Friday, February 17, 2012

Why the ‘Motorola Droid Razr Maxx’ is a harbinger of better things to come in Smartphones?


If you rewind the clocks by about 8 years, the only mobile that was on people’s minds and undeniably on their tongues as well was the ‘Motorola Razr’. The general population was so head over heels in love with the mobile that even today, it remains one of the largest selling devices in the history of smartphones and the characteristic that made it stand out from the regular run-of-the-mill phones was: it’s SLEEKNESS.

Back to the present, and you are again greeted by the same company trying to recreate the yesteryear’s magic by releasing an entirely different beast sporting the same appellation. Yes, the ‘Motorola Droid Razr’ is that phone, which for a brief period of time justified the title ‘World’s thinnest smartphone’ awarded to it. So, did it meet with the same fate as its predecessor namesake? The initial results: Not Quite.

Now if you analyze why, you will eventually get to know that though the smartphone has the build quality unmatched by any other phone and its internals match the internals of the best phones available on the market, the main factor that let it down a bit was only one: Battery Life. Is it that Critical? Yes, it is and there are no doubts and second thoughts about it.

The reason is pretty simple and straight forward. Smartphones are getting increasingly smart and increasingly capable and they are being integrated with functionalities that can guzzle battery much in the same way as SUVs guzzle fuel. Yes, I am talking about you LTE!!! So, what good is a phone that lets you do numerous things but which requires the user to charge it once every half-a-day if used extensively?

So, what has Motorola done about it? Simple. They went back to the drawing board, figured out what 
people wanted, designed and brought out an upgraded version: the ‘Motorola Droid Razr Maxx’ and if you think they only changed the name. Well, think again. The ‘Motorola Droid Razr Maxx’ has a 3300 mAh battery tucked in its back that lets the phone have a talk time of around 21 hours!!! Stunning, isn’t it? Initial reviews suggest that though the phone isn’t coming close to the claimed talk time it is still beating every other phone’s talk time capacity by a HUGE margin. Now, why is this relevant?

As I mentioned, today’s smartphones let the users do numerous things like Watch Videos, Browse the Internet, Listen to Music, Read books, Write notes and last but not the least Make and Receive Calls. To support all these functions, the phone needs to have battery-life so that user is able to do all the functions listed above on a typical day. Now, the 3300 mAh battery is so good that it gives the ‘Droid Razr Maxx’ enough juice to let you watch videos continuously for up to 15 – 16 hours.

The ‘Droid Razr Maxx’ isn’t the first phone that has broken the non-imposed thresholds of battery capacity that a smartphone today has got. Samsung got to the party first, with their super-sized smartphone: the ‘Galaxy Note’. When all the smartphones being released into the market were sporting batteries with capacities ranging around 1500 mAh – 1800 mAh, it went ahead and included a 2500 mAh battery to power its beast. But, the important difference between the ‘Galaxy Note’ and the ‘Droid Razr Maxx’ is that a 2500 mAh battery is powering a 5.3 inch screen loaded ‘Galaxy Note’ whereas a 3300 mAh battery is powering 4.3 inch screen loaded ‘Droid Razr Maxx’.

It is a known fact in the electronics industry that once a manufacturer comes out with a feature or a technology, the competitors improvise on it at such a pace that it even amazes the company that has introduced the technology in the first place. So, if the 3300 mAh battery sporting Motorola Droid Razr Maxx is regarded as the starting point, you can foresee where the middle and the ending points are. Can’t you?

Stay Tuned..!!!

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Intel Medfield: The new CHIP on the block

Nowadays, you guys must be hearing the term 'Medfield' a lot. So, what is Medfield?

If you even have a vague idea of the 'Chips' and 'Microprocessors' market, you would know that Intel is one of the principal market leaders. Laptops and PCs from leading manufacturers like Toshiba, Dell, Lenovo etc. use Intel's chips to power their bodies which has made Intel one of the undisputed leaders in this segment. So, what about the smartphone market then?

Intel, for some reason, hasn't really focused on the smartphone market, which had thrown up a huge opportunity for companies like ARM and Qualcomm to make their mark in this segment. Today, they are one of the undisputed leaders in this market and have even for the last quarter earned huge revenues and also made huge profits by selling smartphone chips. The reason obviously is people's increasing preference towards buying smartphones. ARM and Qualcomm had probably forecasted this then and now are reaping  its rewards.  So, what about Intel?

It seems that Intel have finally realized their mistake and are now focused on gaining a slice of the 'Smartphone Chip' market pie. They are going to be out with their first SoC (System-on-Chip) in this year. The platform for this SoC is named 'Medfield' and the SoC itself has been named 'Penwell'. So, is the 'Penwell SoC' ready to take on established players like Exynos and Tegra? Let's find out.

Intel has demonstrated the power of their new SoC by pitting it against devices like Samsung Galaxy Nexus and have won the appreciation of everybody. The SoC seems to have a 1.6 Ghz single-core Atom Z2460 processor (CPU) and a 400 Mhz Power VR SGX 540 (GPU). In benchmark tests like 'Sunspider Javascript' and 'Browsermark', Intel's SoC has defeated the current leader (TI OMAP 4460 in Galaxy Nexus) by quite a good margin. While the 'Galaxy Nexus' scored 97381 on 'Browsermark', Intel's Penwell SoC scored a better 116425. As you already know, the CPU is entirely responsible for the remarkable performance on these tests and by the demonstration of such performance, it seems that Intel's single-core 1.6 Ghz Atom processor (also called 'Saltwell') is better than TI OMAP's dual-core 1.2 Ghz processor. Guess that the old man did have some wise tricks up his sleeve!!!!

Anyways, what feels like a kind of blip in this amazing SoC is the choice of GPU that Intel has made, a Power VR SGX 540. It's actually surprising why manufacturers like Samsung and Intel are opting to go for this GPU from 'Imagination Technologies' as it has almost been 2 years since it initially debuted in the market. But what actually makes the Power VR SGX 540 in Intel's SoC better than the other Power VR SGX 540s is that the GPU here is clocked at a higher frequency: 400 Mhz. Hopefully, this should make it perform better in Intel's SoC.

So it is pretty clear that if Intel had debuted with this offering for the smartphone market a year ago, it would definitely had a huge advantage and would probably have been rubbing shoulders with the current leaders like ARM and Qualcomm as far as 'Smartphone Chip' market is concerned. Anyways, as the saying goes, 'Better Late than Never'. Initial reviews suggest that Intel's first offering is most definitely not bad and it will only get better when the company comes out with their dual-core offerings. That might actually be the beginning of a new era as far as Intel is concerned.

Stay Tuned..!!