Thread: Anandtech News

HTC CEO Peter Chou just announced the HTC Inspire 4G. Details about the HTC Inspire 4G's hardware stack are relatively scant, but the 4.3" screen begets a platform likely similar to the HTC EVO 4G, and will run Android 2.2.

The HTC Inspire 4G's real new feature is that it will be the first HTC phone with the new HTC Sense experience. HTC Sense brings a host of new enhancements, including context-aware ringtones - leave your phone in a purse or handbag, and the ringer will be appropriately louder, but silence itself when removed.

The New HTC Sense will also come with a web component, HTCsense.com, which provides remote wipe, lock, and ring functionality similar to what Windows Phone 7 and iOS offer.

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Rounding out the devices AT&T has announced this morning is the Samsung Infuse 4G, which packs a huge 4.5" Super AMOLED plus display. We're not certain what plus adds to super beyond even better sharpness and outdoor visibility. It's possible that super AMOLED plus includes a different subpixel pattern with greater density than Pentile, however we're not entirely certain yet.

The device is 9mm thin, which AT&T claims is its thinnest smartphone - sure enough, the iPhone 4 is just 0.3 mm thicker. The 4.5 inch display is the largest we know of as well.

It appears that AT&T is taking a nod from T-Mobile and calling HSPA+ 21 Mbps devices "4G," something that while technically is kosher now by ITC standards, really isn't as exciting or fast as LTE. Details about the Infuse 4G are scant beyond it including an 8 megapixel rear facing camera and 1.3 megapixel front facing camera, and running Android 2.2 as well. The Infuse 4G also includes a Hummingbird SoC clocked 1.2 GHz.



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Twelve months ago NVIDIA stood on stage at CES and introduced its Tegra 2 SoC. It promised dozens of design wins and smartphones shipping before Spring 2010. That obviously did not happen.

What instead happened was NVIDIA lost a number of design wins, many of which we centered around mobile OSes other than Android. There were a number of Windows Mobile/Windows CE based designs that never made it to market, and a lot of efforts around earlier versions of Android that never went anywhere.

In the time since NVIDIA’s CES 2010 announcement, the company has shifted resources and focused its entire Tegra team on a single OS: Android. Choosing Android isn’t a hard decision to understand, of all of the available smartphone OS options it has the most momentum behind it.

Read on for more coverage of NVIDIA's Tegra 2 announcements at CES.



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NVIDIA's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang just announced Project Denver - its first CPU architecture design ever, based on ARM's ISA. This is a custom design done by NVIDIA in conjunction with ARM and targeted at the high performance computing (HPC) market.

This is a huge announcement from NVIDIA, but not entirely unexpected. Prior to Project Denver NVIDIA licensed ARM IP but developed its own IP everywhere else for use in Tegra. Going forward, NVIDIA is turning into a full fledged SoC architecture company. This is a huge step in NVIDIA becoming a major player in the smartphone evolution going forward.

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Just four months ago, NVIDIA released their top-to-bottom 400M lineup. Since the announcement, it took about a month but we then got the ASUS G73Jw (460M), Dell XPS L501x (420M), Clevo B5130M (425M), and ASUS N53JF (425M) in rapid succession. All of these were decent offerings, with a nice blend of performance and features at reasonable prices. Of course, Core 2010 products are last year’s news, and with the launch of Sandy Bridge the whole industry is moving to 2nd Generation Intel Core Processors (aka Core 2011). With an improved IGP threatening low-end discrete GPUs, what better time for NVIDIA to refresh their mobile parts?

Unlike the desktop GTX 580, the new 500M mobile parts are all using existing architectures; there are even a couple of new 400M parts to round things out. The major change is that we’re getting higher clock speeds, both on the GPU cores/shaders as well as the memory. In a few cases we also have additional shaders available, as well as clearing up some potentially confusing part names (really!). Read on for details on this year’s NVIDIA laptop offerings—coming soon to a Sandy Bridge laptop near you!



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A few months ago SandForce announced its second generation SSD controller: the SF-2000 series. The specs SandForce released at the time were almost too good to be true. As a refresher here’s what we saw back in October of last year:

SandForce is promising a single enterprise level drive that can deliver 500MB/s sequential reads and writes (for highly compressible data), and up to 60K IOPS for 4KB random reads and writes. That’s not an evolutionary improvement, that’s more than a doubling of what most of the competition can do today. Even compared to existing SandForce drives it’s a huge increase in performance. But as I’ve heard many times before, anyone can put out a promising PDF.

Read on to find out if OCZ's beta Vertex 3 Pro can live up to the expectations.



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Today Motorola unveiled 4 new Android based devices during their press conference at CES today; three smartphones and 1 tablet. We were able to get some limited hands on time with these devices at the end of the conference today.

The first device, the Atrix 4G was announced earlier this morning during AT&T's press event but we do have a few more details about this smartphone and its "webtop" peripherals. Read on for our take on the device.


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The Microsoft keynote at CES last night reiterated a lot of what we already know about Windows Phone 7, and fleshed out the software giant's plans for its mobile phone operating system in 2011. Part of those plans include a much needed update bringing copy and paste, some dramatic performance improvements, and support for CDMA carriers stateside like Verizon and Sprint.

Read on for more.

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CES 2011 has kicked off in a major way and the talk on a lot of vendors lips is Sandy Bridge: what it means, what it brings to the table, and yes, how to capitalize on it. But Sandy Bridge isn't the only big thing going on here; we had a chance to sit down with Corsair, Kingston, Zalman, Zotac, Patriot, A-Data, Thermaltake, and Cooler Master to see what they had on the horizon. These are some of the trends and noteworthy products we came across.

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The entities formerly known as AMD—namely, AMD and GlobalFoundries—are both here in Vegas for CES, and we had an opportunity to stop by and discuss their current and future technologies. 2011 is set to be a major year for both companies, with new process nodes, new CPUs, and new GPUs targeting all segments of the computing spectrum. Judging by the amount of AMD laptops scattered around the various booths, this could be something of a comeback for the “little” guys. Why the excitement, and what’s coming this year?

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