CES 2020 was an amazing event with over 175k technology professionals around the world converging in Las Vegas. The event saw who’s who of the technology world including Apple, Amazon, Samsung, Lenovo, MediaTek, Sony and more. As promised, the event had groundbreaking technologies to showcase from foldable laptops, to display screens with soundwave technology, robots and 8k televisions.
While Toyota came up with a prototype of Woven City (community of the future fuelled by driverless cars) and a plan to build it near Mount Fuji, Japan, Lenovo showed off its Thinkpad X1 Fold and Dell showed off two foldables, the Concept Ori and the Concept Duet. Sony unveiled their first concept car at CES 2020 and Canon was in the spotlight with their latest DSLR. There were other products such as smart glasses to help people with dyslexia, companies leveraging soundwave technology to create touch interfaces, and earbuds to sense blood pressure!
But what did CES 2020 mean for Android dedicated device fleets?
The highlight for Esper was the announcement of a partnership with MediaTek to help customers create purpose-built Android devices. Our collaboration is focused on making it as easy to create a custom Android device as it is to build the corresponding Android app!
This lowers the bar for building tailored Android-based kiosks, POS devices, digital signage, and custom use case tablets. Engineering teams will be able to apply the existing designs available through MediaTek’s ecosystem to lower NRE, reduce risk and time-to-market while having superior per-unit pricing and manufacturing capabilities from small lot to high volume.
One key aspect is delivering Esper Foundation for Android on MediaTek hardware. At CES we demonstrated the Innocomm SB30 built with MediaTek’s economical i300A chipset powering a consumer Kiosk running Esper Foundation for Android.
Esper At CES 2020 With MediaTek
With Esper Foundation for Android, customers can drop ship devices from the manufacturing plant directly to their end customers without the need for technicians. Just turn on the device at the designated location and it automatically enrolls into Esper and provisions with all the device settings and applications needed for the solution. Frictionless yet secure remote diagnostics capabilities work out-of-the-box, including remote view, remote control, and secure remote ADB.
The ROM image contains only what the customer needs – no useless bloatware consuming system resources and network bandwidth, and greatly reduces penetration vectors tightening down on the device’s security. Additionally, security patches and updates are quickly passed through from Esper as they are made available by Google, yet are controlled through Esper’s update windowing capability to ensure devices are updated during specified off hours putting the customer in control rather than at the whim of an OEM.
Esper Foundation for Android was showcased with our customer, Bobly, in the Colgate booth. Using the kiosk Colgate is kickstarting demand for their new Colgate Plaqless Pro Toothbrush. Attendees lined up to use the Kiosk and in return receive a digital discount coupon for the new toothbrush with Colgate collecting a strong lead through great consumer experience. You may see these kiosks popping up in retail outlets and dentist offices across the country driving new customer engagements. An efficient operation is made possible by using Esper Foundation for Android combined with Esper’s application and device management platform.
Building innovative and engaging consumer experiences requires an agile application development process with continuous integration and delivery of new software to these purpose-built devices. That’s why Esper introduced our Pipeline capabilities. Using the Esper Pipeline feature customers can ensure a smooth deployment of actions, including new versions of apps installed on dedicated devices on large fleets by defining stages spanning installations, tests, operations, and wait times that are then executed when a defined trigger occurs. Only after successfully clearing the defined stage on test devices will the action get applied to production devices. Our initial implementation is focused on application installation, bringing increased rigor and lower risk to the challenging process of updating an application fleet. Over the course of the next few months we’ll be adding pipeline capabilities covering all controls available through Esper. Give it a try by signing up for a free trial on Esper!
CES 2020 is in the books, and with it, we look forward to helping customers build, deploy, and maintain massive device fleets delivering new consumer experiences and improved operational efficiencies for businesses using Android-based fleets around the world.
