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ARM CEO not impressed by Intel's 'Medfield' chips for smartphones, tablets

By Katie Marsal

Published: 10:22 AM EST (07:22 AM PST)

The chief executive of ARM, which supplies the reference designs for Apple's custom chips found in the iPhone and iPad, has said he doesn't view Intel's newly unveiled smartphone and tablet chips as competitive.

ARM Holdings Chief Executive Warren East said in an interview with Reuters at the Consumer Electronics Show this week that Intel's latest Atom-based mobile chips are "good enough," but don't match up with ARM's reference designs.

"They (Intel) have taken some designs that were never meant for mobile phones and they've literally wrenched those designs and put them in a power-performance space which is roughly good enough for mobile phones," he said.

When it was developing the iPad, Apple originally utilized Intel's low-power Atom processor, but ultimately determined that the Atom wasn't efficient enough to run its touchscreen tablet. Instead, the company developed its own custom silicon in the form of the A4 processor, which is based on ARM's designs.

With most mobile devices now powered by ARM's low-power, low cost chips, Intel is attempting to muscle its way into a market where its presence has been limited, particularly compared to the traditional computing landscape it has dominated for years.

At CES, Intel unveiled its new Atom Z2460 "Medfield" platform designed for smartphones and tablets. Motorola Mobility and Lenovo also announced plans to build devices based on Intel's new Atom mobile processor.

As Intel looks to gain ground in the smartphone and tablet space, ARM is poised to chip away at Intel's control of the traditional computing market. That's because the next major version of Microsoft's operating system, Windows 8, will offer compatibility with machines powered by ARM-based processors.

There was even a rumor last May that Apple had secretly built a prototype MacBook Air powered by the same A5 processor found in the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S. It was said that Apple officials were impressed by the results, as the test machine performed "better than expected."

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NVIDIA has unveiled the world’s first Quad-Core Tegra 3 processor for tablets and mobile phones. This is said to offer PC-class performance levels, better battery life and better mobile experiences (Better web experience, faster applications and multitasking) in tablets and mobile phones.This was previously named, Project Kal-El that was confirmed by the Nvidia CEO in AsiaD last month.

The Tegra 3 processor has 12-core GeForce GPU that would offer 3x the graphics performance of Tegra 2, and up to 61 percent lower power consumption that would offer 12 hours of battery life for HD video playback. This is based on Variable SMP (vSMP) Multi-Core CPU Architecture for Low Power and High Performance. This is designed to use less power while running in four cores than dual-core processors.

It shuts down its 4 cores while performing tasks that require less power consumption like, music, playing back video or updating background data and uses its companion core. It switches to the cores from the companion cores while performing heavy tasks like web browsing, multitasking and gaming.

It offers full game-controller support that would let the consumers to play games on their tablet or super phone, or connect to big screen HDTVs for a truly immersive experience and offers 3D Vision technology and automatically converts OpenGL applications to stereo 3D, so consumers can experience 3D on a big screen 3D TV (via HDMI 1.4).

40 Tegra games are expected to be available by the end of 2011 and over 15 Tegra 3 games are under development for Tegra Zone. The Tegra 3 processor is in production and it is expected to be available in December 2011 starting with the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime with more devices in future. Developers can download Tegra 3 developer’s kit now.

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The video streaming platform has been on the tablets for some time now, but now Sony wants a simple music streaming app which can run on any of the Android tablets, which will also provide access to the cloud based music unlimited network. it will be attainable via download , an app for any Android tablet junkie to freak out on, though this app will be hitting on Sony Ericsson’s Tablet S first.

This is what Sony had to say: “As one of the largest digital entertainment services, Sony Entertainment Network aims to bring new ways for consumers to enjoy digital music and video,” said Tim Schaaff, President, Sony Network Entertainment. “The launch of the Music Unlimited service on Sony Tablet marks one of our many significant steps to satisfying the mobile demands of our current consumers while opening up our cloud-based music service to completely new audiences.”

The user can now navigate between album view and the inventory view, which is quite agile, and actualize playlists quicker and identify the related artists with much ease.  Now the service has been at hand for various Android smartphones for quite some time, the latest v1.2 app allows tablets to avail the service. The modernized application thus brings a very modified and harmonized user interface.

A 180-day trial of the Basic plan absolutely free at this moment for Sony Tablet S users. This exciting new service is also accessible in nine various nations with an elementary subscription at $3.99 monthly and the premium subscription at only $9.99 monthly.

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Have you ever wondered how well are the Android tablets selling?

According to the god father of Android, Andy Rubin , who provided a detail about it,  6 million tablets have been sold at AsiaD yesterday. We had previously heard that only 3.4 million Honeycomb tablets have been sold till now, from developer estimates, previously this month.  If these developer estimates were to be precise, that means that a little over half the Android tablets out there,  are Honeycomb.

Google is pitching out to get even more Android Tablets into the market. Yet, it is neither clear if the number of tablets Rubin offers includes only Honeycomb devices or earlier tablets that ran the smartphone version of the OS like the original Galaxy Tab, nor it’s clear if the developer estimate was veracious.

Google hopes that the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich will be a great motivator for Android tablet adoption. The revolutionary 4.0 version of Android will be for tablets and smartphones in one build, thus maintaining the ecosystem.

Source: Androidcommunity

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Want Netflix running on your Honeycomb tablet?

Have you been waiting for the ‘official’ support?

It’s available, accessible and ready to download in the Android Market.

Rejoice all you Honeycomb Tablet owners, as Netflix (the movie streaming service) has befittingly dropped an app that would support your tablets. But don’t get all excited as “Honeycomb Support” is comparatively different than “Honeycomb optimized”.  Now the Netflix app that has ‘unofficially’ exerted itself to almost every device and has been in existence for a very long time, every couple of months it releases and ‘official’ app to ceremoniously support the equipment. Although the features are dissatisfying and poor in quality, it is accessible to the Android Honeycomb Devices.  It has been proclaimed that the latest update does doubtlessly work on the Honeycomb devices, nevertheless, it is far from being god-sent (well, it is man-made).  Netflix 1.5.0 augments Android support to Latin America and Canada. For the first time and supports alternate sound, inscription and headings, along with Honeycomb support.

You can download the application from Android market by clicking on this link

Source: Androidguys

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We’ve seen Samsung going the aggressive way, and they are gaining a lot momentum in the mobile space. JK Shin,President of Samsung’s Mobile business told PCMAG at CES 2011 that they will be showcasing their new line up of devices mainly the Dual-Core phones and Tablets at MWC 2011 this year .

“We will continue to keep our technology leadership this year. In terms of dual-core applications, we already have a program, and next month at Mobile World Congress we will unveil it.In February at MWC, we will unveil our next-generation tablet device portfolio in detail.” Shin said.

Major players like LG, Motorola have already announced  tablets, smartphones and hotspots running the latest version of Android (ie 2.3) with some stunning specs (like phone’s running on dual-core processor, having 1GB RAM, Wi-Fi Direct etc.). Though Samsung has already announced some devices at CES, they haven’t had any groundbreaking products.

He also said

“We are in a position to supply 4G smartphones and tablets to all the carriers in the US”.

“We will continue to keep the partnership with Microsoft”.

“Samsung will take a major shift from 3G to 4G and from feature phones to smartphones, Shin said.

Samsung’s executive vice president and head of marketing DJ Lee said that the company expects to sell at least 10% more phones in 2011 than they did last year. They are concentrating more on capturing the smartphone market, rather than Feature phone market.

And as far as the tablet news is concerned, Mr. Omar Khan (Samsung’s Mobile’s Chief strategy) also noted that some of those tablets which are going to be announced at MWC may come in some new forms.

New forms? – Ie, New categories and New form factors, different convergence opportunities in terms of docking, and interoperability with consumer electronics,” he said.

So all that i can tell is Samsung has taken the right way by concentrating more on smartphones and tablets just like all other players. Announcing mobile products at an event like MWC makes more sense than at CES.

Looking forward to Samsung’s MWC press conference in Barcelona on Sunday, February 13. FoneArena will be there . Stay tuned for our live coverage  !

Source : PCMAG

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Google has just shown of the next major version of Android tailor made for Tablets called Honeycomb (Android 3.0 ) in a Video. There was some confusion if HoneyComb was Android 2.4 or 3.0  and now its clear that it’s 3.0. Also HoneyComb is  built entirely for tablet according to the Video you can watch below

The features of Android 3.0 HoneyComb showcased in the video are

Customizable homescreenRich Web Browser with support for TabsTablet optimized GmailRedesigned YoutubeGmail Video Calling3D Google MapsGoogle eBooks

What do you think of Android 3.0 ? Would you like to use it on a Tablet ?

We should be hearing more details soon !

We just heard about Android 2.3 with the launch of the Nexus S and some users are still waiting for an Android 2.2 update for their phones and Google is readying Android 3.0 .

Source: AndroidDevelopers

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The folks at Opera Software have shown a little preview of the upcoming Opera Mobile browser for tablets. They would be showcasing the first public preview of Opera for tablets at Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week. While we see an Android version in the video . we would love a native iPad app too !

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