Thread: Anandtech News

There’s no getting around it, RIM hasn’t had the best year ever. It's been steadily losing market share to Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 7, there's been lackluster response to BlackBerry 6 OS and the Blackberry Torch, and at best tepid reviews and sales of their first tablet, the PlayBook, have not left the company on rock solid footing. So, pardon, bold moves were a must for the company as developers and journalists gather in Orlando, FL for BlackBerry World.


Images of the Touch Bold leaked months earlier; yet even without the leaks it’s unlikely the reveal would have been met with much surprise. The line was launched in 2008 with the Bold 9000, which itself was no great departure in form factor with its portrait QWERTY dominating the front of the device and its 15 mm girth. In our review of the last iteration, the 9780, we mentioned the lack of innovation in form factor, and while the new phone looks mighty familiar, it is at least quite thinner, down to 10.5 mm from 14.2 mm. This isn’t 2010’s Bold, though. Indeed it’s fair to say this is the first time in a while that a BlackBerry phone will compete on specs.

Gone is the anemic Marvell sourced 624MHz SoC, future BlackBerry aficionados will be blessed by a 1.2 GHz single core Snapdragon variant, likely the MSM8x55. This kind of leap could bring a smoothness and performance to the beleaguered OS that has been sorely lacking. The polish is not just applied to the hardware, the software gets buffed into a whole new iteration.

BB 6 was revealed just last August and while several BB 5 devices were blessed with 2010’s finest BB OS, the same will not be true for 2011’s finest. Indeed, even the Torch and Bold 9780 will be left behind. Why the lack of legacy support? Mirroring the path of graphics in PCs, GPU's have become as important to a good user experience as the CPUs, and the dated SoCs in prior BlackBerry phones won't cut it this time. Bringing BlackBerry 7 to 2011 meant a graphics subsystem that’s tightly integrated with the Adreno 205 most likely under its hood, something that Marvell’s offering lacks.

And speaking of graphics, the Adreno should have no trouble handing just 640 x 480 pixels on its 2.8” capacitive touch screen. A pixel density of 287 dpi should provide crisp text but it remains to be seen how comfortable users will be with a small lower res screen after growing accustomed to the steady rise in screen size and resolution over the last few years. Liquid Graphics is the marketing name for BB 7’s graphics engine and it’s said to provide 60 fps and smooth scrolling and zooming while browsing or taking advantage of the devices multimedia capabilities.

And in a feint to its enterprise users, BB 7 will introduce BlackBerry Balance, which seems to bundle its most enterprise features behind a secure wall, separated from more consumer driven content like your Facebook and Twitter apps. Secure remote wiping of the phone can now be isolated to the enterprise components, leaving your Tweets safe and sound. The only application that I can imagine for this would be wiping sensitive data once an employee is terminated; not the most marketable feature, then.

An updated browser, enhanced voice search, a 5.0 MP camera that will record at 720p and the inclusion of NFC round out the new features. Not a hint of QNX, the PlayBook OS, is to be seen, but this isn’t surprising given that QNX blessed phones aren’t expected till 2012. And speaking of the PlayBook, BlackBerry didn’t leave it out of the first day of BlackBerry World. Video chat and Facebook apps will be gracing the App World this month, with the former promising one-click calling over WiFI.

All in all, a packed day at BlackBerry World. Tomorrow’s keynote by Mike Lazaridis will hopefully shed some light on the companies strategy looking forward, and perhaps give us a peek at the next wave of BlackBerry 7 OS phones.


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AMD has hardly kept quiet on the CPU front these past several months. At the beginning of the year AMD put the nail in Atom's netbook coffin with the Brazos platform, and last month it announced the first shipments of Llano APUs to OEMs. Expect an official launch of Llano to follow sometime in the next two months.

AMD's focus on the mainstream echoes to a certain extent its GPU strategy: focus on the bulk of the customers first, then address the smaller high end of the market. Despite an overly controlling stance on overclocking and issues with B2 stepping 6-series chipsets, Intel's Sandy Bridge (Core ix-2xxx) dominates the high end. AMD will make a go for that market later this year with its Bulldozer architecture. It's still too early for an accurate preview of Bulldozer performance, although the time for such a thing is quickly approaching.

Until Bulldozer's unveiling, the Phenom II remains as AMD's high end platform. Today, that very platform gets a little boost.

Read on for our review of the Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition.

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This morning the Samsung Droid Charge arrived on our doorstep, and we've got a few initial impressions and some photos to tide you over until the full review. Last we saw the Droid Charge was at CES, where it was previously named the rather unassuming "Samsung 4G LTE Device."

Read on for some of our first impressions of the device, and stay tuned for a full review in the coming week or so.



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Well, it’s happened again – Apple’s online store went down briefly this morning, meaning that the secretive company was stocking its virtual shelves with new product. As expected, when the curtain was pulled back, we all had new iMacs staring us right in the face, and they brought with them the customary slew of incremental upgrades over last year’s models. If you were paying attention when Apple refreshed the MacBook Pro earlier this year, a lot of this is going to be familiar to you.



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As a matter of course we tend to spend a lot of time focusing on the gaming potential of the hardware we review. Boutique desktops get a lot of love, and it's always interesting to see just how much power you can pack in a portable solution. Many users simply don't game, yet they still need a powerful machine for other tasks like video or photo editing. In the world of Intel's first-generation Core i7 line, that meant getting a notebook with a battery eating graphics card you just didn't need. Sandy Bridge changes all that with integrated graphics suitable enough for most tasks, and today, CyberPower has offered us a notebook targeted to a slightly different segment than usual: the IGP-powered, 1080p and quad-core-wielding Xplorer X6-9100.

We've already looked at both dual-core and quad-core Sandy Bridge laptops with IGP graphics, but how does this laptop stack up in other important metrics like battery life, design, and build quality? Read on to find out.

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Earlier this week Intel sent us a cryptic message:

I wanted to invite you to an Intel press conference on Wednesday May 4th at 9:30am Pacific time. Intel will be making its most significant technology announcement of the year. No further details will be provided in advance. The event will be held in San Francisco so for those of you are local in the SF Bay Area please attend in person if you like. It will also webcasted live. Tune-in details and logistics are below. Please let me know if you can attend.

A while ago Intel decided that a nice way to drive up its stock price would be to behave more like Apple, keeping major announcements under wraps and introducing them on its own terms to hopefully build up anticipation and excitement for Intel's announcements. You've seen examples of this with how closely Intel held Sandy Bridge's architectural details before its presentation at IDF, and how little we knew about Quick Sync (Sandy Bridge's hardware video transcoder) until Intel decided it was time to talk about it.

Apple can get away with it since most of its products are tangible, consumer facing devices. Intel's technologies are arguably even more important, but they're just not as easy for the general populace to get excited about. Today's announcement is the perfect example of just that.

Earlier today Intel announced that its 22nm process would not use conventional planar transistors but rather be the first time Intel is using 3D Tri-Gate transistors. This is a huge announcement that fuels Intel's leadership in the mobile/desktop/server CPU space and makes it a lot more attractive in the SoC space, let's understand why.



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Yesterday Apple introduced its first Sandy Bridge based iMacs. Thanks to @siromega I was pointed at iFixit's teardown of the new 21.5-inch iMac, which pointed out that the new system is actually first to use Intel's Z68 chipset - ahead of Intel's official launch of the chipset.

Image courtesy iFixit

It's a unique choice for Apple given that Z68 incorporates features that Apple doesn't seem to use in the new iMac (SSD caching, overclocking). But perhaps we will eventually see Apple embrace SSD caching in future models?



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I still don't get how OWC managed to beat OCZ to market last year with the Mercury Extreme SSD. The Vertex LE was supposed to be the first SF-1500 based SSD on the market, but as I mentioned in our review of OWC's offering - readers had drives in hand days before the Vertex LE even started shipping.

I don't believe the same was true this time around. The Vertex 3 was the first SF-2200 based SSD available for purchase online, but OWC was still a close second. Despite multiple SandForce partners announcing drives based on the controller, only OCZ and OWC are shipping SSDs with SandForce's SF-2200 inside.

The new drive from OWC is its answer to the Vertex 3 and it's called the Mercury Extreme Pro 6G. Read on for our full review!



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After 11 years of partnership, Sandisk and Toshiba's timing could not have been better. Just seven days after losing the NAND crown to Intel and Micron (IMFT) they announce they will have 19nm NAND samples rolling off their fabs as we speak. This one upmanship is normal for this industry but the announcement coming so soon after IMFT's 20nm announcement was a surprise to many. Like IMFT, they expect to start mass production during the second half of this year, and finding homes for their latest NAND in the next wave of tablets, smartphones and SSDs.

Toshiba NAND on display on the Kingston SSDNow V+100

Anand and I had the opportunity to speak with representatives from Toshiba and SanDisk who sounded quite optimistic about the competitiveness of their 19nm products. Like IMFT, they expect to see similar endurance as their 24nm products, around 3,000 program/erase cycles. This is owing to ever improving ECC and wear leveling algorithms, ensuring as few wasted p/e cycles as possible. SanDisk and Toshiba did not publish die size for this iteration, but did state a decrease of approximately 25%. Previously, their 24nm die size was published as 151mm2, so this iteration should bring that down to about 113mm2, besting IMFT's 118mm2 at 20nm. Page and block sizes remain at their 24nm levels of 8 KB per page and 256 pages per block.

Read on for our analysis of the SanDisk-Toshiba 19nm announcement!


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Announced today, LG joins in the race for thin with its latest P series notebooks, now dubbed the Blade series. Available in late May across Europe, South America, Asia and the Middle East (no North American release was mentioned), the new line features 14" and 15.6" laptops each sporting Sandy Bridge i7's in their slender profiles. Sporting an aluminum case, chiclet keyboard and quad-core-only line-up, there's little room to speculate from whence LG drew its inspiration. A few factors separate these new thin notebooks from the rest, however.



LG's display division has developed an ultra-thin LED display that sports a bezel about 40% smaller than is found around your typical display. The innovation allows its 14" class device to fit in the footprint of a 13.3" notebook; and while those two classes have seemed awfully close all along, this will surely blur the line even further. Being able to squeeze the display into a smaller footprint makes the device generally more compact, which means less materials used, which means a lighter weight. Indeed, at a listed 1.94 kg, the 14" P430 is certainly one of the lightest quad-core laptops announced so far. Its 15.6" sibling, the P530, weighs in at a spry 2.2 kg, besting the 15" Macbook Pro by almost a third of a kilogram.



Don't expect to be tearing through Crysis 2 on the (lightweight) go with these slim quads, though. Packing the lowly NVIDIA GT 520M, gaming is clearly not a priority amongst the designers at LG. Packing half as many shader cores (48) as the GT 420 M (96) it ostensibly replaces, the GT 520M's strongest competition comes from the Intel HD 3000 graphics. Yep, the one it's being packaged with. Obviously, buyers would still get to benefit from NVIDIA's PureVideo and CUDA technology, but this is exactly what Intel's latest integrated graphcis were designed to do, obviate the need for low end discrete graphics.

Even non-gamers might not be wowed by the visuals, however, as both the 14" and 15.6" displays are limited to 1366x768 as their only resolution option. Early reports indicate that the added cost of these small bezel displays will place a price premium on system costs, a disappointing thing to consider for a device whose compromises seem unrelated to its benefits. North American release has not been announced, so we can only hope that when these slender beauties do make it to these shores they bring a few choice upgrades with them. Full specifications below.

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