Mobiles @ NCSU

Samsung won't be using Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 in the next Galaxy S smartphone because of overheating issues, according to a Bloomberg report published this morning. The phone will instead use "Samsung's most advanced chips," according to Bloomberg's sources—this suggests a 64-bit Exynos 7 Octa or a closely related chip.

Though the Galaxy S series isn't the sales juggernaut it once was, it's still one of the single best-selling handsets in the Android ecosystem, and Qualcomm has supplied SoCs for some variants of the S phones since the days of the Galaxy S II. Samsung still uses Exynos chips in S-series phones destined for its home turf in South Korea and some other markets, however, so it wouldn't be a major engineering feat to drop Qualcomm in other territories, especially since Samsung's in-house LTE modems are coming into their own.

In some ways, it's not surprising that the Snapdragon 810 might be giving Qualcomm trouble. The company has switched from using its own custom-designed Krait CPU architecture to off-the-shelf Cortex A57 and A53 designs from ARM, at least in part because of demand for 64-bit chips from OEMs and users (previous Snapdragon generations only used Cortex cores in lower-end SoCs with less potential for thermal problems). Major transitions like that can be tricky, especially when you're working with small, tightly integrated chips. These also aren't the first reports about the 810's overheating problems, and some CES previews of LG's Flex 2 suggested that the phones on the floor kept dimming their screens because they were running too hot. All mobile SoCs throttle their performance to some degree when they run up against heat issues, but most of the time the effects are subtle enough that you won't actually notice them during normal use.

Today at Microsoft's Windows 10 preview event, the company gave us our first look at what Windows 10 will look like when it's running on small screens. The "standard" Windows 10 experience as demonstrated in the Technical Preview is only for screens 8 inches or above; phones and smaller tablets get their own interface. Though Microsoft simply referred to this as "Windows 10 for phones and small tablets," this is our first look at the next version of Windows Phone.

The biggest overarching feature of the small-screened version of Windows 10 is better integration with the desktop version of Windows—Microsoft is really pushing the new OS as a "universal platform." If you've got a Windows phone and a Windows laptop or desktop signed into the same Microsoft account, most of your information will be able to sync seamlessly across platforms. If you dismiss or interact with a notification in your Action Center on your phone, for example, the change will be reflected in the Action Center on your laptop so you won't need to interact with it again. Lists of recent documents in the Office apps will roam between devices, and playlists created in a new music app will sync between devices as well. These are just the applications that Microsoft mentioned, but you can expect all of the first-party Windows apps will support some kind of syncing.

Dragging the software keyboard around will be useful on larger screens.

Microsoft

Microsoft is also making more of an effort to make apps on Windows phones, tablets, and touch-enabled PCs look and work the same. A number of "Universal Apps" will lead this charge, including a touch-enabled version of Microsoft Office that will be included with all phones and small tablets.

Update: The Wall Street Journal is corroborating this story with a report that makes this sound like a done deal. The Journal mostly focuses on the Sprint side of things, saying the MVNO agreement with Google went all the way up to the Sprint and Softbank CEOs. Apparently Sprint was worried it would be "letting a rival into the gates" by dealing with Google, but a clause limiting Google's customer base calmed the company's fears.

Reports about a rumored Google wireless service are cropping up again. The Information (subscription required) is reporting that Google plans to resell Sprint and T-Mobile services as a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO).

The last time we heard about this was back in April 2014, when Google was supposedly talking to Verizon and Sprint. MVNOs are resellers of wireless access—they get access rights from one of the "Big Four" carriers and resell it to end users. Google does a lot of ISP work with things like Google Fiber, Project Loon, and the Space X investment, but those are all projects where it owns the hardware and is free to innovate. As a reseller, Google controls little other than the price and packages it provides to end users and the software it puts on devices it sells.

For the second time in as many months I feel like I've taken a step into the world of science fiction—and for the second time in as many months, it's Microsoft who put me there.

After locking away all my recording instruments and switching to the almost prehistoric pen and paper, I had a tantalizingly brief experience of Microsoft's HoloLens system, a headset that creates a fusion of virtual images and the real world. While production HoloLens systems will be self-contained and cord-free, the developer units we used had a large compute unit worn on a neck strap and an umbilical cord for power. Production hardware will automatically measure the interpupillary distance and calibrate itself accordingly; the dev kits need this to be measured manually and punched in. The dev kits were also heavy, unwieldy, fragile, and didn't really fit on or around my glasses, making them uncomfortable to boot.

But even with this clumsy hardware, the experience was nothing short of magical.