Thread: Anandtech News

It goes without saying that for Nokia, the Lumia 900 launch is quite possibly one of the most important launches, ever. The Lumia 900 marks Nokia’s first serious foray back into the competitive American market, and with it the first high-end fruit from its new strategic partnership with Microsoft. The stakes are high for Nokia - how well the Lumia 900 does in the USA will be a reflection on both Nokia’s industrial design, and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 smartphone OS.

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Thirteen months ago OCZ announced its intention to acquire Indilinx, the SSD controller maker that gave Intel its first taste of competition in the consumer market in 2009. Eight months later, OCZ launched its first post-acquisition SSD based on Indilinx silicon. Today, just five months after the launch of the Octane, OCZ is officially releasing the Vertex 4 – based on its Indilinx Everest 2 silicon. In less than a year, OCZ has brought to market more Indilinx powered controllers than Indilinx did in the previous three years. It's rare that you see the fruits of acquisition so quickly, but if there's anything OCZ's CEO Ryan Petersen is good at it's pushing for an aggressive schedule.

Rather than call this drive the Octane 2, OCZ went with Vertex 4, indicating its rightful place at the top of OCZ's SSD lineup. The implications run even deeper. It marks the first time in two years that a Vertex drive will ship without a SandForce controller inside. Make no mistake, while Octane was a shot across SandForce's bow, Vertex 4 means war. While OCZ continues to ship tons of SandForce controllers, the future for the company is Indilinx. The Vertex 4 is just the beginning. OCZ will continue to ship Vertex 3 in parallel, and should a future SandForce controller make competitive sense to use OCZ will definitely consider it, but the intention is to build the fastest silicon internally and use it as much as possible.
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For a while now, a regular feature in our smartphone reviews has been comparison of smartphone voice quality on different devices, air interfaces, and codecs. Until recently, improving voice quality has been something of a secondary objective for wireless carriers, and improvements in voice codec efficiency has been used to increase total call capacity rather than improve cellular voice quality.

Today however Sprint announced the introduction of its HD Voice initiative which will launch in conjunction with the HTC EVO 4G LTE. Our own Jason Inofuentes is at the event and will have impressions of the device soon, which is based around a 1.5 GHz MSM8960 dual core Krait SoC. For the HTC EVO 4G LTE, HD Voice consists of one part common mode noise rejection using two microphones (something we've seen ship on high-end smartphones for a while now), and one part 1x-Advanced.
Part of the CDMA 1x-Advanced specification is inclusion of support for higher quality EVRC voice encoding. At present, virtually all the CDMA2000 carriers in the USA use EVRC-B for their voice calls, which has adaptive bitrates of between 4 and 8 kbps and sampling of up to 8 KHz. Sprint has talked rather publicly in the past about upgrading its CDMA2000 1x network to 1x-Advanced, and that brings me to HD Voice.
I reached out to Qualcomm and asked what voice codec was being used in conjunction with Sprint's HD Voice branding on the HTC EVO 4G LTE, and learned that EVRC-NW (Service Option 73) is being used. EVRC-NW (Narrowband-Wideband), as the name suggests, includes both the EVRC-B rates and narrowband 8 KHz sampling, and EVRC-WB rates and 16 KHz sampling all under one umbrella.
The end result is double the frequency bandwidth for voice calls, as 16 KHz is essentially close enough to the widely cited 20 KHz upper bound for human auditory perception. EVRC-NW is superficially analogous to AMR-WB, and I've listened to a number of AMR-WB versus AMR-NB demos that are pretty compelling. Sprint moving on to wideband audio is definitely a welcome move here, and we look forward to testing it out. The only remaining question is just how aggressive and quick Sprint will be with its 1x to 1x-Advanced update.



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HTC and Sprint teamed up today to announce the latest in the EVO line: the EVO 4G LTE. So, not the most novel name, but it gets to the point. The 4.7" device is carved out of an aluminum space frame, anodized to an all black finish with red accents and an exposed silver edge. And along that prominent red band across the back? That's right, the kickstand's back. But don't call this part of the One series. This is a Sprint EVO device through and through.
Inside the EVO 4G LTE is Qualcomm's MDM8960, Snapdragon S4 per PR parlance, mirroring the HTC One S, but with some additional features enabled to separate it from the One line. Most predominantly, per Sprint, is the introduction of the US market's first HD Voice phone. In addition to the requisite noise cancellation features, Sprint will now be supporting EVRC-NW (Enhanced Variable Rate Codec - Narrow Wide), which extends the voice codec from EVRC's 3,600-300 Hz to an impressive 7,000-80Hz and correspondingly extends the bitrates range, as well. This system will be backwards compatible with their current EVRC codec, and will be a nice fall back when Sprint moves towards a VoLTE system.

HTC has also seen fit to update the camera over prior EVO devices with one of the most well specced optics we've seen on a phone, including what they're calling HTC ImageSense, which features an f/2.0 lens, and a dedicated imaging ISP. We did get HTC to confirm that they'll be using their own silicon for the imaging ISP, foregoing Qualcomm's capable ISPs, though we don't know whose IP HTC is leveraging for this silicon. ImageSense will be seen in the One line, including the f/2.0 lens, so this will not be an EVO exclusive for long. The pictures look good on the phones 4.7" 720p Super LCD screen, we'll see how they look at full-size when we get to sample the devices.
Sense 4.0 is featured atop Android 4.0, and HTC was all to eager to mention just how slimmed down Sense had become. The interface seemed snappy enough, no doubt helped by Krait's potent CPU and ICS's GPU acceleration hooks. Oddly, the phone will launch during the second quarter of this year (so, before July), but Sprint's LTE network won't launch till sometime in the second half of 2012. It's unclear what sort of lag there will be between the phone's launch and the network's launch, but we may be visiting our Kansas City readers in order to test out the device when the time comes. The HTC EVO 4G LTE willb e priced at $199 on-contract, when it does launch. Paired with Sprint's dedication to unlimited data plans (sans throttling) even on LTE this could be a bargain route to Krait.



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Plextor as a brand is probably a new acquaintance for most people and I have to admit that I had not heard of Plextor until a couple of months ago. Plextor is more known for their optical disk drives but roughly two years ago, they entered the SSD market. Plextor is now at its third generation of SSDs and we have finally got the chance of reviewing their latest offering: The M3. Based on Marvell's 88SS9174-BLD2 controller, the M3 is a direct competitor to Crucial's popular m4 series. Both obviously utilize in-house firmwares, which can lead to big differences in performance.

While Plextor is a relatively small and unknown brand, I can already hint that their offering is not minuscule in performance when put against SSD giants' drives. How fast is it then? Read on and find out!


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Ever since the launch of the Bulldozer range and 9-series motherboards, the initial reviews of the processors were not encouraging to say the least. Since then, AMD has decided to pull out of the enthusiast end of the CPU market, to focus in on the mainstream and low power processors. This is despite the fact that Windows 7 (and Windows 8, natively) is now receiving updates so the operating system can understand the processor architecture a little better, and hopefully boost performance. This gives a second wind to those owning (or thinking of owning) a Bulldozer based processor, and in turn, a 900-series motherboard. With the updates in hand, today we are looking at five 990FX boards that may feature on the consumer or system builders’ radar.

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Pulse-Eight is one of the companies tracing its roots to XBMC, and it is no wonder they have a host of interesting products in the HTPC space. We have already taken a look at their innovative HDMI CEC adapter product, and today we have their universal remote up for review. The Motorola NYXboard hybrid remote from Pulse-Eight is unlike any other remote we have evaluated so far.
There are plenty of universal remotes and HTPC control solutions at various price points. Some come with both IR and RF capabilities. Others are able to control multiple devices. Some have universal remotes integrated in a keyboard. However, the Motorola NYXboard hybrid remote is unique in terms of combining the optimal features necessary in a XBMC HTPC based setup.

The NYXboard is a dual-sided learning remote with both IR and RF capabilities. The RF capabilities enable it to interact with a PC, while the IR support helps it to control other devices in the home theater setup. The keyboard side also has basic mouse functionality. The NYXboard has everything going for it in terms of specifications. Does it translate to a good user experience? Read on for our short take on the Pulse-Eight Motorola NYXboard Hybrid Remote.


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Well, today is a day that everyone was expecting, but perhaps not the most exciting day of the month. Today, Intel officially releases the spate of 7-series chipsets for their 3^rd generation Core microarchitecture processors (read – Ivy Bridge), despite the actual release of the processors being another three weeks away. This means that today we can actually look at, test, or purchase the range of motherboards that natively support Ivy Bridge. However, we can’t officially publish all the benchmarks for these products using Ivy Bridge until that date three weeks away (to be honest, we are still testing!). So today we are going to have a good in depth look into the Z77 chipset itself, and the review products we have received to let you know what we think looks good. All these boards today will be fully reviewed, warts and all, with Ivy Bridge, as close to official release as possible.

The boards today are from ASRock, ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, ECS and Biostar. All these boards will natively support Sandy Bridge processors, and be fully upgradeable to Ivy Bridge silicon when the processors are released. Read on for the preview.


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Towards the end of last year, I took a visit out to Antec's campus in Fremont to see two new cases: the headlining P280, and the shortly-to-follow Eleven Hundred. The P280 we've already reviewed; it's as much a complement to the existing P180 series as it is a refresh, but our review of the Eleven Hundred has been conspicuously absent since its launch. That's due to a combination of bad timing and the fact that, superficially, the Eleven Hundred has an awful lot in common with the P280, pushing other cases to the front of the line.

With the refreshed case testbed I decided it was time to take a look at the Eleven Hundred, if for no other reason than to at least get a comparison point that was similar to the P280 in our results. As it turns out, though the Eleven Hundred shares the same fundamental framework and chassis as the P280, the differences between the two are far more notable than they seem. Read on for more details on what the Eleven Hundred brings to the chassis party.


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Just a few months after announcing the IdeaPad S2, Lenovo has brought the Android 4.0 ICS powered 9.7-inch IdeaPad S2109 to light.

In a YouTube video, Lenovo teased some of the specs of the tablet; it wields a 8.9mm-thick gunmetal unibody case wrapped around a 9.7-inch 1024x768 IPS screen. That's not a very impressive resolution, but it does match the iPad 2--which of course has now been superceded by the new iPad with it's 2048x1536 resolution LCD.
The S2109 comes with the now fairly standard setup of a micro-HDMI port, micro-SD expandable memory card slot, and a micro-USB port. Lenovo opted to only equip the S2109 with a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera, with no rear camera present. Lenovo also claims the battery life for the S2109 will reach 10 hours. The final bit of info we’ve been given is that the back of the device features four SRS TruMedia-branded speakers. Just to leave us eager in anticipation, Lenovo has not yet revealed the SoC nor the onboard memory capacity for the S2109.
With Lenovo having just recently announced the IdeaTab S2, comparisons are begging to be made between the two. The IdeaTab S2 is just a hair larger than the S2109 at 10.1 inches and packs the brand new Qualcomm S4 MSM8960. That’s just a fact to keep in mind while we wait for further details about what the S2109 may possess. For now price and availability are unknown, but we’ll keep you updated as further details arise.



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