Android For Digital Signage: A Closer Look At Navori’s QL Solution
April 18, 2013 by Dave Haynes
This is the fifth in a running series of closer looks at digital signage solution providers who have started working with the Android operating system and low-cost, ultra-small ARM processors.
At least 20 companies have introduced products based on the open-source Android operating system that is very widely used for smart devices like handsets and tablets, all of them using CPUs based on ARM reference designs. Most smartphones and tablets use ARM.
It is likely that much of the industry will shift to ARM-based devices using Android or Linux in the next 1-3 years because ARM devices now rival the processing power of lower cost x86 personal computing devices, but at a fraction of the cost and, in most cases, size.
Navori
Navori has been around the digital signage sector forever, and established a very solid presence globally. Progress in the US and Canada has been a little patchier, but the Swiss company has a presence in Montreal and a new Android product it no doubt hopes will create some buzz and business.
The company announced several weeks ago that it had ported its platform – which was based for many years on Windows – to also run on the Google Android operating system. The released products were the result of two years of development work, going at it long before many people were looking at the Android OS as a viable platform for anything other smartphones.
Now the company – having tested a bench-load of low-cost players – says it has a set-up that does everything its Windows players do, and a back-end that allows users to transparently manage both Microsoft Windows and Android player hardware. The QL Stix player settled on is the sort of quasi-PC device users just plug into the second HDMI port on a monitor. These devices could start showing up en masse when Dell releases a consumer-grade version as early as this summer.
While some Android solutions are largely based on calling and caching content from a website, Navori says its solution is a full native player.
Navori and Android
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