Hasta La Gadget!

Samsung is aiming to launch its next flagship, the Galaxy S 4 and the replacement of the Galaxy S III, as early as February 2013, execs reportedly claim, maintaining its pressure on Apple’s iPhone. The new phone will be revealed at Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona, an unnamed executive from Samsung told The Korea Times, with a global release in March; the biggest change could be a bigger screen, now up to 5-inches according to the insider source.

That would move the Galaxy S 4 further toward “phablet” territory; the existing Galaxy S III uses a 4.8-inch screen, itself a sizable step up from the 4.3-inch panel on the Galaxy S II. Samsung is tipped to stick with its own OLED technology, unsurprisingly, though it’s said to be undecided whether it will use a flexible panel of some sort – which could be curved around the phone’s chassis or simply bent to better suit the curvature of the user’s face – after Samsung’s display division encountered production issues.

Other specifications are expected to include LTE and Samsung’s own Exynos quadcore chipsets, rather than the mixture of Exynos and Qualcomm Snapdragon processors on the current phone. As with the current model, it will run Android.

The new phone could also feature a significantly higher resolution camera than the 8-megapixel example Samsung’s current high-end range tops out at. The company is believed to have intended to use a 13-megapixel camera in the recently announced Galaxy Note II, but had its plans scuppered when LG monopolized sensor supplies for its own upcoming Optimus G.

“Samsung wants to keep its one-year product schedule and the Galaxy S4 will be the first to match that strategy” a local Samsung partner apparently told the Korean paper. “The S4 will see some external changes but retain its popular rectangular shape with rounded corner concept.”

According to the sources, Samsung’s ambitious timetable was settled upon three days after Apple’s iPhone 5 event last week, with the company hoping that a refresh of its flagship after just nine months will prove suitably compelling in contrast to the iOS 6 handset. Third-party figures suggested the Galaxy S III surpassed the iPhone 4S in US sales in August, the first time Apple’s device had been eclipsed, though the milestone was swiftly followed by the reveal of the iPhone 5.

[via The Next Web]

Samsung Galaxy S4 tipped to chase iPhone 5 with March 2013 release is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Four days before the iPhone 5 is sold in participating retail stores and we already have some New Yorkers starting to line up for the iPhone 5. Four days! I wonder how much productivity is lost in the respective offices that these New Yorkers hold because of a smartphone launch. This line refers to Apple’s flagship store on New York’s 5th Avenue, but four days might not be too early as CNET reported on a handful of followers who already started to queue since last Friday itself, which is one whole week prior to the iPhone 5’s release.

Needless to say, sleeping bags and collapsible chairs will be a common sight around the flagship Apple store in that part of the world. If you happen to be on the lookout for a new iPhone, would you be one of those who would be lining up as well? After all, online stocks are already sold out while hitting a new pre-order record within an hour, and estimated shipping times of the iPhone 5 was also pushed back by a couple of weeks.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: iPhone 5 materials estimated to cost $168, Verizon enables cellular FaceTime use regardless of data plan,

For all the noise that was made around the relative lack of novelty with the iPhone 5, it’s fair to say that most people will probably agree on the fact that it is a faster phone, and not in a small way. Without running proper benchmarks, we’re not sure if it is really “2X faster” than the previous one but it is obviously faster.

One of the first theories to emerge was that Apple was using the ARM A15 core design instead of the ARM A9 design that was integrated to the Apple A4 and A5 chips. I know, the naming scheme is confusing, so to put this in context, ARM’s A9 and A15 core designs are CPU blocks, which can be integrated into Apple’s (or other) chips that also contain graphics processors, video processors etc. A full chip like the Apple A6 is called a “system-on-a-chip” or SoC (learn more about SoCs). Qualcomm’s Snapdragon , NVIDIA’s Tegra and TI’s OMAP are other well-known SoCs. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: iPhone 5 held back by… dogma, The unibody iPhone,

During the iPhone 5 announcement, Apple mentioned the new phone would have its own new chip, the A6. Specific specs were sparse then, but AnandTech did some sleuthing and found the custom chip packs 1GB of RAM, and 33% more peak memory bandwidth than the iPhone 4S, which it will need for its high-res screen. More »

Unsurprisingly, Apple left us in the dark regarding some specifics of the iPhone 5 upon its release. Thankfully, the good folks over at Anandtech have done a bit of digging into those numbers you see bordering Apple’s Apple A6 SoC, definitively figuring out that Cupertino’s latest phone packs in a total 1GB of Samsung-sourced memory. The site clocks the DRAM inside at 1,066Mhz, noting that it’s comprised of “two 512MB dies in a dual-channel LPDDR2 package with 32 bits per channel.” Further, Anandtech lists the the speed of the iPhone 5’s memory at 8,528MB/sec — an ample 33 percent boost over the 6,400MB/sec rating for the RAM in the iPhone 4S, but well below the 12,800 MB/sec needed to drive the new iPad’s bandwidth-hungry screen resolution.

Beyond that, the site believes that the A6 is Apple’s first truly in-house creation, as it’s using math units too new to be found in a ARM Cortex-A9 architecture (like the A5 or A5X) but reportedly isn’t a match for the soon-to-be-released Cortex-A15. If true, the implication is significant — it suggests Apple is taking the more aggressive path of a chip designer like Qualcomm and custom-tailoring large parts of its processor designs to get the speed it wants on a more exacting schedule. That’s a quick summation of the details; hit up the source links below if you want the explanation in full geek speak.

Jon Fingas contributed to this post.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

Anandtech: Apple iPhone 5 features 1GB of RAM, A6 is a custom SoC originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 15 Sep 2012 23:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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