129: Red Star Tablet

"Boss, do you have any more ROC Phones here?"

"Oh, my old friend, I'm already sold out. You can wait a bit; I heard from above that stock will arrive in two days."

"Amazon is also showing as sold out, which is really giving me a headache. I wanted to buy one for my dear Salina. Maybe she would agree to spend some wonderful time in the wild with me if she received the phone."

A young man in casual clothes left the mobile phone megastore somewhat displeased, grumbling as he went.

His good friend Morel had taken a set of photos for his partner with a ROC Phone a few days ago. After the two spent a wonderful weekend together, although Morel was still a bit low on energy, he still excitedly shared how pleasant that weekend was.

Listening to Morel's story with some envy, he also wanted to buy a ROC Phone for the girlfriend he had just found, hoping to take their relationship a step further.

When he went to buy it on Amazon, the website showed it was sold out. After visiting several mobile phone megastores offline, he realized it was too difficult to buy a ROC Phone; the megastores around Paris didn't even have a single ROC Phone from China left.

The ROC Phone has been on sale for a month, and sales have exceeded 400,000 units!

Such news quickly spread on foreign websites. Unlike the frustration of stock shortages in the European market, netizens in the USA across the ocean were also very much looking forward to the phone going on sale in the USA.

Inside Red Star Company, everything was running in an orderly fashion. The newly produced kunpeng phone 2nd generation, pre-installed with the international version of Starlight OS, was rushed to the European continent to take root in that unfamiliar land.

With the Spring Festival approaching, it meant that 2013 was truly coming to an end. After contributing 27 million in sales, the shining 2 finally reached the end of its historical mission.

This was Red Star's highest-volume model, so its replacement was naturally a very important matter. The Shine 3 was equipped with MediaTek's latest octa-core processor, the 6592T, a 4.7-inch IPS fully laminated 720p resolution screen, an 8-megapixel back-illuminated camera, a sensor from OV, and a 5-element lens module from TG.

The battery also became 2500mAh. The standard version still featured a 1+8GB memory combination, while the high-end version featured a 2+16GB memory combination.

The charging power remained unchanged, still 18W fast charging.

Due to the leakage and heating issues with MediaTek's 8-core processor process last year, MediaTek also launched the 6592T processor at the end of 2013. By switching to a new process and reducing the clock speed, the heating of this processor improved compared to last year.

At first glance, the configuration of the Shine 3 didn't seem to have much of an upgrade; in fact, the improvement wasn't particularly large. It's a sub-1000 yuan phone, after all—what more could you ask for? The starting price for the 1+8GB version was still 799, and the 2+16GB version was 899.

The larger-screen Shine Note 2 was also under development, but the replacement wouldn't happen until July, so there was no rush for now.

Currently, the departments with the heaviest development tasks were the Starlight OS department and the newly established tablet department.

In fact, the tablet development plan had already started last year. As an important link in the ecosystem, tablet system adaptation was the hardest to do. Tablets using the Android System found it difficult to perform system-level application adaptation on large screens, and the functions of android tablets weren't significantly different from android phones.

One could easily turn a tablet into just a large-sized phone.

This is why people habitually divide tablets into two categories: one is Fruit's iPad series, and the other is "other tablets."

In many people's eyes, an android tablet is just a large-screen android phone that can only be used for watching videos, playing games, and binge-watching shows. Of course, a tablet being a large phone isn't a huge problem; the biggest issue for android tablets is the ecosystem.

The early android tablet ecosystem was unstable, with many functions on phones and tablets overlapping yet unable to interact with each other.

Interaction between tablets and phones became a major flaw of android tablets. This flaw was very serious. In later years, Huawei was the first to focus on this issue, increasing the interaction experience between phones and tablets as much as possible at the system level, which allowed Huawei's tablets to gradually gain traction.

As for Xiaomi, if the tablet market hadn't heated up again later, Xiaomi's tablets would have died out after four generations.

Fruit, the leader of the tablet market, launched the iPad Air series in 2013, which was their third-generation product. It was excellent in terms of system smoothness and applications. Moreover, Chen Chen knew that Fruit would include professional-level design features on their tablets, making them favored by many designers.

Many designers and professionals loved using Fruit's iPad for professional design. Coupled with the fact that Fruit tablets could interact with Apple phones, the productivity of these users could be significantly improved.

To the point that later, whenever "productivity" was mentioned regarding android tablets, netizens would mock them: "What productivity do you need on an android tablet? Just be a good instant noodle lid."

Whether a tech product is excellent shouldn't be judged by how high its configuration is, nor by how beautiful its sentiment or brand story is. There is only one point: see if it is useful enough and if its productivity is useful to you.

Not only in terms of ecosystem and interaction, but also because Fruit's peripheral products were more abundant, and their service life far exceeded that of android tablets from the same period. Chen Chen was even more aware that this year, Fruit would launch the A8 processor based on the 20nm process, and it would be a 64-bit processor.

Not only that, this processor also integrated a dual-core M8 co-processor, which could help the main processor share some simple tasks, thereby reducing power consumption.

Chen Chen had fully experienced the changes in the android tablet ecosystem and system in his previous life, so he naturally knew that if Red Star wanted to make a good tablet, they had to work hard on the system level.

They couldn't just blindly copy the Starlight OS from phones with simple modifications and put it on the tablet.

At the same time, the interaction experience and supporting products also had to be excellent. Chen Chen would never allow the Red Star tablet created in this pioneering era of android tablets to be just a large-screen phone.

Chen Chen hoped that his own tablet could one day surpass Fruit's.

To provide the tablet with more powerful performance, Chen Chen was even willing to delay progress to wait for the mass production of Red Star's 20nm processor.