 welcome to embedded world welcome to the planet stand here's the here's the astro slide kind of like the coolest phone in the world well we like to think so and it slides so here here you can see the the phone so it looks like a normal phone but then we can open up oh my god and then it becomes a little pocket computer PDA so come on and where do you think about this this is like the ultimate form factor like the dream of many geeks in the world not just geeks but anybody who actually cares about being productive well we think it's a really great business phone as well as well as doing things like you know SSH or any of other tools we think it's a really great business phone as well you have a bunch of developers here the show is like I want this well there's a few people that we've met a few backers from indiegogo and we've seen quite a few people that are really interested in the phone yeah absolutely this is awesome and shipping to backers shipping to backers still early days but shipping to backers already since December very slowly because you know there are quite a few issues in in China with the zero covid policy so we're we're doing our best to get the majority of the devices out during the next two months so let's hope we can do that but it's been it's been quite an interesting time for last few months but yeah it's it's happening we've got the now the Swiss sorry the Swedish and the Swedish and the Finnish keyboards in production now the first stock of German quartz keyboards coming into the warehouse I think tomorrow so yeah it's it's quite an exciting time what is this keyboard so this is a this is a Japanese keyboard this is a canna keyboard device so it's got both QWERTY and canna letters canna symbols on the keyboard one of the biggest markets is Japan Japan is our number one market US number two UK number three and Germany number four I think the US and UK need to step it up and try to see if they could beat the Japanese you tell them you tell them Nicholas how about maybe some some telcos watching this video what's the next partnership so you can get so the nice the nice thing is this is the first and only 5G device with a keyboard so of course being 5G it's something that is here to stay until 2030 even longer so the first 6G we're expecting to come up around let me show you some just the keyboard side as well you want to see the the main screen the keyboard we're expected to see sort of about about 2030 the the 6G coming in so 5G is here to stay so that means that the phone is kind of pretty resilient in terms of the network side so that's kind of where we are that's kind of where we're where it's interesting that you know 5G technology is here to stay for quite a while so it's future-proof already this one and this is your third-generation part working to get into the media tech it's a first you want to see the spec you want to zoom in on the spec I don't know if you want to do that and it should cost more than iPhone right so currently it's about 925 dollars in the store on pre-order and it's it's it's got it's up some thousand dollars barring all the inflationary costs that are happening now so we might have to recalculate the price up so if anybody's watching get it now because the prices will go up so what if you can get a deal and sell 5 million pieces then the price will go down but for the for the current batches the price probably going to go up because of all the inflationary costs around the world what the billionaire watching this video call you up yes absolutely and what's here then better world what's the latest you're working with some new projects right so so our main business is phones but we're looking to expand the range of devices so we're looking at some new products under the planet brand which will be utilizing some embedded computers so we formed some partnerships so some of the boards on the table yeah so we formed a partnership with the firefly teacher so you can see here we've got it this is the ITX RK3588 J board it's a rock chip it's a rock chip 3588 it really rocks it has eight cores 2.4 gigahertz so it's very fast but some really great features on here is you see there are three HDMI ports right so those three HDMI ports one of them has 8k video out okay one of them has 4k video out and the third one has 4k video in so you're getting some excellent video very high in multimedia exactly exactly right so you know as the you know there'll be some interesting products coming up from the planet brand and we have this partnership with firefly to make some of the boards so these will be bigger products not funds but we hope that our our audience and our customers will really like the products nice and so there could be partnerships and all kinds of better ideas here right yeah I think we do want to have consumer-ready devices but obviously those have embedded parts inside right so that's kind of where it's important so I mean in terms of current firefly products the station PC range is very interesting so these are small small PCs which are arm-based so running Ubuntu or Android so this is a this is small mini PC from called P2 there's a Rockchip RK3568 in this in this one step down from 358 yeah 358 is absolutely the latest so there's no station PC yet for for that but this is the kind of board that's available so if you go to planets embedded.com you can see the whole product range so here's the QR code yeah so yeah I can show you some of the other things so this is the this is absolutely the smallest form factor station PC it's a quad core but this is a this is a smaller device but it's great for things like display display signage or just a small little media thing great thing on this one it has an infrared as a infrared port as well so you can remote control it if you wanted to use it for playing video or streaming video or something so very very small form factor right fits in your hand but then you know the the firefly range has some other interesting things like for example this products really cool it's a it's a 4G gateway and and this one this one it's basically small computer with a 4G system inside so it can report things like sensors or anything for IOT it can just report things more an industrial machine right so it's a great range these are just boards so these are just the core boards so you're seeing core boards with rock chip processors three so this is 3399 so they're different they're different processor boards but this is just to show the kind of full range that we have here and they're like it very skilled with the Rockchip and Rockchip is a really cool chip so Firefly a great company in China really up and coming and you know with Rockchip creating large processors like 8 core it's really fantastic to see that so the whole range is now on planet embedded.com you can have a look including some servers so there are some servers which you can test like they have even like over 70 CPUs inside so you can do like test product testing very fast product testing based on arm chips and the Rockchip so quite interesting Of course it's running Android. What's the version? So Android 11 it's fully GMS compliant running Android 11 also about three days ago our open source community members for Linux they posted the Ubuntu UB ports first port so you can actually download that from the link that's on the Indiegogo website at the moment but it's very early days so we have the bootloader and the kernel they're open on the phone plus there's now a version of Ubuntu that can be downloaded. So that's one of the original concepts to do all kinds of Linux. Yes and we want to focus more on Linux and some of the both Linux support for the phone but also Linux on other products that we're going to announce which will all be sort of based around Linux so we want to enhance we've kind of created this partnership with Firefly because they have actually provided in the arm 64 Linux Ubuntu build they've been very instrumental in making that happen so you have essentially the mainline kernel has a lot of support for the Rockchips which is extremely important and that's what we've been looking out for so yeah absolutely great great support on if you go to the Firefly Wiki pages you get some excellent you get some excellent documentation about how to actually compile and run apart from the ready-made images of Ubuntu you get some excellent documentation how to compile and run the Ubuntu there. I got one comment that says arm to the moon there we go. Arm is so cool and you are you like doing stuff to like innovate change the world influence people make the world a better place so you know so what's happened recently is you have a lot of focus also on decentralized services with the whole blockchain community and decentralized applications so we are looking to see what we can do in that space as well and also form devices that are really useful for the public so that's kind of very important yeah so I can show you the 3568 board so actually this is kind of an interesting board it's a it's a quad core so based on the Rockchip 3568 it's a quad core device it's actually a really nippy device also running Ubuntu or Android on the on the system what's nice about this board of course it has a lot of interfaces so you have two camera in me piece to display out me piece also HDMI so a lot of potential M2 slot here for memory card and also 40 for the 4g modem so really quite a lot of expansion and then of course can bus and RS232 additional USB interfaces so very rich environment it's the AIO 3568 J board so you can look that up on planet embedded.com so that's a really nice board as well of course it's probably like half the price of this one which is the really a really sort of high-end now top of the range board so they are available they are in stock in Europe so something to see what's the discussions you have in here the embedded world so a lot of people really interested in the phone and then there's a lot of solution solutions anything from embedded systems for medical devices in hospitals to you know security applications to you know farming applications there's a lot of different with embedded computing you have a lot of potential you know the fact that computing has got so fast you get like very small embedded devices like this where there's a computer inside here and you can do something with it whatever it is right we use something like this in the office we plug in a small scanner and it just sent emails the PDF documents from the scanner directly to an email account right so just very simple things you can have various and this is like only about a hundred pounds UK so maybe hundred and twenty dollars US so very simple products with embedded computing so but of course somebody needs to create the solutions and then market those solutions one question is RK 3588 waiting for mainline kernel is anyone working on it yes I think Rockchip and maybe Firefly and your partner yes a lot of upstreaming yes you can have I mean there's already you can download the you can so I mean this board this board itself is the currently running Ubuntu on the on this board right so yes very smooth all the video decoder we haven't tried everything yet but of course we've just literally we downloaded it before the show and it's definitely video video video play out is great audio is great so yeah we've tested that we haven't tested video in yet well we've only done the initial test we've done the I'm too to spec marks as well which came out with some quite high numbers as well I don't have them of hand but quite high so we're quite happy with that so Rockchip has been very busy upstreaming of the last few years I think media tech are you pushing them so media tech media tech we're where this is our main supplier for the chipsets for our phones and of course this chip is Dimensity 800 which is a mid-range 5G chipset so we're very happy with the chipset of course Linux support is not their highest priority so for the for the more embedded and PC products we're going with other brands but for the mobile industry and for some of the embedded kits that they're using different chips not necessarily 5G chips they have a really great support they have really great support I'm talking about you know 5G chipsets it's really focused on Android for for for for media tech for other ranges like for example the media tech chipsets that are in the let's say the Alexa the Alexa speakers it really good support of course because every one of the Alexa devices has a media tech inside strange couple years yeah absolutely I mean we haven't talked about well you know it's been an it's been an interesting actually surviving the covid it was not so bad but then the knock-on effects of covid for us you know obviously had some effect so it's been a strange couple of years without we're going to China well imagine making a whole phone without ever going to the place where the phone is being made it's you know you've got a lot of risks all kinds of risks from you know manufactured from the original engineering of course everything takes longer because when something's ready you can't just see it you have to wait for another 10 to weeks to receive it because logistics is slower so logistics warehousing lockdowns in each city components which are faulty and then take another month to get a new component in assembly plants locked down you know you name it there's been a problem right but hopefully these things are now coming to an end despite you know don't forget that this is just a caveat because there's still a zero covid policy in China so you need to you need to see how that will play out but it's getting better that's for sure I miss China well it's a real Chinese restaurants okay now you're kidding me but that's all right yeah yeah we have some good Chinese we have some good Chinese restaurants in London when I go back to Shazen I see like 40 new skyscrapers and I've been three years it'll be like look I think I think we have to just wait to see what's new because it's been there for quite a while but you know there's a there's a there's a lot of things that I think are changing so Martin ready for your team did the custom how did how did you get how did it happen so Martin created the original design there's a video on Indiegogo showing his kind of thoughts about it on the Indiegogo page for Astroslide so it's it's really something that is you know he spent time thinking and it was his big wish to have something that can do this feature so the the actual slide and the hinge mechanism and the slide mechanism this time what we call the rock-up slider is really ingenious so he's he's he's pulled it off one more time and you know it's a really great thing and of course a lot of support from Sebastian Anglais who's our internal designer and helps refine some of the smaller components in the design yes you can see so in terms of the hinge you can see so now we're getting to this point where the legs actually stretch out that gives it the support when it's on the table and then we tilt we tilt the the top and then that creates the that creates the angle the 120 degree angle that we want and then of course here you can see you know you can still hold it by the screen it will not flip out because you know if I do this then it will flip back and it glides nicely back into position so there's a lot of thought and you know believe me even point one millimeter difference in some parts makes the difference of it being so much tweaking had to be done yeah the tolerances have to be really good and the you know all the parts have to be perfect so how many years gonna work smoothly without needs repairing I can't tell you that but we've tested the hinge with with with the 10,000 opens and closes so in terms of the emotion this has been tested 10,000 times in terms of it working and we actually the last refinement of the hinge was still in terms of the manufacturing parts was in December just before the first production so we were really optimizing it we're really optimizing it all the way up to the last moment and so it's shown at the Soma Museum the museum design museum I think there's some pieces history which one computer science museum I think they have some Gemini some cosmos I'm not sure they have the astro yet but yeah a computer science museum in Santa Clara next to the Google HQ so absolutely so did you have a meeting with Sergey not yet they should be the pixel phone I don't know what they're doing they just like send you a billion dollars and make it a pixel when you see them next the planet pixel that everybody is just so lazy in the industry like in the smartphone everybody's just copy Apple well we try the only one doing something different well we try to do something different and also something useful and we hope that some of the sort of embedded based products a PC based products that we're going to announce in later this year people also find them very useful but we're trying to make it very user friendly and we're trying to make arm devices more user friendly and Linux more user friendly so what do you need to say that's okay what do you need to refresh hi hi brightness is it max or do you want to go lower lower you want to go lower my camera okay if you want to go lower like this a bit higher higher yes of course you can go very high yeah tell me when it's good yeah like this yeah maybe I just changed my shutter speed a bit yeah maybe when I go 120 it's better okay okay there is cool all right so nice to be back in the world with real people excellent we're nice to see you Nicholas because I think we saw each other last a couple of years back before the lockdowns of the CES right and the last CES before all this yes when we were showing when we were showing the Cosmo yeah no we didn't do if I but you know the cosmos still around for other shows in future well this is kind of marking the end of this year probably for some of the shows but then oh maybe gytex gytex will be in Dubai pretty sure with our distributor there