Acer's Snapdragon-equipped F1 in fast-paced WinMo action at Computex

We've already seen dormant F1s resting comfortably from the confines of display stands at MWC earlier this year, but Acer's now ready to flip the power switch and show off its WinMo 6.5 superphone's capabilities in the flesh at Computex this week. Our own Engadget Chinese spent some quality time shooting the Snapdragon-powered beast, running what could very well be the gold shipping build of 6.5 considering that it's now been released to manufacturers in final form for inclusion in their devices. As you might expect for the Tegra-fighting Snapdragon silicon, animations and transitions seems to be totally dead-on smooth and movement between applications is faster than anything this side of a Toshiba TG01, so we're excited to see this one find its way into retail later this year; in the meantime, though, follow the link for some glorious footage.

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 3rd 2009 4:32PM]

WOW I'm Impressed. I guess if you put a 1 gigahertz prosser on windows mobile it will work the same as a .4 gigaherts prosser on the iphone. If only this hardware was on anadroid.

[looselycoupled Posted Jun 4th 2009 1:51AM]

Make no mistake... The next-gen ARM core in Qualcomm's Snapdragon is the fastest ARM chip on the market. I believe they have it running at up to 1.0-1.5Ghz. The core uses the ARM v7 instruction set and although it is custom, it is very similar to the Cortex-A8. The Snapdragon also has very powerful DSP, graphics, and media engines.

Unfortunately, Windows mobile is probably the worst example to use to test performance. For legacy compatibility reasons, Windows mobile is still compiled to a very old version of the ARM instruction set that doesn't use any of the new instructions, optimizations, SIMD units, etc. The interface is also based on Win32 GDI+ and doesn't use any type of graphics acceleration.

[togusa Posted Jun 9th 2009 2:02AM]

Snapdragon is very interesting and may have the fastest next gen arm cpu, however nvidia tegra uses both its cpu and gpu to accelerate what is displayed, including within the browser. Even if tegra has an old arm cpu i expect this soc to be faster ...

http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/17/nvidias-tegra-in-the-flesh-booting-to-android-and-pumping-out
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ij2VZsvWvY
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=videos&search_query=tegra&search_sort=video_date_uploaded

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 19th 2009 12:45PM]

This new F1 running windows mobile 6.5 will simply be a thing of beauty and artwork for sure. This looks like an incredible device for sure.