Australia being so close to China, the models are not all that hard to find—eBay is the best place to start.

With ARM's new 64-bit announcement, what will WonderMedia do?

VIA WonderMedia chips were one of the first to be taken up and used by countless Chinese tablet manufacturers, when 7-inch tablets first hit the market. All the designs were fairly similar, and based on VIA WonderMedia WM8750 chips that include an ARM 11 core and are 1080p capable.

ARM have just announced new 64-bit Cortex-A50 series processor designs, licenses for which will be sold to companies like WonderMedia, with their intended usage to be in, not smartphones and tablets, but in servers.

"ARM dominates in smartphones and tablets, but is aiming to make its mark in the server market ruled by x86 chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. There is growing interest in ARM servers as an energy-efficient way to handle large numbers of Web requests such as in search or social networks. Dell and Hewlett-Packard already offer prototype ARM-based servers for testing to customers looking to deploy ARM servers to cut energy bills. However, Intel is also tweaking its low-power Atom processors to work in cloud servers and will release new Atom S-series chips for microservers later this year." - Source.

Will WonderMedia pursue this new avenue?

HTC considering a new tablet

It's interesting that VIA WonderMedia was one of the first chip designers to get enthusiastic about the 7-inch tablet market. I remember visiting the Lunch @ Piero's event in Las Vegas during CES probably five years ago (I think) and seeing 7-inch tablet designs. Other manufacturers had prototypes on their stands, often "UMPCs", but VIA WonderMedia had working products already for sale in China.

Around three years ago there were dozens of 7-inch tablets available across Asia with VIA WonderMedia chips powering them. Only a couple of them actually made it to the Western market in any volume. They were sold as cheap (around the $100 mark) tablets and of course couldn't compete with the iPad hype.

HTC, related to VIA by family ownership, tried to get into the tablet market also with a couple of Windows-based tablets and like just about everyone who went with Microsoft for their OS, success wasn't a word found in their post-launch review documents!

Rumour has it that HTC is considering a new tablet PC. Questions are: 1) will it be Android based this time? Certainly HTC has had huge success with Android on their phone handsets and 2) will they use the resources of "related" companies like VIA WonderMedia or even VIA itself in the design.

VIA spreading tablets to education market in India

VIA and Wishtell get a mention in an upbeat article about the proliferation of tablets in the education sector. The VIA based tablets were recently launched in India, catering to 23 different regional languages.

"Our tablets will enable students to access virtual labs for physics, chemistry and so on. A student can also subscribe to our special packages, such as astronomy content, which may not be available in the school curriculum," says Milind Shah, CEO of Wishtel India. - Source.

VIA and Wishtel bring out new tablets in India

Two new Wishtel tablets, featuring VIA chips, are the first in the world to natively support Indian languages giving them an advantage for adoption into the education market in India.

“With the introduction of the IRA and IRA Thing, Wishtel is leading the way in driving tablet innovation in India,” commented Richard Brown, VP International Marketing, VIA Technologies, Inc. “The potential for these devices is breathtaking, particularly in areas such as education.”

Source.