Thread: Anandtech News

Since there are so many smartphones on the market, we figured that the holiday season was a great time to write our first smartphone buyer's guide. And so we continue our 2010 Holiday Buyer's Guides with the handset sector. This year was the first year that we got some real, honest competition in the smartphone sector. Google's 2.0 version of Android released late last year to great success, and versions 2.1 and 2.2 only continued that trend. Apple, always good for some drama, kept it up this year with the iPhone 4 and the ensuing Antennagate scandal. Microsoft finally made a serious play for the handheld sector with the brand new, Zune-based Windows Phone 7. Palm got bought out by HP, BlackBerry finally got a WebKit browser in BB6, and Nokia continues pair increasingly awesome hardware with Symbian on everything not called the N900. Safe to say, we had a pretty busy year in the smartphone segment.

We've split our guide into 6 segments - one for each carrier, then one for unlocked and international devices. We put in a page for tablets, since that's still an expanding market closely related to smartphones. Over the next few months, we'll see rapid growth in tablets and slate computing devices, but for now, it's not big enough to warrant more than a page. So, we'll kick it off with the carriers, starting with AT&T.



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As expected, today Google announced Android 2.3 Gingerbread and the Nexus S. Android 2.3 is the latest iteration of Google’s popular smartphone platform, and includes a number of immediately apparent graphical changes to the Android 2.2 UI, and a host of under the hood features for developers.

Alongside the Android 2.3 announcement came official confirmation of the Nexus S, which appears to be architecturally very similar to the Galaxy S line of devices, with the notable inclusion of near field communication (NFC) hardware, a curved display, and front facing camera.

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AMD is usually pretty aggressive with turning process tweaks and yield improvements into new products. Just two months ago AMD gave us the Athlon II X3 450 and the Phenom II X2 565, today we're getting speed bumps of both of those parts. The Athlon II X3 455 runs at 3.3GHz, up from 3.2GHz and costs the same $87. You get an additional 100MHz for free. The chip hasn't changed otherwise. You get a quad-core die with one core disabled, no L3 cache and a 512KB L2 per core.




The Phenom II X2 565 is an unlocked Black Edition part, also identical to its predecessors. Here you have a quad-core die with two cores disabled, a 512KB L2 per core and a shared 6MB L3. The 565 runs at 3.4GHz, up from 3.3GHz, but the clock increase comes with a $10 price increase.

The six-core Phenom II X6 gets a speed bump as well. The 1100T increases default clock speeds from 3.2GHz to 3.3GHz, and increases Turbo Core frequency from 3.6GHz to 3.7GHz. Turbo Core is only supported on Thuban based processors (currently only Phenom II X6s) and increases operating frequency if half or fewer cores are actively in use.

Read on for our full review.



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NVIDIA can be a very predictable company at times. It’s almost unheard of for them to release only a single product based on a high-end GPU, so when they released the excellent GeForce GTX 580 last month we knew it was only a matter of time until additional GTX 500 series cards would join their product lineup.

Now less than a month after the launch of the GTX 580 that time has come. Today NVIDIA is launching the GeForce GTX 570, the second card to utilize their new GF110 GPU. As the spiritual successor to the GTX 470 and very much the literal successor to the GTX 480, the GTX 570 brings the GTX 580’s improvements to a lower priced, lower performing card. Furthermore at $350 it serves to fill in the sizable gap between NVIDIA’s existing GTX 580 and GTX 470 cards.

So how does NVIDIA’s latest and second greatest stack up, and is it a worthy sibling to the GTX 580? Let’s find out.

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As a vocal proponent of improving laptop LCD quality—and LCD quality for desktops as well—the past few years have been painful. True, laptop LCDs have never been at the level of their desktop counterparts, but once upon a time there were at least a few laptops that didn't use TN panels. One of those is the vaunted IBM ThinkPad T42, launched way back in 2004. Besides coming before virtually everything migrated to widescreen displays, the T42 is one of the few laptops to use an IPS panel. As luck would have it, I recently had a chance to use a T42, and I took the opportunity to run it through our standard set of LCD tests. Mostly I was curious to see the results, but I figured some of our readers would enjoy getting our impressions of this archeological find as well.

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The search for a notebook with a quality screen, at least in the mainstream sector, can often feel like a futile one. Outside of Jarred's recent love affair with the Dell XPS 15 and the respectable Clevo B1530M, most screens we've dealt with have been subpar at best. But make the journey to enterprise-class notebooks and things start to brighten up. On the bench today we have HP's EliteBook 8740w, sporting the vaunted DreamColor IPS notebook screen. The upgrade costs a pretty penny on top of what is already a respectably powerful workstation, so how does the whole package fare?

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Next year is looking to be a very important year for smartphone and tablet performance. Just as we saw widespread migration to the ARM Cortex A8 and Qualcomm Scorpion CPU cores in smartphones in 2010, in the next 12 months we will see the first tablets and smartphones based on dual-core SoCs from TI, Qualcomm and NVIDIA. The long awaited Tegra 2 will start shipping in smartphones and tablets in early 2011, and Qualcomm will have its own 45nm dual-core Snapdragon SoCs featured in devices as well. Today TI is announcing more details on its OMAP 4440, a high performance dual-core Cortex A9 SoC slated for production in the second half of 2011.



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ASUS and Intel are putting together a webcast that they've invited me to attend. The topic of discussion? Sandy Bridge. The webcast will air after Intel's official announcement of Sandy Bridge at 9AM PST on January 5, 2011 at CES.

The discussion will be a conversation between myself, Gary Key (former AT Motherboard Editor, current ASUS Technical Marketing Manager), and Michael Lavacot, an Intel Consumer Field Application Engineer.

If you have any questions you'd like to see me answer on air or that you'd like me to grill ASUS and Intel on, leave them in the comments to this post and I'll do my best to get them addressed.

Of course we will also have our full review of Sandy Bridge around the same time.



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Fifteen years ago if you wanted to write an application that would run on over 90% of the world’s personal computers, you only needed to target one OS. Today, to do the same, you’d need to develop for ten - Windows, Linux, OS X, Android, iOS, webOS, BlackBerry OS, Symbian, MeeGo and of course, the web.

You don’t get order without first having chaos and you don’t end up with consolidation without first going through fragmentation. The PC era was dominated by Microsoft and Intel. The transition to ubiquitous computing allowed for many more competitors, which results in a great deal of fragmentation up front.

The goal however, is the same. Every player in this space wants to be what Microsoft was during the PC era. Even the actions are the same. There’s no interoperability between platforms, there are closed door negotiations and exclusivity agreements resulting in a number of alliances that are not easily broken.

Read on for our take on Google's second attempt to capture a piece of the new pie: Chrome OS.



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