Kyocera was at the Pepcom event showing its Dura Force Pro rugged phones which have cellular ‘push to talk’ and Land Mobile Radio (LMR). The company didn’t have new hardware but was showing new apps and talking about new use cases. The company told us that it has very good sales in law enforcement.
Kyocera’s Dura Force Pro is selling well to law enforcement. Image:Meko
Mediatek was showing the new Helio X30 chip and was highlighting the high power and high efficiency as it is made using 10nm technology has 10 cores. There are a dual-core A73 Cortex-A73 up to 2.5GHz, a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 up to 2.2GHz and a quad-core ARM Cortex A35 up to 1.9GHz. The company said that the chip increases performance by up to 35% and saves power by up to 50% over the MediaTek Helio X20. One of the demonstrations was showing how Mediatek has developed an analytics engine for games that analyses the use of the CPU, GPU and the types of memory access to optimise power consumption for gaming and that could reduce the power used by 25% to 30%, typically.
There was also a demonstration of the X30 being used for the playback of UltraHD content with HDR, and Mediatek can support HDR10, Dolby Vision and HLG. There are also new facilities for uploading and downloading that save power and multiple hardware-enhanced improvements for camera and vision processing.
Mediatek had an HDR Demo on its X30 chip
MyKronoz is a specialist maker of smartwatches in Switzerland that claims to have sold two million smartwatches since it started in 2013. At the Pepcom evening event it was showing its latest ZeTime hybrid smartwatch which uses a mechanical watch mechanism that works through a hole in the centre of an LCD. The mechanical watch will work for 30 days on a single charge. A range of faces and straps are available and features include activity and sleep tracking, incoming call notifications and social network updates as well as weather and calendar reminders. Control is via a smart crown or using the touch display. The product is based on the firm’s own OS that it has been developing for four years and will be on sale in September.
The MyKronoz ZeTime has an analogue movement and digital functions. Image:Meko
French OTT and technology company, Neotion, has been developing more towards the IoT and smart home applications. At the show, the company was showing its support for the Eutelsat packet-based DVB stream technology which allows content to be transmitted via satellite and then distributed through home networks. Neotion has developed technology to allow DRM on end-to-end OTT streams sent over the system, although the user must have some internet access to get DRM keys.
Neotion is working with Eutelsat on OTT over satellite. Image:Meko
