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  • ksherman - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link

    That HTC EVO 4G phone is looking AWESOME. I live near Chicago, one of the home bases for Clear/Sprint's WiMAX areas. First phone I've seen yet that will make me drop my iPhone 3G to get. Really excited about it's ability to become a local WiFi access point for my laptop which will be extremely valuable to me as a photojournalist. I won't have to have two separate plans.
  • JonnyBlaze - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link

    You can make almost any current Android phone act as a wireless access point right now.
  • ksherman - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link

    Sure, but none have WiMax. I used to tether my iPhone 3G's 3G signal to upload pictures and it was virtually useless.
  • sinchesterjenkins - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link

    Not a 4G wireless hotspot for up to 8 devices. This phone is a game changer.
  • jordanclock - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link

    Why are their so many mentions of whether these platforms support HD encoding/decoding? The encoding makes a little sense, but who is really going to take HD video clips with their phone? And I'm really not concerned that I won't be able to watch HD videos on my 480x800 screen. There isn't even a video output (unless you count USB?) to hook it up to an external monitor.

    I'm GLAD when they don't waste silicon on being able to handle HD from my phone. I want that silicon used to make the user interface quick and be able to render web pages faster.
  • ganeshts - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link

    While HD encode (recording HD video) remains a checklist feature for app processors, HD decode (playback) has become much more than that. The reason is the abundance of media that people want to store on the go / playback. The rise of media streamers as a market is a case in point.

    Now, cell phone manufacturers have realized that people really do not need a separate media streamer at home. All they need is a dock to which the cell phone can be connected, and this may connect to the TV through HDMI for video playback.

    That said, the Sprint HTC EVO 4G does have a mini HDMI port at the bottom which may enable HD video output to a TV. Also, the Samsung Galaxy S has an optional cradle dock which enables it to be tabled and used for a multitude of purposes other than just wireless communication. Samsung also announced in its press release for this phone that they are planning to team up with content providers to enable downloading of full length movies and other media onto the device. Also, it sports an 'AllShare' feature utilizing the DLNA standard to communicate with other devices (including TVs). So, we might be able to playback HD video on a separate big screen, after all! How well this would work remains to be seen.
  • jah1subs - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link

    Sprint is showing off their 4G network by emphasizing 720p video for this device. I am using the Sprint 3G/4G modem for work. We're saving a little bit of money right now by using only 3G speeds (I can see a 4G enabled tower by looking out the window) because I am using this primarily for email and browsing, not multimedia.
  • RaistlinZ - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link

    Andand/Mods,

    Can you guys please be on the lookout for that xoloot poster and others like him that try to advertise their businesses here? Thanks.
  • Adul - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link

    block their damn ip address this is getting annoying
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link

    They usually come back regardless of what IP we block. We have implemented some fixes though :-P

    Take care,
    Anand
  • Strings - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link

    How does the smart phone of today compare with the PC of yesterday? Would be interesting to see an article on the subject.
  • ganeshts - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link

    Thanks for your suggestion.

    We do have an article coming up on the different app processors in the market (as noted in the above article), and could probably add in information relevant to your request.

    Personally, I would say that the smartphone of today is much more powerful than, say, a PC from 10 years back, and I dare say, probably more efficient at some common tasks than even the current day PCs (in terms of performance to power ratio). For example, most PCs from 2006 can't play back HD video without dropping frames (and the GPUs of those days didn't have decode acceleration either). However, even a small smartphone / PMP is able to playback such material flawlessly.

    On the general purpose computing side, the advancement in smartphone capabilities has been entirely reliant on how much ARM has been able to innovate, coupled with advances in semiconductor manufacturing processes that the fabless semiconductor companies have access to. Usually, PC CPU vendors have an advantage with respect to the latter point.

    The smartphone market has shaped itself in such a way that the most common tasks are taken care of through specialized hardware accelerators (for example, UI through 3d graphics cores, and media playback through specialized decode engines) which give it an advantage over PCs.

    Whether PCs can be completely replaced by smartphones is something up for discussion. Again, my personal opinion is that it depends on the extent of success of cloud computing and how much people trust it. But then, that is a whole different domain altogether :)
  • Drizzt321 - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link

    Because if it is, I'm of two minds about if I'd like this phone or not. See the ArsTechnica article (http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/03/secret... which details some interesting things about it.
  • ganeshts - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link

    Recently, it was brought to our attention that the WiMax baseband chip on the HTC EVO 4G is not manufactured by Beceem as previously thought, but by the French company Sequans Communication:

    http://www.eetimes.com/rss/showArticle.jhtml?artic...

    We will continue to keep in touch with the market and bring you further information.

    The error is deeply regretted.
  • [email protected] - Saturday, April 3, 2010 - link

    Indeed. The first WiMAX phone made by HTC for Russian operator Yota already did use a Sequans chipset, the SQN1130. The EVO uses the more recent SQN1210 with improved performance and lower power consumption and smaller footprint.

    See for example on Yota phone using SQN1130:
    http://www.wimax.com/commentary/blog/blog-2009/nov...

    And a more recent indicating Sequans again for EVO:
    http://connectedplanetonline.com/ctia/2010/news/sp...
    http://www.wirelessweek.com/News/Feeds/2010/03/wir...

    For info on the SQN1210:
    http://www.sequans.com/products-solutions/mobile-w...
  • dadicool - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link

    Somehow Nvidia's Tegra2 doesn't make it to the list of App Processors. Omission or is it deliberate?
  • ganeshts - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link

    I believe Tegra2 is a very promising platform, but the truth is that it hasn't been demonstrated yet in a smartphone form factor. All we have seen at CES and MWC this year have been tablets and the like. It is likely that Nvidia is unable to fit the platform within the power envelop required by a smartphone.

    Personally, I think Tegra2 deserves kudos for being the first chip to bring out Cortex-A9 in silicon inside real third party demo-ed products (such as the Notion Ink Adam). Whether they are able to get it into production before OMAP4 (which is also Cortex-A9) products hit the market remains to be seen.
  • Randomblame - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link

    I NEEeed a new phone msm7201a and 128mb of ram is just pathetic, I want the hd2 but at&t won't be carrying it and it won't support 3g on their network, desire looks nice but it won't be out for a while yet and it's android native which means there won't be the fun of porting linux to it or the freedom to run winmo when I want. I may have to get a topaz or rhodium to tide me over till the next great thing
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  • Eurobrsg - Saturday, April 3, 2010 - link

    It looks like Apple has recently purchased Intrinisity. Shortly after this article went live, I tried to visit their website, now I know what happened. Great article.
  • Dave0057 - Saturday, April 3, 2010 - link

    The WiMAX chip for the HTC Evo is indeed powered by Sequans. see here: http://connectedplanetonline.com/ctia/2010/news/sp...
  • Electrofreak - Sunday, April 4, 2010 - link

    Why is everyone so convinced that Hummingbird contains an SGX 540? My research shows that the SGX 540 puts out 30 million triangles per second max, 1/3 of what Samsung is claiming.
  • ganeshts - Monday, April 5, 2010 - link

    Hummingbird by itself doesn't contain a graphics core. It is just a layout implementation of ARM's Cortex-A8 microarchitecture.

    The S5PC110 is expected to contain the SGX540. The 30 million triangles / second (or, is it polygons per second, if I remember right) quoted by ImgTec is probably at a low frequency of operation. If the SGX540 is overclocked internally, the performance in those terms would go up.

    As of now, we have to take what Samsung marketing talk fed us with a pinch of salt. Let us wait for the device to arrive, so that real benchmarks can be obtained,

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