Thread: Anandtech News

The Verizon Droid Incredible 4G LTE begged the question, is their room for a mid-range phone? As it turns out, there is, but the latest Incredible is not it. Too many compromises made some solid components into a less than capable whole. So, what happens when you stir the pot again and draw out a different brew? We’ve laid hands on the Atrix, and the Atrix 2 that followed, and come off impressed by the device, if underwhelmed by the WebTop UI that accompanied the standard Android install. The Motorola Atrix HD, though, takes a very different tack than its predecessors. From software, to design, to internals, there’s very little legacy left in the Atrix HD; but with the Droid Incredible 4G LTE’s design so hampered by its past, could the Atrix’s break from tradition be a good move? Let’s find out. 

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We just got seated for the Microsoft/Nokia Windows Phone 8 press conference in NYC. This is the first of many press events happening this week. There's a Motorola event later today, and a couple of others quietly going on in the background. Tomorrow we've got Amazon's big tablet event as well. We'll be bringing live coverage from all of them, starting in about 35 minutes with the Nokia event. Check back here for live updates! Nokia is also live streaming the event here.
We were at the official introduction of Windows Phone 8 over the summer. For details on what WP8 brings, check out our coverage here. Higher resolutions (1280 x 768, 720p), support for 28nm dual-core Snapdragon S4 Plus (MSM8960, dual-core Krait + Adreno 225) are both features on the hardware side. Combine that with the software improvements in Windows Phone 8 and we'll have a much more modern smartphone platform from Microsoft this round. 
Microsoft initially had three issues with the relaunched Windows Phone back in 2010. It lacked a leading hardware partner, it only supported old/outdated silicon and it needed an aggressive update cadence. The Nokia partnership announced last year helped address the first problem. The second is presently addressed by Windows Phone 8's support for 28nm Qualcomm SoCs. And the third is similarly impacted by the new OS release.
The Microsoft/Nokia partnership was first announced in February of 2011. It typically takes 18 - 24 months for a brand new smartphone design cycle. The earlier Lumia devices were impressive but largely repurposed from existing Nokia designs. What we see today from Nokia should be a bit more unique, but it will likely be early next year before we see the true fruits of this partnership.
Microsoft got off to a great start with Windows Phone 7. The lag between WP7 and WP8 was unfortunately too long to put Microsoft in a good place. The real question going forward is how long we'll have to wait between significant OS updates and whether or not Microsoft will push to adopt new hardware platforms quicker than it has. Both Android and iOS are well established at this point, for Microsoft to outpace both it will need to be far more aggressive on its release schedule.
The trump card in all of this is the rest of the Microsoft world. Windows Phone 8 shares a kernel with Windows 8. With a common hardware platform between Windows RT and Windows Phone 8 there's a lot of potential for WP8 to leverage development for Windows RT. If Microsoft eventually expands WP8 silicon to include Intel's x86 SoCs, the cross-platform compatibility story could improve tremendously. 

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Syabas launched the next generation member of their Popcorn Hour A-series at IFA 2012 last week. Even though we have been aware of the news for quite some time, we waited till the official US press release was sent to us. Some blogs have already covered the IFA launch. US readers worried about the price (289 Euros, which translates to more than $350 at current exchange rates) should be quite happy to find that Syabas plans to sell the A-400 elsewhere for US $249 only.

The A-400 scores over the A-300 in some critical aspects:

• Support for 3D Blu-ray playback with BD-Lite
• Premium casing from SilverStone, which ensures optimal passive cooling
• Slide-out tray for hard disk installation
• Tablet apps (iOS available at launch / Android version coming later this year) to present NMJ interface on the secondary screen
• Sigma Designs SMP8911 with VXP Video Processing

The final aspect should prove to be a worthy competitor to the Marvell chips with Qdeo video processing. The SMP 891x series was demonstrated at the 2011 CES, and it has spent quite some time getting into the hands of the media player manufacturers. Hopefully, the SDK and firmware are stable. Syabas also has a table comparing the features of the A-400 with other contemporary media players.

The A-300 might still be the player of choice for many users because it offers full Blu-ray menu functionality unofficially. The case with A-400 is not very clear because the BD stack wasn't licensed for the SMP8911 due to Cinavia concerns. This is also the reason why a C-400 (a Blu-ray drive equipped version of the A-400) appears quite unlikely at this point.
Syabas assures that the issues with HD Audio and multi-branching Blu-ray titles that plagued the A-300 aren't a problem with the A-400. There are a number of other showstopper bugs in the A300 (which has prevented us from putting out a full review) which are hopefully addressed in a future A-300 firmware update / don't exist in the A-400.

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Nokia just announced its next-generation Windows Phone 8 devices: the Lumia 920 and Lumia 820. Both are pentaband devices (available in both LTE and HSPA+ versions later this year, Q4 to be exact), powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 SoC running at 1.5GHz. The 920 features an 8.7MP rear facing camera with optical image stabilization and F/2.0 lens. Around front is 1.2MP F/2.4. The 820 has no OIS for the 8MP rear facing camera and a VGA front facing camera.
Both phones support wireless charging via the Qi standard. The 920 has an integrated 2000mAh battery, while the 820 has a smaller, removable, 1650mAh battery.
The 920 features a 4.5-inch WXGA IPS LCD, while the 820 uses a 4.3-inch OLED WVGA panel. 
Both support Nokia's super sensitive touch that allows even someone wearing gloves to use the capacitive touchscreen. Synaptics is responsible for the touch controller in both the 920 and 820.
Only the 820 has a microSD card slot, while the 920 features 32GB of on-board NAND. 
The 920 measures 130mm x 70.8mm x 10.7mm and weighs 185g. The 820 is smaller at 123.8mm x 68.5mm x 9.9mm and 160g. Full network support for both phones is as follows:
GSM850/900/1800/1900 WCDMA 850/900/1900/2100
LTE 800/900/1800/2100/2600
Speed: LTE Cat3 100Mbps/50Mbps HSDPA+ Dual Carrier cat24 (42 Mbps) HSUPA cat 6: 5.8 Mbps
 
NFC, 802.11a/b/g/n, WiFi Hotspot, Bluetooth 3.1 are all supported.

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While Anand is covering today's other big NYC events for Nokia and Motorola, I'm over at HTC's second ever Frequencies, and just recently got to play with a special edition of HTC's One X (MSM8960). It's a special edition HTC One X that's internally identical to the HTC One X on AT&T with MSM8960, but instead carries a unique two-tone black and white polycarbonate chassis. 
Gallery: One X Cushnie et Ochs Edition


The phone is visually striking and was manufactured specifically for New York Fashion Week from fashion label Cushnie Et Ochs. The phone also includes a slick new theme onboard which matches the exterior styling, but unfortunately carries over AT&T's branding and iconography in places. I placed the special edition inbetween my own One X (black, left) and Richard Lai's One X (white, right) for comparison. 

While it's visually striking, the two-tone One X will not be available for purchase and will only be gifted to certain celebrities and famous personalities. I was told to think along the lines of Victoria's Secret fashion model. At Frequencies, HTC is strongly playing up an emphasis on industrial design and color choice driven by colors and fashion, so this special edition One X does fit alongside that strategy in some way. 

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I'm rushing over to the Motorola event right now, but I wanted to upload some hands on shots of the new Lumia 920 and 820 that were announced earlier today. Videos and more impressions to follow!
Gallery: Hands On with the Nokia Lumia 920 & Lumia 820

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Having just finished up with the Lumia 920 and 820 at Nokia's Windows Phone 8 event, I just got seated at Motorola's On Display event. Expect live coverage right here starting in about 30 minutes!

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Some data from Google at today's Motorola On Display event:

There are now 1.3M Android device activations per day, as of today. About 70,000 of those device activations per day are tablets. The installed base of Android devices is about 480M as of today.

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We just spent a little bit of time with the new Droid RAZR family: the Droid RAZR M, RAZR HD and RAZR HD MAXX.
The RAZR M features a 4.3-inch qHD Super AMOLED Advanced display, while the HD and HD MAXX feature 4.7-inch 720p Super AMOLED HD displays. PenTile is present on all three.
Gallery: Motorola Droid RAZR M


All three phones feature the same dual-core (28nm Krait + Adreno 225) Qualcomm MSM8960 SoC running at 1.5GHz, and 1GB of memory. Software isn't final on either of the RAZR HD devices so we'll hold off on doing any real performance analysis there. We should have a final RAZR M later today so we'll update with a quick look at performance there.
NAND storage ranges from 8GB on the M, to 16GB on the HD and 32GB on the HD MAXX. Additional storage expansion via microSD is offered on all three models. 
Battery capacity varies between the three as well. The M comes with a 2000mAh battery, the HD bumps that up to 2530mAh, and the HD MAXX features a whopping 3300mAh battery just like its predecessor. 
Gallery: Motorola Droid RAZR HD


All three support the same bands and operating modes:
CDMA 800 1900, LTE B13, WCDMA 850 900 1900 2100, GSM 850, 900, 1800, 1900 EVDO Rev. A, HSDPA 21.1 Mbps (Cat 14), HSUPA 5.76 Mbps
The RAZR M and RAZR HD are both available in black and white, while the RAZR HD MAXX is only available in black.
Gallery: Motorola Droid RAZR HD MAXX

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While the Droid RAZR HD and RAZR MAXX aren't due out until later this year, Motorola/Google sampled press who attended the On Display event earlier today with a Droid RAZR M. As a recap, the RAZR M shares the same internal hardware as the RAZR HD and MAXX, but with a small battery, less on-board storage and a smaller display. 
The 4.3-inch qHD (960 x 540) Super AMOLED Advanced (RGBG PenTile, similar to the original Droid RAZR) display is crammed into a chassis that's only a bit larger than the iPhone 4S. 

Gallery: Motorola Droid RAZR M

I have to say I'm a fan of the compact chassis combined with extremely large screen. Although I definitely understand the appeal of larger devices (I like the One X a lot), the RAZR M really does offer a great balance of form factor and display size. The device feels solid and relatively light, although the plethora of breaks in the design do give the RAZR M a distinctly lower tier look.
The phone ships with 8GB of on-board storage, but you do get a microSD slot for expansion.

The microSD and micro SIM slots are located behind the same plastic cover on the left edge of the device. The micro USB port is also found on the left side of the RAZR M. Power/lock and volume rocker are both located on the right side. 
Surprisingly enough I had no issues using Verizon's LTE network while walking around Manhattan today in between meetings. In fact I did most of my testing while wandering around the city, which leads me to my next point: the RAZR M can get quite warm during heavy use. That's nothing too surprising, but a single loop through GLBenchmark 2.5 will warm up your pocket enough to make things a bit uncomfortable. This isn't really an issue specific to the RAZR M, but rather a reminder that even with the move to 28nm we're still dissipating the same amount of power under max load as we have in earlier designs.
I didn't bring my display testing equipment with me so I'll have to save those results until I'm back in Raleigh this weekend. Subjectively the display looks vibrant although small text doesn't look all that good by today's standards.

The RAZR M, like the rest of the new Droid RAZR family, ships with Chrome as the default browser. It's not as much of a bold statement as it would've been prior to Jelly Bean (Android 4.1) officially doing the same thing, but it's a nice addition. Unfortunately it looks like JS performance isn't anything earth shattering. We've definitely seen better performance from other devices running Chrome. Motorola did caution us about drawing any conclusions based on this data since final software is still not quite ready. 

Overall performance courtesy of Vellamo looks to be in line with other S4 based devices:

The rest of the software is custom Motorola layered on top of Android 4.0.4 (Jelly Bean upgrades promised before the end of the year). Motorola's changes to Android don't feel terrible and they don't seem to take as much getting used to as what you get from HTC or Samsung, but that may just be me. 
Most UI transitions are smooth although you will see dropped frame rates from time to time. The move to Jelly Bean will hopefully help alleviate some of those issues though. 
GPU performance is right where you'd expect it to be based on the underlying hardware (dual-core Snapdragon S4 running at 1.5GHz with Adreno 225):

We still have a lot more to do before we're at full review status of the device, but so far I like what Motorola has done with the RAZR M. It's good to see Motorola focusing on both the larger and smaller device form factors in the RAZR family. 

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