Sci/Tech Android-based smart phones take on iPhone with next gen quad-core phones

[MrBrooks]

Android phones have edged out the iPhone to become the most popular smartphone in the UK - with 2.5million more users. The number of handsets operating with Google software hit 11million while smartphone ownership extended to more than half the country. Some 36.9 per cent of smartphone users own an Android, with 28.5 per cent - or 8.5million people - using an iPhone. A total of 18.1 per cent a BlackBerry, according to a study by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

Although, with Apple likely to release the next version of its iPhone this year, any lead the Android offerings now have in speed may not last long. The most lauded of the three quad-core phones is the HTC One, which includes a massive 4.7in screen and an 8 megapixel camera with its own image processor.

Android takes the fight to iPhone with trio of next generation quad-core smartphones that are TWICE as fast

HTC, LG and Huawei all showcased the new technology – which will be released later this year – at the Mobile World Congress fair in Barcelona.

www.dailymail.co.uk

 

[Icyculyr]

"Android" is not a smartphone, it's an OS that runs on more than 50 smartphones. It's pretty impressive that Apple's been able to fair so well whilst only releasing one new model per year yet have such high market share comparatively.

I look forward to the next wave of smartphones though, quad-core Cortex A15 please.

 

[Accname]

"Android" is not a smartphone, it's an OS that runs on more than 50 smartphones. It's pretty impressive that Apple's been able to fair so well whilst only releasing one new model per year yet have such high market share comparatively.

[...]

My personal guess is that many people who buy apple stuff are either too ignorant or too stupid to compare.
At least thats how all the people i know with an iPhone got one. They dont really know what it is or what it does or what the alternatives are.

 

[Icyculyr]

My personal guess is that many people who buy apple stuff are either too ignorant or too stupid to compare.
At least thats how all the people i know with an iPhone got one. They dont really know what it is or what it does or what the alternatives are.

The majority of people in the world aren't technologically literate, and that market is particularly attracted to iOS because it's easy to learn and use. That, and Apple markets all their products well, not to deceive as some suggest, but to promote what it can do and make it an appealing choice.

 

[Accname]

[...]
That, and Apple markets all their products well, not to deceive as some suggest, but to promote what it can do and make it an appealing choice.

About everything you have posted here has convinced me from the opposite.

 

[Icyculyr]

About everything you have posted here has convinced me from the opposite.

What exactly?

They advertise very, very well what their products do.

 

[xPass]

Quad-cores?! That's just epic!

 

[Sajin]

Why is all fucking hell would you need 4 cores in a phone? You plan on running maya or something?

 

[Icyculyr]

Why is all fucking hell would you need 4 cores in a phone? You plan on running maya or something?

Games, my friend, games. Like GlowBall:

[video=youtube;eBvaDtshLY8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBvaDtshLY8[/video]

A lot of those things can be done on the GPU (physics, cloth simulation, dynamic lighting), but CPUs can be leveraged too.

 

[Slapshot136]

Why is all fucking hell would you need 4 cores in a phone? You plan on running maya or something?

how about just playing a 1080p video for a TV? the better the compression/quality, the higher the processing power requirements

 

[Icyculyr]

how about just playing a 1080p video for a TV? the better the compression/quality, the higher the processing power requirements

Video decoding is all done on the GPU(s) afaik.

 

[Slapshot136]

Video decoding is all done on the GPU(s) afaik.

it can be accelerated by the GPU for certain codecs/formats, but it's still mostly cpu-based

 

[Icyculyr]

it can be accelerated by the GPU for certain codecs/formats, but it's still mostly cpu-based

On the contrary, the CPU is used little -- it's the GPU that's primarily used:

Anandtech iPad 2's Review

The iPad 2 consistently lasted longer than the original iPad in our video playback test. The Xoom however did noticeably worse. Unfortunately only a portion of the H.264 decode pipeline is accelerated by NVIDIA's Tegra 2 in this test. When playing back anything more strenuous, portions of the pipeline are handled by the CPU cores in software. If you were to enable b-frames the Xoom would not only stutter but its battery life would drop to around 6 hours.

On the iPad 2 its Cortex A9s are mostly powered down during this test, on the Xoom the A9s are helping with the heavy lifting for video decode and as a result we see lower battery life. Kal-El is expected to address this issue head on.

 

[Slapshot136]

On the contrary, the CPU is used little -- it's the GPU that's primarily used:

so they are testing a current-gen tablet CPU doing only 720p - I think that right there makes a point that we need more power to see 1080p playback, but also like I said it was only on the x264 codec - I prefer to keep my movies in .mkv formats, does it have GPU decoding for Matroska files? actually does it even mention gpu-accelerated decoding other then saying that it doesn't quite work?

and even so, is there any way to see CPU usage while playing those videos?

allow me to take a page from your book, what is the screen resolution of the ipad3 compared to 720p? the CPU/GPU performance should increase by atleast that much to keep up, and then more so to increase the amount of stuff that you can multitask - what if I want to stream video to the TV via the microhdmi, but at the same time want to play my own game (lets pick a CPU-heavy game, like a flight simulator here) on the phone's screen

 

[Icyculyr]

so they are testing a current-gen tablet CPU doing only 720p - I think that right there makes a point that we need more power to see 1080p playback, but also like I said it was only on the x264 codec - I prefer to keep my movies in .mkv formats, does it have GPU decoding for Matroska files? actually does it even mention gpu-accelerated decoding other then saying that it doesn't quite work?

and even so, is there any way to see CPU usage while playing those videos?

allow me to take a page from your book, what is the screen resolution of the ipad3 compared to 720p? the CPU/GPU performance should increase by atleast that much to keep up, and then more so to increase the amount of stuff that you can multitask - what if I want to stream video to the TV via the microhdmi, but at the same time want to play my own game (lets pick a CPU-heavy game, like a flight simulator here) on the phone's screen

Well neither of them can display more than 720p and it is a battery life test, and it wouldn't matter whether or not it was 1080p as it would still be decoded by the GPU, that's not to say it wouldn't run sluggishly, but the Xoom's CPU kicks in the Tegra 2 only supports GPU acceleration for a portion of the H.264 decode pipeline. The PowerVR SGX543MP2 supports 1080p playback and can output it to the TV. I've no idea about the other formats.

Sure. Plug an iDevice into XCode and run some profiles and you can see the CPU usage, GPU usage, RAM usage, battery usage, and any other tidbit of information you need to know. The same would be true of an Android device, so I imagine.

The resolution of the device doesn't matter, as I said above the SGX543MP2 already supports 1080p content, so the MP4 will do just fine at it too. I'm not sure what would happen if you streamed a video to your HDTV and then played a game at the same time on your devices screen, it'd really depend on how demanding the game is.

 

[Accname]

Actually it depends whether the CPU or GPU is processing the screen on how you run the programm.

I can only tell about how it works on pc since i dont have any smart phone neither do i intend to get one.
But i have learned that the CPU is processing the screen image if the GPU cant and the GPU can only process it if the resolution of the image has the right size.
Any window on your computer can only be processed by your GPU if its resolution is like 800x600 or 640x480 or 1024x768, etc.
Any other sizes might not be supported by your graphics card and can thus not be processed by it. The GPU is very limited in the varity of what it can process, this is done to boost the performance while keeping the energy and material costs low.

That is why games usually run in full screen mode because then you can be sure that the GPU will process the graphics entirely.

 

[Slapshot136]

The resolution of the device doesn't matter

it matters, as resolution is very closely related to what kind of CPU (and/or GPU) power it takes to display it

if those tablets don't have a 1080p display, then that's unfortunate, as is the fact that they don't have a HDMI out, but I would expect the next-gen tablets to have such features..

 

[Icyculyr]

it matters, as resolution is very closely related to what kind of CPU (and/or GPU) power it takes to display it

if those tablets don't have a 1080p display, then that's unfortunate, as is the fact that they don't have a HDMI out, but I would expect the next-gen tablets to have such features..

It's the resolution of the video that matters, not the resolution of the display. The iPad has an accessory for HDMI out.

 

[Slapshot136]

It's the resolution of the video that matters, not the resolution of the display. The iPad has an accessory for HDMI out.

OK then, but if we are talking about the specs that the top-tier devices (such as the ipad) that you pay a premium in $$ for should have, the ability to play 1080p video would definitely be something people want/expect from it

 

[Icyculyr]

OK then, but if we are talking about the specs that the top-tier devices (such as the ipad) that you pay a premium in $$ for should have, the ability to play 1080p video would definitely be something people want/expect from it

You can play 1080p video directly on the device :shades:

Perhaps, but you know that it doesn't so if you need that then go for an Android based slate. If you don't care, or find the pros of the iPad outweighs its cons, then go for the iPad. I for one, don't want ports all around my device, so I find that to be a pro in itself. I'd prefer to have one port and then switch accessories when I (rarely) need it.

That aside, the TF700 will have a fair bit of trouble competing with the iPad 3 considering it starts at $100 more.