A give-away of leading-edge technology devices always offers an opportunity to settle a bar bet: What’s the hottest gadget of the year?
Judging by Amazon, a lot of Amazon products (Fire TV stick, Echo Alexa-powered devices, Kindle and so on) were the most popular. But another interesting indicator is the 2016 HEXUS Epic Giveaway, done in conjunction with ARM. This year’s trove of popular give-away treasures, based on the number of social-media shares, included some of what you might call the usual suspects and some surprises.
Topping the list were the usual suspects (smart phones), led by the Google Pixel XL and the Huawei Mate 9. The kickoff prize, the Huawei Mate 9, featured a 5.9-inch full HD (1920 x 1080) screen and 64GB of expandable internal storage. The phone is powered by the HiSilicon Kirin 960 64-bit octa-core processor, with an ARM Cortex-A73 and ARM Cortex-A53 cores plus a ARM Mali-G71 graphics process, the first of the Bifrost architecture cores.
The Pixel XL, shipping with Android 7.1 “Nougat” and supporting the Google Daydream virtual reality platform, is powered by a quad-core 2150MHz Kryo processor in the Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 MSM8996 Pro. Its graphics processor is an Adreno 530.
So you’d expect brand-new smart phones to top the hot list for the technical audience. But network-attached storage devices? Yep. Those came in as the third and fourth most-popular in the HEXUS Epic Giveaway.
No. 3 was a four-bay DS416 NAS, running a dual-core ARM Cortex-A15, and an award-winning RT1900ac router, leveraging a Broadcom BCM58622 ARM Cortex-A9 processor with embedded gigabit switch with two BCM43460 radios.
Coming in at No. 5 was cute, cute as in the Omate Yumi robot. It’s cute until you start considering some of the engineering involved. The device has touch-screen capability (and is obviously connected to the Internet), offers dual stereo speakers for playing music but it also can be voice activated using the Amazon Alexa technology.
And as I’ve often written about how mobile phone design has influenced other areas of electronics, this is the case with the Yumi, which is essentially a smart phone. It includes a 1.3GHz quad-core Cortex-A53 processor, 1GB of LPDDR3 RAM, 8GB of onboard storage, dual-band WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, an HDMI port and a micro-USB port.
Next to these high-runners, most of the other ARM-powered prizes in the month-long HEXUS Epic Giveaway all clustered together in popularity, including the Amazon Echo Dot, Fitbit Charge 2, and home-security systems from Cocoon and Y-Cam.
Those were the most popular on social, and the HEXUS Epic Giveaway lingers for another few days, with prizes still to be claimed including the Oclu Action Camera, an ASUS RT-AC5300 and an NVIDIA Shield TV.
Related stories:
--What’s inside a Google Pixel XL (and how you can win one)
--Amazon Echo Dot, Huawei Mate 9 among HEXUS Epic Giveaway prizes