As per tradition Apple has released a promotion video for its newly announced iPad mini.
The smaller 7.9-inch slate shares its chipset and screen resolution of the iPad 2, but adds a 5MP rear camera and the new Lightning port. The video tells more about those as well as the other cool bits of the compact tablet.
Check it out.
Making your own chips seems to be all the rage these days – a new rumor claims that Amazon is looking to acquire Texas Instruments’ high-end OMAP chipset manufacturing business.
TI recently announced they’ll be expanding the focus of their chips to “automotive, industrial, enterprise communication, vision and robotics”, but they won’t give up on the mobile phone and tablet market.
Has that changed? And more importantly, why would Amazon, which is a retail and service company, spend billions of dollars to get its own chipset making business?
Amazon recently revealed they are not making any profit on the hardware of the Kindles (they serve more as a storefront), so if they’re the ones making the chipset powering the Kindle Fire tablets (also Barnes&Nobles Nook tablets) they might be able to reduce the manufacturing costs somewhat.
But enough to justify a deal worth billions of dollars? It might, if Amazon was planning to make more than just Kindle tablets. There were rumors of an Amazon phone, but the company might also go the digital video player route a la Apple TV or Nexus Q – they certainly have the multimedia library for it.
What else? Well, Amazon is maintaining a lot of data centers for EC2 and their own needs and ARM-based servers have been gaining popularity lately (and TI’s OMAP 5 that’s based on Cortex-A15 would be a good fit for something like that).
Of course, all this is just speculation – the two companies haven’t even confirmed that such a deal is being discussed. But Amazon is certainly a company that aggressively breaks new ground, so it just might be true.
We’ve just concluded our in-depth review of the Motorola RAZR i and its Intel Atom Medfield chipset inside and now it’s time to shine a light on its battery performance.
The Motorola RAZR i achieved some pretty good scores in all of our tests, but its talk time endurance was partucularly impressive.
Here we go – the call test is where the new Intel-designed modem really shines. The Motorola RAZR i got a whopping 20 hours and 7 minutes, climbing to third spot in our call test chart and making top 3 a Moto exclusive territory. More impressively it managed to match the achievement of its MAXX siblings with a battery that has a 1300 mAh smaller capacity.
The RAZR i got stellar results in the web browsing department as well. The 2000 mAh Li-Ion battery under the RAZR i’s Kevlar vest was able to pump out 7 whole hours of non-stop browsing, which is not particularly kind to smartphones with AMOLED Screen.
And finally the video test for all those people who spend a lot of time traveling and like watching videos on their smartphones during the trips. The Intel Atom-sporting RAZR’s got you covered with 8 solid hours and 11 minutes of video playback, which isn’t a top score but definitely one to be respected.
At the end the Intel-designed modem got another chance to shine and it took it. The RAZR i turned out to be excellently efficient at stand-by, which allowed it to get an endurance score of 64h.This means that if you were to use the smartphone for an hour of talking, an hour of web browsing and an hour of video playback per day, you’d need to charge it once every 64 hours.
Still, the breakdown shows that if you use your smartphone for web-browsing and video playback more than you do for actual telephony, than you are probably going to get shorter discharge times.
The Sony Xperia Tablet S packs a Tegra 3 chipset, making it more powerful than the original Tablet S. But how does it stack up against other tablets on the market right now? Things should be pretty close, considering the popularity of NVIDIA’s chipset.
We ran practically every benchmark we could think of, testing the CPU (four Cortex-A9 cores at 1.3GHz in the Tablet S), the GPU (an ULP GeForce) and the web browser (stock browser on Android ICS and Chrome).
BenchmarkPi is good at estimating per-core performance and the Xperia Tablet S does very well here. It comes second only to the higher-clocked Samsung Galaxy Note II, but beats the Tegra 3-packing Nexus 7.
Linpack is better at multi-tasking performance. Here, the Tablet S maintains its lead on the Nexus 7, but falls behind the Exynos-powered Galaxies (whose CPUs are clocked higher). Geekbench 2 concurs with these findings.
AnTuTu shows that the performance of the Sony tablet is comparable to a Tegra 3 phone. Quadrant puts it a bit behind, but the tablet is at a bit of a disadvantage due to its higher screen resolution (1280 x 800 vs. 1280 x 720).
Lower is better
Higher is better
Higher is better
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Time to look at the ULP GeForce performance. NenaMark 2 doesn’t really give us any significant result beyond that the PowerVR SGX540 that’s inside the Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 is getting too old to be in a tablet.
The offscreen Egypt GLBenchmark tests were used to put the GPUs on equal footing. The SGX543MP4 inside the new iPad normally renders graphics at a much higher resolution than even 1080p, so it’s far ahead.
Oddly, the Sony Xperia Tablet S comes out last in this test, even behind the Nexus 7, which has the same GPU.
Higher is better
Higher is better
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Finally, the browser. For SunSpider and BrowserMark we used the default browsers on each tablet. Samsung has done a great job of optimizing the browser on Exynos (less so on TI OMAP), but the Xperia Tablet S actually edges out Apple’s latest tablet, which is no small achievement.
Vellamo puts it behind all the quad-core phones we’ve tested though.
Finally, FishIE Tank shows good HTML5 canvas performance, though it doesn’t beat the quad-core phones. As far as HTML5 compatibility goes, if you’re running Chrome on the Tablet S, you’d be on par with the current flagship phones, except the Galaxy S III, which has an advantage.
Lower is better
Higher is better
Higher is better
Higher is better
Higher is better
As many of you know, the ASUS Nexus 7 is powered by the Tegra 3 chipset and its four main cores are clocked at 1.3GHz. Naturally, the guys over at XDA wanted to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the processor and have managed to make it run at the blazing 1.64GHz.
When put through its paces in the Quadrant benchmark test, the overclocked Nexus 7 scored over 7100 points. The secret ingredient is the Trinity kernel developed by XDA’s “Morfic”.
Thanks to it, the Nexus 7 is able to achieve the tremendous clock speed, and according to user reports still maintains great battery life. You can check out the kernel’s XDA thread in the source link below.
