There’s a lot of litigation flying through the air over various Android devices, but if Hong Kong-based manufacturer JXD comes anywhere near the US, there’ll be a lot more. Its latest device manages to ape the iPhone and PSP, and manages to infringe on intellectual property from Nintendo, Sega, Microsoft and probably a few independent Android developers for good measure. The website for the JXD S7100 doesn’t so much “think different” as “think people won’t notice a hodgepodge of triple-A consumer electronics have been ripped off all at once”.
The device clearly has the Android gamer in mind, though by the looks of it JXD is encouraging some almost certainly illegal emulation to boot. Advertising “Apple games, Android games, Sony games, Nintendo games, Arcade games, Sega games”, they follow through with standards like Angry Birds, Mario Kart 64 and others, as well as some baffling Microsoft Office apps. If a no-name Hong Kong OEM has managed to develop Office for Android, they need to be marketing a whole lot more than some PSP knockoff.
The 7-inch tablet manages to include WiFi, a front-facing camera and an HDMI-out function into its oversized iPhone body, and with a Cortex A9 processor it might just be able to run a stolen misappropriated N64 emulator at a few frames per second. There appears to be at least a little bit of custom software on the device, in the form of a proprietary “game center” app. The S7100 doesn’t appear to be for sale directly from the manufacturer, but you’ll probably be seeing them in your local slightly shady electronics retailer soon – just don’t buy one within 100 yards of a patent lawyer, or his injunction senses will start tingling.
[via Kotaku]
Also looks a bit like the Wii U’s tablet controller.
What a beautiful innovation, we can only hope that those who seek to stifle progress in order to milk as much money as possible out of every little improvement can be prevented from stopping things like this and that it will force the big boys to start offering their hardware at reasonable prices, and quit holding back releases…
I like it.