Lenovo Announces The Alexa Powered Smart Assistant, And Smart Storage NAS

When Amazon announced the Echo, it’s likely even they were not prepared for the response to the device, and Echo is the primary funnel to Amazon Alexa, which is their intelligent personal assistant, which has been so successful in the Echo as a voice based assistant. Today Lenovo is announcing they have partnered with Amazon to bring Alexa to the Lenovo Smart Assistant.

Lenovo’s take on the voice-based IoT assistant is available in three colors, and offers eight 360° far-field microphones with noise suppression and acoustic echo cancellation. All of this is to make it able to be used at up to distances of up to 16 feet, or 5 meters, away.

Lenovo will also be offering a Harman Kardon edition of the Smart Assistant, which will offer better quality speakers for an improved audio experience when using the assistant to playback music.

Some may be wondering why Lenovo would want to create such a device, but the device will be able to control Lenovo smart home devices, and is a foot in the door for them to be part of this arguably large IoT market. It will also work with many existing 3rd party products as well.

The design is typical for this type of device, with a large cylinder meant to be used upright. A small footprint is ideal since these are almost certainly going to be used on a counter in a home. Lenovo’s multiple color options, as well as the Harman Kardon audio version, bring a bit more customization than perhaps you would see otherwise. The Lenovo Smart Assistant will be available in May starting at $130, and the Harman Kardan model will be priced at $180.

Lenovo is also announcing the Smart Storage solution, which is a NAS device meant to be used to sync between multiple devices in the home. There’s no doubt that our digital lives create an enormous amount of data, and the Smart Storage NAS will be available with up to 6 TB of space.

The design is certainly interesting, with an upright chassis that is much more appealing to look at than most NAS on the market, and the Smart Storage smarts include the ability to use facial recognition to organize your photo library. It features dual-band wireless access, as well as Ethernet and USB 3.0 ports. Lenovo’s press material doesn’t delve too deeply into the other software features of the Smart Storage, so we’ll have to wait for some hands-on time at CES this week.

Finally, Lenovo is also offering a new interesting take on the HTPC keyboard. One of the biggest issues with a HTPC keyboard is you want it to be wireless, portable, and easy to use, but often it would be handy to have access to a trackpad or pointer control. Lenovo’s solution is the Lenovo 500 Multimedia Controller, which offers a full keyboard experience, as well as a full track pad.

Where is the trackpad you might be asking? The entire keyboard is the trackpad. This gives a huge surface to use for pointer control, as well as Windows 10 gesture support, without adding extra space that would be necessary for its own trackpad. The trackpad defaults to 150 DPI, but can be set to up to 1000 DPI if needed. The keyboard connects over a USB dongle, which is on the 2.4 GHz spectrum, and it is powered by two AAA batteries that Lenovo says will give up to 8 months of use. It will be available in March for $54.

Source: Lenovo

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Marvell Announces New Kinoma IoT Prototyping Platforms

Today Marvell announces two new internet-of-things (IoT) hardware prototyping platforms as part of their Kinoma “JavaScript-powered Internet of Things construction kit” lineup. The Kinoma Element and Kinoma HD provide alternatives to the Kinoma Create that was released last year.

The Element comes in a standalone square form-factor which I estimate should be about 7x7x1 cm. Marvell was unfortunately not able to share the exact dimensions of the piece but it looks compact enough given that it comes in a closed form-factor. The device is powered by microUSB port and has two expansion ports on opposite sides with 8 pins each that can be used for digital GPIO or analog ports and can be re-routed and re-configured by software.

The piece is powered by Marvell’s MW302 WiFi-SoC microcontroller uses an ARM Cortex M4F (A variant of the M4 with an added FPU) at 200MHz and has 512KB of SRAM memory which serves as the platform’s main memory. In terms of connectivity the device is capable of 802.11b/g/n but only in the 2.4GHz band and supports transfer rates of up to 72Mbit/s although those rates will in practice be probably be limited by the CPU’s performance.

The device is able to make due with so little memory by employing execute-in-place (XIP) which is a method of executing code directly on it’s flash storage instead of copying it to separate dedicated memory. The Element is able to run JavaScript byte-code as Marvell has implemented XIP in their new XS6 JavaScript engine.

  
Kinoma Element and Kinoma HD

The Kinoma HD is a beefier platform in the form of a HDMI dongle. The specifications are a tad higher as it is able to take advantage of a more powerful Marvell 88DE 3006 SoC running two ARM Cortex cores at 1.2GHz. We’re still not sure what CPU we’re talking about here but given it’s part of the Armada 1500 family of SoCs we’re likely looking at a Cortex A9 design.

As opposed to the Element which runs FreeRTOS, the HD runs a more conventional OS as it comes with a Linux distribution. It has 256MB of RAM and connectivity is provided by 802.11g/n/ac WiFi. The HDMI output is capable of 1080p and 720p resolutions.

Part of today’s announcement was also the release of Kinoma’s new JavaScript engine, the first independent implementation of JavaScript 6th edition scripting language. In conformance suites the XS6 engine is able to achieve 96% completeness for JavaScript 6th edition far ahead of any other JS engine. On the Kinoma platform JS6 among many language improvements also is able to provide up to 4x speed improvements for application start-up and now offers efficient binding to native C code and connect to OS and hardware features, which is something that is crucial for the KinomaJS development framework.

In the words of Peter Hoddie, VP at Marvell and former CEO of Kinoma before its 2011 acquisition:

“The software tools used to develop embedded hardware products typically lag leading edge software development by many years. IoT developers want the benefits of the latest language improvements, but the memory and CPU performance requirements put it out of the reach of mass-market hardware. With the XS6 engine in KinomaJS, we are bringing the latest advances in JavaScript to embedded developers before they arrive on the web,” 

The Kinoma products thus represent a very low entry-barrier for IoT development and low time and resource investment to get a working prototype application running. Most importantly, it’s the price of the new products that may be most attractive as the Kinoma Element and HD come at an MSRP of respectively US $19.95 and $24.95 and can be pre-ordered now with retail availability in Q4 2015.