Hasta La Gadget!

We don’t have any hard details yet, but Computerworld reports that Nokia’s planning a busy 2011, with four to five updates to the Symbian UI on tap, as well as dual-core phones. The information comes courtesy of Nokia senior manager Gunther Kottzieper, who gave a presentation at the 2010 Internation Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing earlier today — a slide labeled “Nokia Symbian 2011 focus areas” indicated that a Q1 Symbian update will include over 50 features, including a more intuitive browser, while second- and third-quarter updates will add “a new look and feel for the user interface, a more flexible home screen, an updatable HTML5 browser and an easier software update experience.” A hardware-related slide tipped upcoming 1GHz phones with more graphics memory in the second or third quarter, as well as dual-core phones and something called a “true zoom camera” in late 2011 or early 2012. (We’re guessing that means an optical zoom, which would be just wild on a mobile phone.) Ignore this morning’s E7 delay and all of that sounds like evidence of renewed focus at Nokia under new management — and it also sounds like Nokia taking over Symbian development might have lit some serious fires. We’re dying to look at these slides ourselves — we’ll keep digging and let you know.

Nokia to revamp Symbian UI, ship dual-core phones in 2011 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Dec 2010 09:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Phones and tablets based on TI’s first production OMAP4 processor — the OMAP4430 — won’t even be on the market until early next year, but TI’s already planning ahead with the announcement of an upgraded chip that promises a 50 percent boost in overall performance. The new OMAP4440 can send its two Cortex-A9-based cores as high as 1.5GHz, while the 4430 tops out at 1GHz; TI says that means we should expect a 1.25x improvement in graphics performance, a 30 percent decline in webpage load time, and 1080p playback performance that doubles the slowpoke (comparably speaking, anyway) 4430. The company expects to sample these little speed demons to manufacturers in the first quarter of next year with volume shipment coming in the second half, itching to do battle with Samsung’s Orion; in the meantime, we suppose your 4430 will have to do. Follow the break for the press release.

Continue reading TI’s OMAP4440 processor brings two blazing Cortex-A9 cores to the table

TI’s OMAP4440 processor brings two blazing Cortex-A9 cores to the table originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Dec 2010 11:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Unfortunately, the crazy rumors that Google’s Nexus S would ship with a dual-core Orion processor didn’t pan out, which means we’re still waiting for a smartphone to ship with honest-to-goodness multicore silicon of any sort; it’s still unclear just how soon we’re going to see that wild dream come to fruition, but RIM’s Mike Lazaridis is talking like he wants to take the lead in making it happen. At D:Dive Into Mobile this evening, Waterloo’s outspoken co-CEO went on record that they’ll be taking the PlayBook’s QNX platform to smartphones just “as soon as [he has] dual core baseband CPUs,” though power consumption remains a limiting factor. At any rate, RIM seems to be fully acknowledging now both that QNX is a little too beefy for today’s smartphones and that BlackBerry OS isn’t quite beefy enough, which leaves these guys in a bit of a pinch until the dual-core revolution takes hold.

RIM’s Mike Lazaridis: QNX coming to BlackBerry phones when dual-core processors are ready originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Dec 2010 20:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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By the time Qualcomm’s 1.5GHz QSD8672 Snapdragon finally makes it to market, it might be obsolete — the company just announced that the new 28nm dual-core MSM8960 system-on-a-chip will have five times the performance and consume 75 percent less power than the original Snapdragon when it arrives in 2011. It’s got the usual WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth and FM radio modules but also a multi-mode LTE / 3G modem too, and reportedly four times the graphical muscle on board. Speaking of graphics, Qualcomm seperately took the time to detail a new GPU: the Qualcomm Adreno 300 series, which will allegedly offer the gaming performance of an Xbox 360 or PS3. We’d say “We’ll believe it when we see it,” but that would imply doubt — the reality is that we just want to feast our eyes on mobile gaming bliss as soon as humanly possible.

[Thanks, PhineasJW]

Qualcomm teases 28nm dual-core Snapdragons, pixel-punching Adreno 300 GPU originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Nov 2010 02:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Want some specificity about LG’s super-duper tablet roadmap? Last we heard from the Korean tech giant, it was canning plans for a Froyo slate and looking forward to a more suitable iteration of Android, which a senior official at the company has today clarified to mean Honeycomb, describing it as the “tablet PC-version” of the OS. He’s even gone beyond the call of PR duty in placing a release schedule for the 8.9-inch LG Pad in the first quarter of 2011, boasting that it’ll come with a dual-core Tegra 2 chip inside. That sounds terribly delicious to us, as does the note that LG has worked hard to accommodate the needs and wants of European and North American consumers — the release window is explicitly said to be for both domestic and overseas markets.

Update: We’ve just heard back from LG on the matter and the company says it has nothing official to tell us. It’d seem whoever the cited official in this piece is, he was dishing details that LG doesn’t want the world to know yet. LG’s PR team has also pulled a tweet about this story, ostensibly to cover its tracks.

LG Pad coming in Q1 2011, with Android Honeycomb, dual-core Tegra 2, and 8.9-inch screen originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Nov 2010 06:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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