Displaying items by tag: Mobile

Microsoft has made Windows Phone 8 semi-official at its Windows Phone Developer Conference happening right now. We call it semi-official because right now Microsoft is not showing off any hardware running it. They are waiting to have that announcement later. So while the OS is out of the bag and we have some new information no one has made any specific announcements of support for the new OS.

So the rumors about a “Facebook” phone have begun to pop up again. This time they are claiming that the arrival date of the social device will be sometime next year. These rumors are being fueled by other rumors (which is how you do it) and all seem to back up the possibility that Facebook might indeed be looking to try and enter the smart phone arena. How smart this decision is remains to be seem, but for now let’s just take a look at some of the supporting evidence.

Back when Facebook bought Instagram for a cool $1 billion it was widely thought that Facebook did this to be able to compete in the mobile market against companies like Google, Apple and a few others. In fact Facebook even made the comments that they were not good at mobile and needed to figure it out as it was a week spot. Now only a few weeks after the purchase Facebook has released their own camera app that can add similar filters to your pictures in the same way that Instagram could.

Although we reported on this last year it seems that AMD is intent on reminding all of us about their new strategy. In comments to BloombergBusinessweek CEO Rory Read has made the comment that AMD will no longer compete head to head with Intel in the CPU market. This time Read qualifies his comment with a statement that is sure to be put in the same category of Bill Gates’ famous (although misattributed) “640K ought to be enough for anybody.”

For those of you that are pinning for the Asus Padfone (we know we are) there is some good news (well sort of). Since it was first shown off at CES 2010 (in render form) there has been talk about battery life. Now that we have seen what devices like the Transformer and Transformer prime can do there has been even more speculation on the topic. Well is seems that Asus decided to let Engadget in on some battery performance numbers.

The Mobile World Congress kicked off today in Barcelona Spain. This is one of the yearly events that help to shape the mobile technology world. We have already seen some information slip even before the conference kicked off as companies like HTC tried to get the jump on the competition and rumors popped up about Asus’ next generation Transformer.

So Microsoft is on a push to get out as much information as they can about Windows 8. This new operating system represents a massive change for Microsoft and not just in the way the new OS will function, but also in the manner they are interacting with the public. This is evident in almost everything they are doing, from the building Windows 8 Blog to the public statements, demos and interviews that are happening frequently.

Microsoft has actually come clean on plans for Windows 8 on ARM. It seems that despite some earlier concerns that Microsoft would cripple the OS for non-X86/64 systems it will indeed release Windows 8 with support for Office. However, before you starting thinking about Office 2007 or 2010 on that Windows 8 ARM tablet you might want to know that the Office support will only be in Office 15 (Office 2007 is Version 12 and 2010 is Office 14 Microsoft skipped over Office version 13).

If you were looking for any additional confirmation that AMD is reorganizing for a major rally then the announcement that they are canceling CPUs before they are launched might be of interest for you. It appears that AMD will be outright cancelling their Krishna and Wichita 28nm CPUs. The stated reason, Global Foundries will not be ready with 28nm in time.

With all the news about the major ARM players like Samsung, nVidia, Texas Instruments etc. It is nice to finally hear the news about one of the largest, yet least talked about. At one time if you bought a cell phone (this was before the Smart Phone age) you had Qualcomm under the hood (and in many cases AMD as well). However, lately all we hear about is Hummingbird and Tegra (with an occasional mention of Snapdragon). That is until yesterday.

Qualcomm has announced that they are prepping to launch a new series of 28nm processors which they claim are 50% faster than “other ARM based offerings in the mobile CPU market”. This is very healthy boast to say the least. Right now all of this is in the pre-production stages so we do not have any phones or designs to tell you about, but we do have a little bit of information about the processor itself.

The new proc will be dubbed the S4 MSM 8960 and will hit the market as a dual core offering with a quad core to follow. Instead of an on/off switch for power the CPU is going to be built with something like a dial. This will allow for dynamic power steps to be sent to the processor. I have not heard of this being done quite this way so it should be interesting to see how it works out.

Inside the 8960 you will have a new GPU, this is the Adreno 225 which is a unified shader design (think AMD/ATi) and will support DX9.x and possibly shader model 3. Now we wonder what kind of radio they are going to build into this as that has been one of Qualcomm’s strengths (the Cellular and Wireless Radio built into the SoC) and something that Samsung and nVidia have been trying to get done as well.  We know that nVidia has been buying up wireless technology patents with the hopes integrating their own radios into their Tegra SoC, but have not announced anything on that just yet.

For now it would seem that Qualcomm has taken a step out front in the performance arena. We do think that their GPU offering is probably not up to the same standard as nVidia’s Tegra, but then again many people looking to buy a phone do not need it to play graphics heavy games… I mean really, how much GPU does Angry Birds or words with friends use?

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