Displaying items by tag: Mobile

The rise of the ARM architecture has been a meteoric one and came as something of a shock to many of the mainstream players in the mobile industry. The concept for the ARM based SoC (System on Chip) is pretty simple: build a small, energy efficient device that is able to use memory and processor cycles as efficiently as possible.  This is what x86 CPU manufacturers are trying to do as well.  So why are there more manufacturers of ARM based SoCs than there are x86? Well, the problem here is one of licensing. You see, it is much easier and less expensive to license the ARM architecture than it is x86. Right now there are very few players that even have an x86 license. This limits the competition down quite a bit and also (unfortunately) slows progress. However, the fight between Intel and ARM is just heating up. And despite the small number of players in the x86 market, things are far from certain in this area as we enter into a new round of combat between RISC and CISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing and Complete Instruction Set Computing).

Canonical has introduced a new version of Ubuntu, specifically designed for use with smartphones. This is an interesting move and shows Ubuntu’s desire to push into a wider market. A demonstration of the OS's ability is planned soon and will be performed on a Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

The Samsung Galaxy S IV will be unveiled in April, according to multiple sources close to the Korean manufacturer. The biggest news in relation to the current edition will be the S Pen stylus that will be shipped with the device. With this Galaxy S line should get one of the biggest advantages of the devices from the Galaxy Note line.

MIPS has unveiled a new edition of its processor architecture, the "release 5" which inherits the "release 3". With the new architecture, MIPS hopes to improve their standing in the competition with ARM, and the most important features include hardware-assisted virtualization, and new SIMD instructions. There is also improved support for multi-threaded execution, and the address space for 32-bit architecture has also been upgraded.

Manufacturers of hardware components are not expecting a significant recovery of the PC market over the next year. Asus and Gigabyte, both leading manufacturer of motherboards, have said that in 2013 they expect an equal or slightly lower number of deliveries of motherboards than was the case this year.

Facebook is negotiating over the purchase of the company behind the  IM application WhatsApp. Details of the agreement are not known so far, but it is known that Facebook sees this mobile technology as the "next big thing". The rise of smartphones certainly was the best possible thing for applications like WhatsApp and Viber due to increasing pularity of mobile internet.

Although almost all the attention of Microsoft and the public is focused on Windows Phone 8, the older generation OS is far from retirement, according to Microsoft. They surely brought nothing but dissapointment when they announced that the Lumia 900 and all other first generation WP7 devices wont be able to upgrade to WP8. They will try to calm down users by giving them 7.8 but that probably wont be enough.

The Windows 8 online store is growing bigger every day and so far they have reached a promising milestone. With all the Windows 8 devices coming out, it was just a matter of time before the apps accumulated; now they have 13,000 applications in their application store. In the past 8 days there was almost three thousand applications added, this means that it grew at a rate of 362 applications per day.

While today's high-end smartphones feature dual-core and quad-core processors, one day in smartphones and tablets Intel would like to see their future 48-core processors. It is no surprise considering that Intel at this point is largely ignored  from mobile platforms in the market, which is dominated by the ARM architecture.

A few new high level S4 quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processors have been released for the mass market. The company already has their processors in some of the most popular smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S3, HTC One X, HTC Windows Phone 8X, Nokia Lumia 820 and 920, Samsung ATIV S and Motorola Droid RAZR. Now they will push an upgraded version of their shining stars MSM8225 and MSM8625. They will bear the same names with just adding Q on the end. The next generation of Snapdragons will come in the first quarter of 2013.