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This might be HTC's late-2015 flagship phone
HTC has been promising another "hero" phone this October to try and turn around its dismal fiscal performance, but what that device would look like has remained a mystery. Would it just be a tweaked One M9? If a claimed photo leak is accurate, it might be considerably more than that. The two images purport to show the A9 (aka Aero), a handset that has very little in common with the M9. Its camera is above the antenna stripe (reminiscent of the M8's depth camera) rather than below, and it appears to be flatter. The front, meanwhile, looks like it's switching to "2.5D" curved glass. Those aren't far-fetched changes, but we can't blame you if you're still skeptical -- these pics are tough to verify, so it's possible that they're just fanciful renderings.
B&O Play previews A9 Nordic Sky edition wireless speakers (eyes-on)
Not to leave its $2,699 A9 wireless speaker stuck with solid colors for the fall and winter, B&O Play's added some limited editions inspired by the natural color palette of Scandinavia. Dubbed the Nordic Sky editions, the three variants previewed for Copenhagen Fashion Week represent dawn, twilight and dusk. The pastel gradient grilles aim to keep the summer night's visual influence alive through the colder seasons, as B&O explains it. The units still feature the same 480-watt (x5) 2.1 stereo output, with DLNA and AirPlay to keep the music flowing. The Nordic Sky editions will retail for the same $2,699 price as the standard versions, while current A9 owners can also purchase each color kit (three wooden legs and a grille cloth) for $259 a pop. There's no exact arrival date yet, but B&O says to expect them on its shelves in September. No doubt these pieces scream opulence, but they're a visual treat in person. Full press release after the break. %Gallery-195483%
Apple snags Amazon's A9 head to lead Siri team
Companies poach each other's employees and execs all the time. But, Apple's latest score, William Stasior, is a pretty substantial one. For the last six years he has served as president and CEO of A9, Amazon's search and ad subsidiary. Before that he held other search-related roles at Amazon and worked at AltaVista, departing around the time of the Yahoo! acquisition. In his new role at Cupertino, Stasior will be leading the Siri team. The MIT Ph.D will be taking the helm of the voice-powered virtual assistant, which has led some to speculate that Apple could be stepping up search and advertising game. Considering the on-going drama between Mountain View and the purveyors of all-things-i, we wouldn't be entirely surprised to see the two go head to head on Google's home turf. But we'd say such a move would be a long term goal, at best.
B&O Play's BeoPlay A9 wireless speaker gets your classy party jumping for a cool $2,699 (eyes-on)
B&O Play is at it again for the younger crowd with money to burn. With a TV, a hybrid iPad dock, an iPad friendly speaker system and a portable speaker already under its belt, Bang & Olufsen's spin-off brand is ready to really get the festivities going with its new BeoPlay A9. Starting at cool $2,799, this satellite dish circular eye-catcher also doubles as a full-on 2.1 speaker system. Simply put, we'd describe its looks as a super-sized half of the BeoPlay A8 speaker dock. We'd guess the A9 stands at roughly three feet tall (legs mounted) and three feet wide based on our quick in-person look. Behind its fabric grill you'll find a duo of three-quarter-inch tweeters and a pair of three-inch mid-range drivers, all of which get their power from independent 80-watt digital amps. Of course, the A9 brings the rumble as well, featuring an 8-inch "bass unit" that gets double the wattage of its drivers. Notably, AirPlay & DLNA are baked right in, ensuring you'll have access to WiFi streaming across whichever platforms you prefer. You won't find any physical controls, but on the top-edge of its backside you'll notice a status light and a power button, both separated by a long touch-sensitive strip that lets you adjusts the volume, or mute it completely. Below that, a pop-off cap hides a USB port for docking and charging devices and a 3.5mm jack if wireless isn't an option, but it's also where an admittedly unsightly power cord plugs in as well. As you can see in the photo, the A9 can be supported by a trio of wooden legs, however, it can also be wall-mounted or hung from a ceiling like the BeoPlay V1 TV -- thankfully, it features three DSP presets to cope with however you'd decide to place it. As you might imagine, it's also incredibly loud -- just a duo of A9s were being used as the sound system at the large Penthouse party we were in. As such, it wasn't an ideal environment to comment much further on its audio performance. If it's up your alley, expect the system to hit B&O and select Apple stores near the end of November, with your choice of a black, red, silver, green or white grill, and wooden legs in beech, oak or teak -- all of which can be purchased separately. For now, you can get your own eyes-on with it in the gallery below. Update: Check out the video past the break to catch a video of how it's made.
Anandtech: Apple iPhone 5 features 1GB of RAM, A6 is a custom SoC
Unsurprisingly, Apple left us in the dark regarding some specifics of the iPhone 5 upon its release. Thankfully, the good folks over at Anandtech have done a bit of digging into those numbers you see bordering Apple's Apple A6 SoC, definitively figuring out that Cupertino's latest phone packs in a total 1GB of Samsung-sourced memory. The site clocks the DRAM inside at 1,066Mhz, noting that it's comprised of "two 512MB dies in a dual-channel LPDDR2 package with 32 bits per channel." Further, Anandtech lists the speed of the iPhone 5's memory at 8,528MB/sec -- an ample 33 percent boost over the 6,400MB/sec rating for the RAM in the iPhone 4S, but well below the 12,800 MB/sec needed to drive the new iPad's bandwidth-hungry screen resolution. Beyond that, the site believes that the A6 is Apple's first truly in-house creation, as it's using math units too new to be found in a ARM Cortex-A9 architecture (like the A5 or A5X) but reportedly isn't a match for the soon-to-be-released Cortex-A15. If true, the implication is significant -- it suggests Apple is taking the more aggressive path of a chip designer like Qualcomm and custom-tailoring large parts of its processor designs to get the speed it wants on a more exacting schedule. That's a quick summation of the details; hit up the source links below if you want the explanation in full geek speak. Jon Fingas contributed to this post.
TSMC ramps 28nm ARM Cortex-A9 chip to 3.1GHz, gives your desktop jitters
We know TSMC's energy-miser 28-nanometer manufacturing process has a lot of headroom, but the company just ratcheted expectations up by a few notches. Lab workers at Taiwan's semiconductor giant have successfully run a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor at 3.1GHz under normal conditions. That's a 55 percent higher clock speed than the 2GHz maximum that TSMC normally offers, folks, and about twice as fast as a 40nm chip under the same workload. Don't expect that kind of clock speed from your next smartphone or tablet, though: expect processors of this caliber to find "high-performance uses," which takes us that much closer to NVIDIA's Project Denver as well as other ARM-based desktops, notebooks and servers that should give x86 chips a run for their money.
Samsung demos new 32nm quad-core Exynos ahead of MWC
If you were lucky enough to be at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, then you might have caught a glimpse of Samsung's latest sliver of mobile silicon. The as yet unnamed Exynos parts will come in dual- and quad-core configurations running at up to 1.5GHz. Perhaps the most important change though, is the switch from a 45nm manufacturing process to 32nm. That means smaller parts that draw less power, while delivering better performance. The A9 cores are paired with Sammy's own GPU, an OpenGL ES 2.0-capable chip with four pixel processors. According to the company, the new CPUs deliver a 26 percent boost in performance and up to a 50 percent increase in battery life. Of course, we'll have to wait to run our own benchmarks to confirm that lofty claim. Who knows, maybe we'll see it show up in some phones at MWC.[Thanks, Vlad]
RedPad brings Chinese patriotism to Android, costs each comrade just $1,590
Well, it was only a matter of time. Hongpaiyihao (literally meaning "red group number one"), a Beijing-based pro-government new media company, has launched a 9.7-inch Tegra 2 tablet that's "tailor-made for government officials" and patriotic consumers. Well, we're not sure whether the government's even aware of this Android 3.2 device's existence, but it's certainly preloaded with a bunch of pro-China apps (including one for the state-approved microblogging service), electronic subscription to a handful of newspapers (state-controlled, of course) and "exclusive" access to daily updates on some government strategic decisions. The damage? 9,999 yuan ($1,590) per unit, or 7,100 yuan ($1,120) each if you buy in bulk. As pointed out by Penn Olson, this RedPad is about two to three times as expensive as the iPad in China.To be honest, having dug around Hongpaiyihao's unbelievably shoddy product pages, this reeks of a desperate company trying to squeeze money out of overly patriotic folks in China. Even the screen resolution and battery capacity are inconsistent across the site: it's either 1,024 x 768 and 8,000mAh, or 1,280 x 800 and 7,600mAh, respectively. Judging by the render, the former combination is more likely the real deal; yet the screenshots in the owner manual suggest the latter. Oh, and just so you know, there's no sign of the above interface in the manual at all. If you still care, other features include a five megapixel main camera, a two megapixel front-facing camera, 3G connectivity, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. We'll stick to our diet of regular Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich, thank you very much -- they'll keep our wallets healthier.
Meizu MX first hands-on!
While the rest of Hong Kong were enjoying their dim sum breakfast, we've been busy fiddling with the freshly delivered Meizu MX due out on January 1st. As expected, the customized Android 2.3.5 (dubbed Flyme OS) is pretty slick on that 1.4GHz dual-core Samsung Exynos 4210 and 1GB of RAM, but we keep an eye on the consistency of its performance. Compared to the smaller M9, we're hugely impressed by this successor's solid build quality -- the white crystal casing on the back gives out a premium feel and look, though only time will tell how scratch-resistant it is. Likewise, we also dig the booklet or CD album-like packaging -- you can see it all in our hands-on gallery below. There's much to be loved about the four-inch 960 x 640 ASV LCD -- the slight decrease in pixel density really isn't as noticeable as expected, still giving a sharp image in addition to a slightly wider viewing angle plus color gamut. Alas, many of our camera stills so far seem to be infected by a green hue, though our sample 1080p video clip's in good shape. Here's hoping that Meizu will still be able to tweak that eight megapixel camera before the official launch. Until then, check out our hands-on video after the break (where you can see Meizu's pretty rad "patented situation-aware bottom light keys" in action), and stay tuned for our upcoming review. %Gallery-141308% %Gallery-141309%
Meizu MX resurfaces, home button gets a nip-and-tuck, turns into optical trackpad?
It's been a while since we've seen the Meizu MX, but these latest shots from Mr. Blurrycam reveal that the phone could see a substantial tweak to its main home button. These photos are likely to be of a work-in-progress handset, with plenty of bizarre cutaways presumably obscuring details of the mole. In the leaked drawings, Meizu's upcoming smartphone looked an awful lot like its M9 predecessor, albeit with a bigger screen, running on a superior A9 Cortex processor. The main button apparently doubles as an optical trackpad, with the two flanking capacitive buttons rotating depending on orientation. While it still remains uncertain whether this nub will replace the squarish button found on the MX mock-up earlier this year, hopefully CEO Jack Wong will still manage to meet the December launch date -- if only for the sake of all those loyal Mei-yo. Fans of severely obscured photography can catch another glimpse after the break.
Amazon Flow strikes low blow to brick and mortar, converts barcode scans to online sales
Remember when you had to "walk" to a "store" to buy things? Our grandkids are gonna weep uncontrollably when we explain queuing up at Our Price to buy VHS tapes. We'll recall the date the final nail was driven into brick and mortar's coffin: November 2nd, 2011 -- the day Amazon's A9 released Flow free on the App store. With Flow, you just walked into a store, scan the barcode of a book, DVD or jar of Nutella and it came back with Amazon's price, reviews and "multimedia content". It wasn't the first app to do the job, but we just couldn't help ourselves indulging in another. It wasn't long before the store detectives cottoned on to all the barcode snapping and started issuing automatic take-down tackles if they saw you holding a phone. After that, of course, war was inevitable. (But hey, it was worth it.)
ARMv8 detailed: 64-bit architecture, AppliedMicro first in line
Thought Windows on ARM was snazzy? Have a gander at this. The outfit's forthcoming ARMv8 architecture, the first ARM architecture to include a 64-bit instruction set, has just been detailed, with a goal to expand the reach of ARM processor-based solutions "into consumer and enterprise applications where extended virtual addressing and 64-bit data processing are required." The ARMv8 architecture consists of two main execution states -- AArch64 and AArch32 -- and we're apt to see the real benefits hit high-end servers first. The ARMv8 architecture specifications are available now to partners under license, with the company planning to disclose processors based on ARMv8 during 2012, with consumer and enterprise prototype systems expected in 2014. Head on past the break for ARM's take, or meander to the source links for AppliedMicro's gloating.
HTC Sensation Z710t becomes first smartphone to offer ST-Ericsson's NovaThor SoC
There's a new Sensation on the block that'll be making its way to China Mobile, but rather than rehashing more of the same, this release marks the first smartphone to place ST-Ericsson's NovaThor SoC under the hood. Unlike offerings from Qualcomm, the chip inside the Sensation Z710t offers a dual-core A9 processor along with connectivity to the carrier's TD-SCDMA infrastructure. Other specs are expected to remain the same, which includes a 4.3-inch qHD display and 8 megapixel camera. Unfortunately, press photos weren't released, which suggests its design hasn't changed. You'll find the full PR after the break, heralding this latest Sensation among the top-tier of China Mobile's offerings. While pricing or a release date have yet to be announced, we're inclined to agree.
Pandigital unveils Nova, Planet and Star Android tablets, 'flagship' device coming next month
It's shaping up to be a busy month for Pandigital. Two days after we spotted the Nova at Best Buy, the astronomically-inclined company has decided to officially unveil the Android tablet alongside the Planet and Star, with a fourth "flagship" device slated for release in September. Each of the three slates is powered by an A9 Cortex processor, and boasts a seven-inch touchscreen display (800x600 resolution on the Planet and Nova and 800x480 on the Star, pictured above). As far as storage goes, both the Planet and the Star offer 2GB of onboard memory, with the Nova packing 4GB, and all three offer WiFi and HDMI connectivity. The slabs also come preloaded with Barnes & Noble's eBookstore app and provide access to GetJar's app download store, rather than the Android Market. Honeycomb enthusiasts, however, should probably look elsewhere, as both the Planet and the Star run Android 2.2 Froyo, while the Nova ships with Gingerbread. But considering their prices, that shortcoming may be easy to overlook. The Planet, available now, will run you $189, as will the Nova, scheduled to ship later this week (though, again, you can also find it on Best Buy, for $170). The Star, meanwhile, will hit stores in mid-August, for a paltry $159. Rocket past the break for some photos of the Nova and Planet, along with more details, in the full press release.
i.MX 6 quad-core reference board flexes processing muscle at Freescale Technology Forum
Freescale answered our power prayers with the introduction of its i.MX 6 processor suite at CES earlier this year, but left us longing for a demo. Well, the outfit's just given us all our first glimpse at the healthiest processing muscle in the bunch, the quad-core i.MX 6. Sporting four ARM Cortex A9 cores and a 64-bit memory bus, the reference design board can be seen running a 1080p video demo and Quake simultaneously -- and it didn't even break a sweat. Freescale says it's currently working with Google on making the processor Honeycomb-compatible, but don't get too excited; i.MX 6 won't make it into real-deal machines until 2012. If you've got an extra 20 minutes to spare, hop on past the break for a rather lengthy video of the processor at work.
Panasonic's 1.4 GHz dual-core Smart TV chip is industry's fastest, should load Netflix quicker
The next step for Panasonic's UniPhier family of processors for HDTVs and Blu-ray players has been unveiled, taking form as a 1.4GHz ARM Cortex-A9 based design that it claims is the industry's fastest for TVs. The MN2WS0220 will begin sample shipments this month and it can handle two HDTV streams, plus internet content and smart TV apps all at once while cutting power consumption from the previous generation by 40%. This follows in the footsteps of Toshiba's Cell-based CEVO TV processors that also bring multiple cores and high speed memory to bear. The other question of course is backwards compatibility, while some of the new Viera Connect apps for 2011 were also compatible with 2010 HDTVs, it'll be interesting to see if Panasonic's platform can take advantage of the new chip without making televisions that are currently on shelves obsolete, or if it considers joining forces with the Google TV cadre for apps like SlingPlayer and OnLive.
Linaro and Samsung roll out Exynos 4210-based Origen development board for $199
You may recall a little group of Linux-loving chums called Linaro, which was formed almost a year ago in the hopes of speeding up Linux development. Today at Computex, the company's taking one step further with the announcement of the Origen development board. Based on Samsung's beefy Exynos 4210 dual core chipset, the kit packs all the essential ports -- including HDMI, USB 2.0 host, SD slot, etc. -- for keen developers to get their hands dirty on, and its base board is also removable to accommodate future chipsets. Potential buyers are told to keep an eye on Insignal, which will soon be offering the basic Origen package for $199, along with optional parts at an extra cost.
Meizu MX to be Jack Wong's next dream phone, coming with HDMI-out by year's end (update: HSPA+)
It's only been 109 days since Meizu's remarkable launch of the M9 Android, but as we all know, there's nothing stopping our man Jack Wong from teasing his next flagship phone on his forum. Previously known as the M9II, Wong has now renamed this 4-inch handset to MX -- apparently short for "meng xiang" or "dream" in Mandarin Chinese, though X can also cunningly double up as the Roman numeral for 10 here. Also shared is the above real-life shot of an MX mock-up -- not far off from the earlier render -- which is appropriately seen chillaxing on the CEO's bed. In a separate forum thread, we're told that HDMI and coaxial digital audio outputs will be present on the MX, and a 16GB model will be released by the end of the year probably for ¥3,580 ($548). While this is a significant jump from the M9's ¥2,699 ($413), Wong insists that both phones share the same profit margin, and frankly, this will still be a pretty good deal for some Cortex-A9 goodness under a larger screen. We'll be right here waiting for you, Meizu; or we could just pop by your factory again some time. Update: Jack Wong's also confirmed HSPA+ support for some sweet 21Mbps download speed. The phone's getting better by the minute! Update 2: And we now have an 8 megapixel camera with flash.
Sony's next-gen PSP (NGP) has a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor, quad-core GPU as well
You know that crazy next-gen PSP (NGP) with multiple touchpads, dual analog sticks, and quadrupled resolution that Sony just trotted out? Yeah, it's got a quad-core Cortex-A9 and a quad-core Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX543MP4+ GPU doing the grunt work within. We've never seen a handheld this powerful. Then again, considering the darn thing won't be launching until this holiday season, maybe quad-core parts will be the least Sony will need in order to match up to the "super phones" coming up this year. We're just wondering how long any of these souped-up portables will last on a charge. Full spec sheet after the break.
Nokia's leaked MeeGo device resembles dual-core ST-Ericsson U8500 reference platform
Yesterday's leaked image of a purported Nokia tablet device seems to have been more informative than we initially believed it to be. An eagle-eyed forum member over on mobile-review has spotted the similarity between it and a reference platform for ST-Ericsson's U8500 system-on-chip. Last we heard, that little powerhouse was running a pair of 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 cores, so excuse us if we find the prospect of it driving Nokia's next flagship a rather exciting one. You can see video of the reference device in question after the break -- it ends on the delicious and unequivocal assertion from the ST-Ericsson rep that Nokia has signed up to deliver the U8500 in an upcoming device. Bear in mind, however, that the video is from November of last year and we still don't know for sure that the Nokia slate above is its MeeGo progenitor or just a prototype. Either way, the U8500 is expected in smartphones at some point in the first half of this year, which kind of fits Nokia's roadmap, no? [Image credit: Cor72z]
