Hasta La Gadget!

In its morning Keynote at IDF 2013, Intel has officially launched its Bay Trail system-on chip (SoC) that has been designed to compete with chips from Qualcomm or NVIDIA in mobile devices. A Bay Trail system can use up to four CPU cores and it will integrate Intel’s own graphics processor, which is a derivative of Intel’s HD graphics launched some time ago on the PC. Previously, Intel had licensed IP from Imagination technologies, which provides graphics core for Apple and many other mobile chip vendors.

Bay Trail is extremely important for Intel’s mobility business and at the moment the products built on this architecture are the Atom Z3700 Series and Z3600 Series. It can also be used in laptops and notebook, but will appear as “Pentium” (mostly quad-core) or “Celeron” (mostly dual-core) and if you had not noticed, Bay Trail uses the Intel Silvermont CPU core design. (more…)

Intel Bay Trail Chip For Power-Efficient “Full Windows” Tablets original content from Ubergizmo.

It was only about four months ago when CSL, Telstra’s part-owned operator behind Hong Kong’s one2Free and 1010 networks, showed off its 150Mbps LTE Cat 4 upgrade; but why stop there? Today, the same company gave us a glimpse of its upcoming 300Mbps LTE Advanced service, which is enabled by aggregating its 20MHz carriers at both its 1,800MHz and 2,600MHz LTE bands.

“The announcements in Korea and the announcements in Australia around LTE Advanced… the theoretical speed that they’re delivering is 150Mbps. What we’re talking about today is LTE-A300,” said Phil Mottram, CEO of CSL. “It’s definitely a first for Hong Kong, and it’s potentially a world-first in terms of being able to deliver these theoretical, maximum download speeds at 300Mbps.” %Gallery-slideshow83577%

Filed under: Wireless, Mobile

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As this author was fiddling with his Xiaomi Phone 2S (or MI2S) in bed ahead of Xiaomi’s big event tomorrow, he spotted something odd: a thumbnail of an unfamiliar device — next to the entry-level Red Rice aka Hongmi — in the company’s online store app. Since it’s a high-resolution image, we’re able to zoom into our screenshot (full version after the break) to see this Lumia-like design but with a flatter back. The long flash strip also suggests that this could be a beefed-up dual-LED flash module. Other than that, there’s not much else that we can pick up here.

Given the clock on this mysterious phone matches the 2pm start time of tomorrow’s event, we’re pretty certain that this is Xiaomi’s third-gen flagship device, the MI3; and it’ll likely be announced alongside the Xiaomi TV. We also recall seeing the same back cover leaked way back in February, and the side-by-side shot with the MI2 (embedded after the break) is pointing to a 5-inch screen for this new phone. Judging by the pattern so far, we bet it’ll use Qualcomm’s beastly Snapdragon 800 SoC to follow the 600 on the MI2S. Ultimately, it’ll be all about the price, which is likely to be no more than CN¥1,999 or about US$330 off contract.

While the above product thumbnail appears to be stuck in the cache on our MI2S, the same spot is occupied by the proper MI2S image in the same app on our MI2A. Talk about perfect timing, eh? Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have some sleep to catch up on — we don’t want to scare Hugo Barra with our panda eyes.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Having sat through Meizu’s entire launch event in Beijing, we have to admit: the new MX3 took us by surprise. We weren’t expecting much after knowing some of the key specs from the leaks, and to be frank, the Chinese company lost its way with the MX2; but Jack Wong’s team seems to have put its focus back in place with its latest flagship. First off, while the MX3 has preserved the predecessor’s metallic-rim design, Meizu has now managed to refine the manufacturing process to remove all the sharp edges, and boy does that new body feel good. The TOL (touch-on-lens) display may look odd with its 1,800 x 1,080 resolution, but it looked good on the demo units, and that 15:9 aspect ratio has some advantage for web browsing in portrait mode.

There were many other features that we couldn’t comment on based on our hands-on, such as the audio quality from the Wolfson chip and the image quality from the third-gen Sony 8-megapixel sensor, but the presence of these components suggests that Meizu may be headed back in the right direction. The number of improvements on the slick, Android 4.2-based Flyme 3.0 is also impressive, making it slightly more user-friendly (especially for first-timers) as well as more pleasing to the eye. It’ll just take some getting used to with Meizu’s own soft key approach (virtual buttons on a “Smart Bar” plus a capacitive home button). Much like the battery life and radio performance, we’ll only be able to properly comment on the software part over an extended period of usage, so do keep an eye out for our MX3 review in the near future. Oh, and we have a hands-on video after the break. %Gallery-slideshow77154%

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Since we have an LG G2 unit in the office and are working on the complete review, we have run some synthetic benchmark numbers to see where it stand in the overall mobile hardware landscape. Note that this is not using the final firmware, so the numbers may change by the time the phone is released on American networks. Ready? Here they are: (more…)

LG G2 Benchmarks: The Raw Numbers original content from Ubergizmo.