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Confirmed: HTC Qilin uses OMAP3 -- out of necessity
HTC's got a super-tight relationship with Qualcomm, a relationship that they've gone to the mat to defend on many occasions -- most recently with the Hero, which uses essentially the same 528MHz MSM7201a chipset as pretty much every other notable HTC in recent memory. Thing is, this is 2009 and there now are better, faster processors out there, even within the ARM family; take TI's Cortex A8-based OMAP3, for example, which very effectively powers some of the most media-centric, UI eye candy-heavy devices on the market. That's not to say that the MSM7200 series can't hold its own -- one look at TouchFLO 3D gliding along smoothly on a Touch Pro2 will tell you that -- but why not throw more horsepower under the hood if you can still get a full days' worth of use on battery power? We've been able to confirm a wmpoweruser.com report that HTC's upcoming Qilin for China Mobile will be underpinned by an honest-to-goodness OMAP3, which you'd think might rock the Qualcomm boat but HTC's decision was actually very easy: the fully-integrated MSM7200 isn't available in a TD-SCDMA configuration. That's good for Qilin, good for China Mobile, bad for customers of every other Whitestone variant in the world. If there's a silver lining here, it's that HTC's leaked roadmaps seem to indicate that Snapdragon-powered gear will happen sooner rather than later, but at this point, it can't happen soon enough.
China Mobile announces HTC 'Qilin' as Dopod T8388
China Mobile has a vested interest in making sure TD-SCDMA succeeds seeing how it's the only of China's big three carriers to be rolling it out -- and it's not exactly sharing the technology with carriers around the globe -- but money talks, and a portion of the 47 million yuan in subsidies being doled out to advance the standard have gone to making sure this little gem sees the light of day. What you're looking at here is the Dopod T8388 from HTC, a customized version of the still-unannounced Whitestone that appears to take some pages out of the Touch Diamond2's book with WVGA, 5 megapixels of shooting power, WinMo 6.5, and features 3G fashioned just for China Mobile's airwaves. Look for it in the fourth quarter -- question is, will it beat Verizon's version to market? [Via the::unwired and wmpoweruser.com]
