This break saw a flurry of new technology being unveiled for the holiday season. We will go through some of the highlights and possibly go back to cover these in more depth when they finally land. The holiday season offered a large number of new phones and phone-related press, with many big names making moves to claim a stake in the new year.
The PlayStation Phone, officially called the Sony Ericsson Xperia, was shown off, shortly followed by the next PSP, called the NGP (it has a quad-core processor!). Google popped out with the Nexus S, while Samsung continued to roll out the Galaxy S series of phones (no relation).
On the Apple side of things, the next generation iPhone and iPad are rumored to have NFC (Near field communication) built in, and of course, the big ticket news, the iPhone 4 is coming to Verizon. Motorola came busting down doors with their new phone, the Atrix, which is certainly bringing some new features to the table, and will be asking competitors to step up their game.
This year we are going to see the rise of the super-phone, or alternatively, the super portable-device. Mobile chips have reached a new level of sophistication and power. Specifically, nVidia, Intel, AMD and ARM are all pushing out incredibly powerful chips that need little electrical power. Some are smaller than others, but they could all be in today’s smartphone form-factor.
Let’s start with nVidia. The Tegra 2 chipset is what we will see used in smartphones that will have supreme video processing power. It is smaller than a dime. LG is soon releasing the Optimus 2X, which is an Android phone that will feature 1080p video recording and playback. In a demo, the game Angry Birds was played on a giant projector via HDMI (yes, the phone has an HDMI port). The Motorola Atrix, which we will get to later, also features the Tegra 2.
Intel had a big hoopla over their latest and greatest platform, codenamed Sandy Bridge. It is the next iteration of the Core i3, i5 and i7 series of CPUs. It is smaller, cooler and faster. There is not much more you can ask for. Except Intel is also playing the video processing game now, too. They have, for the second time, built in the integrated GPU right on the same chip as the CPU. It’s a CPU/GPU combo chip! But what is remarkable about this one is that it is actually useful.
Intel has historically been notorious for having the worst in terms of integrated graphics. But that is starting to change with Sandy Bridge. Early benchmarks from 3rd-party reviewers are showing that it can play such games (which I know are dear to many hearts) as Starcraft II on low. This basically means it clears the proverbial bar. Intel is finally competing in the low-end graphics spaces with an integrated GPU; not only will everyone have a working chip, but they will also get the job done with less power consumption, which translates to better battery life, which I’m sure you don’t mind.
AMD couldn’t stand aside and watch Intel steal the show. They unveiled their own series of mobile and laptop chips, which are reportedly even lower power than Intel’s. Some say that AMD’s chips give better bang for the buck this time around, but it will be hard to say for sure until they start showing up in laptops and we get to see some real-world comparisons.
Finally, there is ARM. This year ARM graced us in a few ways, but the one that we will be talking about today is the chip that lies at the heart of the PSP2, namely the NGP. It looks mighty similar to the original PSP, though it now has two joysticks instead of one. It will be backwards compatible with downloadable PSP games, and will feature some killer features. ARM is supplying a quad-core Cortex-A9 processor, and there will be connectivity in the form of 3G and WiFi.
Also, there’s GPS and a rear-mounted touchpad, an accelerometer akin to the one in the Playstation Move, an electronic compass, and finally, two cameras, one on the front, and one on the back. How’s that for a killer list of features? Oh, and did I mention 5-inch OLED touchscreen at 960x544? Yeah this is made to rule, though what price we will pay is unclear. The company indicated that it would not be $599. Well, that’s not exactly much of a relief.
The big ticket item coming out of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was the Motorola Atrix. It is a phone which can dock to a 13.9mm thick laptop-like chassis which has an 11.6-inch screen, keyboard and battery, and nothing else. The phone itself is the only thing that is powering the system, and boy does it pack a punch.
The screen packs a 4-inch 960x540 display, with a 1GHz dual-core Tegra 2 processor with a whopping 1GB of RAM, fingerprint reader and a huge 1930mAh battery to juice it all. The phone docks behind the screen of the laptop, out of the way, and gives you a full desktop experience. This is a groundbreaking design feature. The phone becomes just another window on the desktop so you can use the phone with the trackpad and keyboard to text and access other features of the phone. And when you are done on the laptop, you pull out the phone and can continue right where you left off, and then when you return to your laptop, you’re back to your previous session.
You get a Mac OSX-like application dock, as well as full-fledged Firefox with Flash 10.1 support. As these super-phones continue developing, we will continue to see more uses for phones; eventually, we will be carrying around computers that happen to be able to make phone calls. The Motorala Atrix 4G is rumored to be priced at $150 with a 2-year contract, and will land March 1st.
We are moving forward at an unprecedented rate of technological development, and we can’t imagine where technology will be in ten years. With everything going wireless and increased processing power, data transfer capabilities and storage, we will have phones that have more storage than your laptops and desktops (on the order of several terabytes?), with processors that will leave your desktop in the dust.
We are getting 4G connection speeds (soon-ish, the true 4G isn’t here quite yet) and hundreds of gigabytes on our phones. In the near future, we will see phones with wireless charging and video transfer. The continued competition between the major manufacturers will bring us better devices and lower prices.
