Hasta La Gadget!

You may have noticed a trend recently — pairing slightly less powerful cores that sip power, with more robust ones that can chug through demanding applications. NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 will be packing an underclocked fifth core, while ARM’s big.LITTLE initiative matches a highly efficient 28nm A7 with the beefy A15. Now Freescale is planning to use the same trick, but you won’t find its asymmetrical CPUs in your next tablet or smartphone. Its platform, which marries a Cortex M4 to a Cortex A5, isn’t meant to compete with the latest Snapdragon. These chips will find homes in factories and in-dash infotainment systems which have increasingly sophisticated UIs, but don’t need to push thousands of polygons. Software development tools will land before this quarter is out and the first batch of silicon will be announced in Q1 of 2012. Looks like the era of “dual-core” meaning two identical cores has officially come to an end.

Continue reading Freescale joins ARM A5 and M4 cores at the hip for performance and power savings

Freescale joins ARM A5 and M4 cores at the hip for performance and power savings originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 17:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What do you do when you’ve already created a Sensation? If you’re HTC, you repackage that lightning in a slightly different chassis, turn the volume (read: speed) up to 11 and borrow a bit of optical wizardry to add that new smartphone smell. All key elements that can be found in the DNA of the company’s latest imperatively named product offering — the Amaze 4G. Clearly, HTC’s throwing caution to the fickle consumer winds here, raising the bar for Android users’ expectations and mixing in just enough razzle dazzle to win over those hard earned geek dollars. So, what’s the hook this time ’round? No, not Beats — that’s for its Euro stepcousin, the Sensation XE. Here, the main attraction is this handset’s ability to surf along T-Mobile’s HSPA+ 42Mbps network. That’s right, Magenta’s tiptoeing into LTE speed territory and you’ve got Sense 3.0 to help pilot that wireless ride. Join us after the break as we peel back the layers of this unibodied mobile onion.

Continue reading HTC Amaze 4G review

HTC Amaze 4G review originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 15 Oct 2011 12:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This just in: Microsoft is ready to take the plunge into mobile modernity… at its own pace. During a recent interview with All Things D, Windows Phone President Andy Lees revealed a few details about Redmond’s future crop of handsets, which will apparently include both LTE capabilities and dual-core processors. The exec confirmed that LTE-equipped devices are indeed in the pipeline, but declined to specify whether they’d hit the market this year or next. Turns out, Microsoft wants to wait until current LTE networks prove capable of supporting more power-efficient smartphones. “The first LTE phones were big and big [users] of the battery,” Lees said. “I think it’s possible to do it in a way that is far more efficient, and that’s what we will be doing.”

Lees was similarly opaque about Microsoft’s plans to incorporate dual-core CPUs into its mobile lineup, saying only that they’re on the way. According to him, however, even single-core Windows Phones can hold their own against the dual-core competition: “They’re all single core, but I suspect that they will be faster in usage than any dual-core phone that you put against it, and that’s the point.” Lees went on to wax Panglossian about Microsoft’s strategy, claiming that the absence of LTE and dual-core processing doesn’t necessarily mean that his company is behind the times. “I think that what our strategy is is to put things in place that allow us to leapfrog, and I think that’s how we’ve gone from worse [sic] browser to the best browser,” he explained, “and I think the same is true with hardware.” Check out the full interview for yourself, at the source link below.

Shocker! Microsoft to produce dual-core, LTE Windows Phones, other modern things originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 10 Oct 2011 13:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It may not be the biggest phone reveal coming in the next 24 hours, but leaked details had already piqued our interest in LG’s next big thing. The Optimus LTE’s screen rivals Apple’s Retina Display at 326ppi and that high-definition sharpness is slathered on a 4.5-inch AH-IPS display. The sizable 1830mAh battery should be enough to keep the phone ticking over despite these high-end specs, which include a confirmed 1.5GHz dual-core CPU and eight megapixel camera. Will we get to see it on these shores? We’re not sure of its travel itinerary after it reaches Korea, but we’d love to see this and Samsung’s latest LTE wares tussle for our affections.

Continue reading LG Optimus LTE now official: High-speed data alongside a high-definition IPS display

LG Optimus LTE now official: High-speed data alongside a high-definition IPS display originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 06:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Australian carrier Telstra has revealed this 4.5-inch colossus from HTC, and the above picture from CNET shows it’s likely to arrive under its Holiday moniker. This is the first LTE smartphone announced for Australia, while something similarly tall, dark and Android recently arrived in Korea as the HTC Raider 4G. CNET reports specs that tally with that other model: the big screen is qHD and the power comes from a dual-core 1.5GHz CPU coupled with 1GB of RAM. Like the Raider, the Holiday appears to be running Sense 3.0, not the refreshed 3.5 iteration that debuted on the Rhyme, and it looks primed to be one of the first handsets to launch on AT&T’s brand new 4G network. So, expect to hear more from Ma Bell on this “titanic” rival soon.

HTC Holiday spotted sunning itself on Australian shores originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Sep 2011 16:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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