Mobiles @ NCSU

Find: Nvidia's Tegra 4 in Xiaomi’s Latest Phone

Tegra 4 hasn't done as well as tegra 3, but xiaomi is quite hot, having just snagged a top google exec.

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// published on NVIDIA // visit site

Trim, black-clad Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun has become one of the mobile mad world’s biggest taste makers in a hurry. Maybe because Xiaomi — which means “little rice” in Mandarin — offers a case study in the power of speed. The company focuses on just a few cutting-edge models at a time. And it sells these handsets fast. The last model Lei introduced sold 100,000 units in 90 seconds.

Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun and NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang.

The result: the company is getting a lot of attention in a hurry. Xiaomi’s last handset quickly became the top selling smartphone in China, and thousands of press and enthusiasts jostled for the chance to hear Lei unveil Xiaomi’s latest model, the Mi3, in Beijing Thursday.

It’s a phone NVIDIA played a big role helping Xiaomi engineer, and NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang was invited on stage to help introduce it, leading the crowd of more than 3,000 through cheers of “wei wu,” or “powerful.”

More than 3,000 ‘MiFans’ as they are known, crammed into a hall with room built for 2,100, spilling into the aisles and clambering over one another at the back of the room for a better look. More than 450 reporters from Chinese and international outlets were there too. No one wanted to miss this story.

Jen Hsun signs autographs for Xiaomi’s fans.

Founded just three years ago, the Beijing-based private company is now estimated to be worth $10 billion. Xiaomi has already pushed into Taiwan and Hong Kong. Fans are buzzing about the prospects for more, and Lei has built a team that can go there, picking up top technology talent from around the globe.

The Mi3 combines a mainstream price — less than US $327.00 for an unlocked phone — with premium specs and features. Powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra 4 processor, the Mi3 includes a 5-inch 1080p IPS LCD display, 2 GB of RAM, up to 64 GB of storage, and a 13 megapixel rear-facing camera in a slick metal case featuring an aluminum-magnesium alloy metal inner frame.

Xiaomi’s new flagship is the product of a year-long collaboration between NVIDIA and Xiaomi’s growing team of engineers. The Mi3 takes full advantage of Tegra 4′s quad-core Cortex-A15 CPU and fifth battery saver core, 72 GeForce GPU cores and the unique experience all that raw power unlocks.

Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun talks up Tegra 4.

That means best-in-class gaming, fast web browsing, full HD video playback with 4k video support, and crisp photos in a broad range of lighting conditions.

The result: a smartphone that stunned the press with its power and performance, and made an instant impression on Xiaomi’s legions of fans.

Crowded house: thousands of fans gathered to see Xiaomi launch its latest super phone.

Find: Amazon wants to disrupt again: a costless, contractless phone

What? Amazon disrupt?

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// published on Ars Technica // visit site

Amazon has plans to release a smartphone that customers can get for the price of free, with or even without a contract, according to an article from former Wall Street Journal reporter and editor Jessica Lessin. Lessin writes that an internal source at Amazon confirmed that the company has been in touch with wireless carriers about offering such a phone.

"The free strategy isn’t set in stone," says Lessin, but if Amazon could pull it off, it would be offering something its competitors don’t: freedom from contracts, without a price premium. Lessin was unclear on whether Amazon would require anything of its customers, such as a subscription to Amazon Prime.

Of course, offering a phone that doesn’t cost the hundreds of dollars off-contract that popular models like the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy S 4 do is not the hard part; making that phone decent is. Furthermore, the draw of a contract-free existence wouldn’t mean much if the phone were not compatible with most of the major carriers. Simply being able to swap between AT&T and T-Mobile wouldn’t mean as much as being able to swap between all five of the biggest carriers without a second thought.

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Find: Samsung promises over 70 apps for Galaxy Gear, these are the first 12

A glimpse of what we'll be doing with these things.

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// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site

Now that Samsung has finally announced the Galaxy Gear, you've probably made up your mind on whether it's beautiful or hideous. What you probably don't have a great grasp of is what apps will be available on the smartphone, and how they'll work. We had a brief preview of Pocket for Galaxy Gear yesterday; it offers a complimentary experience to the Android app, effectively functioning as a remote control for the phone version. You can ask your phone to read an article aloud to you, favorite articles, or archive them, and that's about it. Other Gear apps are a little more ambitious.

Find: the wearables march continues - Qualcomm's Toq

Unusual for a chip maker to try producing end user product.

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// published on AnandTech // visit site

We’re at Qualcomm’s Uplinq 2013 conference where Qualcomm’s CEO Paul Jacobs has announced Qualcomm Toq, a smartwatch with a Mirasol color screen that can still be viewed outdoors in bright sunlight with touch capabilities, and wireless charging capabilities through WiPower LE.

The Toq shows notifications and looks like it has a few applications of its own, can control music playback and play locally to wireless headsets, and looks like it can do things like screening calls and show a variety of different watchfaces. Qualcomm is trying to leverage its mobile silicon leadership, Mirasol display, and enable partners to deliver better wearable products. The Mirasol display stays on all the time, never turns off, but still lets the Toq last multiple days between charges.

Later this month Qualcomm will make a limited number of Toqs available and continue to release more details about availability. There still are a lot of unknowns but we're hopefully going to find a lot more about Toq shortly.

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Find: Microsoft buys Nokia phone; becomes a true device maker

Bye bye Nokia, we'll miss you.

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// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site

One of the most enticing "what-ifs" of recent years has come true: Microsoft has purchased Nokia's Devices and Services unit, bringing the Lumia lineup under the Redmond roof. The move unites Windows Phone 8 with its biggest hardware supporter, giving the company the integrated mobile offering it's been looking for with Surface and other devices. When the deal closes in the first quarter of 2014, Microsoft will pay 3.79 billion Euros for Nokia's business, plus another 1.65 billion Euros for its portfolio of patents. (The 5.44-billion Euro total is considerably less than Microsoft paid for Skype in 2011.) 32,000 people are expected to transfer from Nokia to Microsoft, including 18,300 that are "directly involved in manufacturing."

The...

Find: A look back at iconic Nokia phones

Nice.

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// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site

Today, depending on your perspective, we either mourn the loss of one of the most important phone makers ever, or celebrate that the people behind so many iconic phones will continue to work under the Microsoft flag.

As Microsoft, Nokia, and any number of regulatory authorities get to work on finalizing the $7.3 billion deal that will see Microsoft buy Nokia's Devices and Services devision, take a moment to look back at some of Nokia's most beautiful, important, and bizarre creations.

Find: google sidesteps carriers and oems to reduce fragmentation

// published on Ars Technica // visit sit

Ron Amadeo

Android 4.3 was released to Nexus devices a little over a month ago, but, as is usual with Android updates, it's taking much longer to roll out the general public. Right now, a little over six percent of Android users have the latest version. And if you pay attention to the various Android forums out there, you may have noticed something: no one cares.

4.3's headline features are a new camera UI, restricted user profiles, and support for new versions of Bluetooth and OpenGL ES. Other than the camera, these are all extremely dull, low-level enhancements. It's not that Google is out of ideas, or the Android team is slowing down. Google has purposefully made every effort to make Android OS updates as boring as possible.

Why make boring updates? Because getting Samsung and the other OEMs to actually update their devices to the latest version of Android is extremely difficult. By the time the OEMs get the new version, port their skins over, ship a build to carriers, and the carriers finally push out the OTA update, many months pass. If the device isn't popular enough, this process doesn't happen at all. Updating a phone is a massive project involving several companies, none of which seem to be very committed to the process or in much of a hurry to get it done.

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