Microsoft’s entering the tablet business with Surface hasn’t really made them any friends in the Windows ecosystem. In fact, the majority of the manufacturers were quite angry with them, especially since the Redmond company didn’t even tell their hardware partners about Surface except a few of the major ones like HP and Dell. And that’s only two days before the launch event. If Microsoft doesn’t want to compete with them, then why were they so secretive about Surface in the first place?

Acer  had been one of the companies to be the most vocal about their critique of the Surface, blasting Microsoft over its decision to suddenly become a tablet-maker. Now they want to show Microsoft that they’ve got an alternative in ChromeOS, so they’re going to heavily promote their next-gen Chromebooks supposed to come out this October.

Acer hopes to sell about 200,000 Chromebook units monthly, and will use their Chromebook line to replace the Windows-based netbooks. It seems the netbook is an ailing product line, as users are not so keen on purchasing these under-sized, under-powered notebooks anymore, with the popularity of tablet alternatives. Major PC manufacturers have seen their sales of netbooks decline rapidly.

The question is this: if $300-$500 Windows netbooks aren’t selling anymore, what makes Acer think $300-$500 Chromebooks will?

I’ve always thought Chromebooks were a $200 kind of device, because even though you may want higher performance for browsing, at the end of the day, it’s still a browser-only machine. And so, paying $300 more for a higher performance machine just to browse a little faster isn’t easily justifiable.

If Google were to stop making favors to Intel, maybe the price of the Chromebooks would come down to $200 a lot faster, especially since Chromebooks have absolutely no need for x86 chips, as they don’t use legacy applications. I’m still hoping to see some dual core Cortex A15 Chromebooks this fall, but that might not happen through Acer, as I doubt they got to make a deal with Samsung for its Exynos 5 Dual chips.

So the last chance is for Samsung to make such a Chromebook. There have been some rumors about it this spring, but it remains to be seen if an Exynos 5-powered Chromebook will actually show up on the market.

According to its own website, Samsung is now working on a next-gen 13MP back-illuminated sensor, called S5K3L2, that’s meant to go into phones and tablets sometime next year. The news comes after we have already heard that Samsung has been working on a 12MP sensor (S5K3L1) that’s currently in production for upcoming devices.

The new sensor will be a pretty standard 1/3.2″ format, with a pixel size of 1.1µ. The picture resolution will be 4208×3120, and will shoot videos at 30 FPS. According to Samsung, the images will be able to maintain high contrast even when shot at those high frame rates. Their camera sensors are also the most energy efficient in the industry, so that should help with battery life too, when shooting a lot of pictures in a row. We won’t be able to put these affirmations to the test for a while, though.

As far as megapixels go, phone cameras seem to be moving into point and shoot territory, and at this rate it won’t be long until they go into low-end DSLR territory as well, but with much less overall quality than those devices, of course. The problem with increasing the megapixels is that the pixels have to be smaller and smaller, especially if the manufacturers try to maintain the size of the sensor, or make it even smaller. And when the pixels are smaller, it means they capture less light and the pictures are of less quality.

Now does this mean a 13MP picture will look worse than an 8MP picture? Not necessarily, and most likely it won’t, because manufacturers also come up with other improvements. But my point is those improvements would have an even bigger impact if the number of pixels was maintained rather than increased, especially if they aren’t going to increase the sensor size.

When they increase the megapixel size, they have to work that much harder to increase the quality of the picture. And at this point having a ton of megapixels on a camera doesn’t make much sense, unless you want extreme zooms on your PC. But otherwise even a 2MP photo is enough to cover a Full HD display (which has around 2 million pixels).

Speaking of sensor sizes, although I would never have bought Nokia’s PureView 808, because it ran Symbian, and I wouldn’t have been interested in it if it ran WP8 either. I am still hoping Nokia will pursue that camera strategy and continue to use such large sensors in more of their flagship phones. We could even see it become a trend; a trend that I am hoping other manufacturers from the Android world pick-up on.

Unfortunately, even Nokia seems to have given up on that, and now it is only pursuing low-light performance and stabilization. These are still very worthy goals, and I hope other manufacturers try to beat the Finnish company on this, but the quality of the pictures will be much, much lower than what they were on the PureView 808.

Am I asking for all their phones to have extremely large sensors? No of course not, but seeing how Samsung, HTC and others want to release several “flagships” a year, I think they could make at least one of them have highly superior phone cameras, for those of us who really care about taking good pictures with our phones.

But now that dream may have died with Nokia refusing to pursue that strategy, so I wouldn’t expect huge advancements from either Nokia, Samsung or Apple in terms of picture quality, other than some incrementally improvements every year, in the next few years. From the looks of it neither Samsung’s 12MP camera, nor the 13MP one will have optical stabilization, although hopefully they will put it in the latter one now that they saw Nokia doing it!  They are already using this technology on the recently announced Galaxy Camera with Jelly Bean.

]]> http://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-is-working-on-a-new-back-illuminated-13mp-camera-for-phones-and-tablets-115079/feed/ 2 http://www.androidauthority.com/why-android-will-continue-lead-both-software-hardware-this-year-114710/ http://www.androidauthority.com/why-android-will-continue-lead-both-software-hardware-this-year-114710/#comments Thu, 13 Sep 2012 23:16:35 +0000 Lucian Armasu http://www.androidauthority.com/?p=114710

After the disappointing announcement of both the iPhone 5 and iOS 6, with the latter not having introduced anything new from the WWDC event in June, and after Microsoft’s stumbles with Windows Phone 8, it’s safe to say that Android will continue to dominate in both software and hardware this year, especially if there will (most likely) be another version of Android coming out this year.

iOS 6/iPhone 5

So the new “iPhone 5” was announced yesterday. Software wise, there hasn’t been anything new announced compared to the last Apple event, even though some people were expecting Apple would keep some “big features” away from us, to give everyone a surprise when unveiling the iPhone 5. But that didn’t happen, except for the fact that there is now an extra row of icons, which should’ve been expected with a higher resolution, and really how exciting can that be?!. There are still many things lacking from iOS compared to Android, that are much more important.

As far as the hardware is concerned, there’s nothing that groundbreaking. It’s a little taller, but that’s hardly a worthy reason for anyone having an iPhone 4 or an iPhone 4S to upgrade. It’s thinner and lighter, but is that really a big deal for a phone? It’s still 0.5mm thicker than the original RAZR, and it’s about as tall as Motorola’s Droid RAZR M, which actually has a bigger 4.3-inch screen. And I don’t think this is a particularly good benefit for a phone. Being lighter and thinner is much more important for a tablet. There I would agree that tablets need to be half as heavy as they are today.

Droid RAZR M vs iPhone 4S

We don’t know what the processor is yet, but my guess is it’s either a dual core 1.5-1.6GHz Cortex A9, or a quad core 1.2-1.4GHz A9 processor. It’s highly, highly unlikely that the iPhone 5 is using Cortex A15, although there’s no way of knowing until someone disassembles it.

WP8/Lumia 920

Then there’s Windows Phone 8, which hasn’t shown that many new features when it was first announced, probably because Microsoft did most of the work around porting WP7′s features to the Windows 8 core. And Microsoft seems to be unveiling the same features over and over again at every event since then, while at the same time not allowing anyone to test them out, because apparently WP8 is still not ready yet, even though manufacturers have just a month and a half left to port it to their devices until Microsoft’s announces the official “release”.

It’s no surprise that when people talk about WP8, they only talk about Nokia’s Lumia 920, because what they like is not the OS itself, but the design and the camera of the Lumia 920. If anything, in this case, WP8 hindered Lumia 920′s launch. Lumia 920 would’ve sold extremely well with the latest version of stock Android, but that’s one strategic mistake Nokia is never going to take back.

Plus, while I think the design is very good, I don’t think the actual manufacturing is that stellar. It has a 4.5-inch display on a body almost as large (130mm tall, 71mm wide) as the Galaxy S3′s (136mm tall, 71mm wide). So you get less of an advantage of having a large screen with the disadvantage of having such a large phone. Not exactly an ideal trade-off. It also seems to be very heavy (185g) – significantly heavier than Galaxy S3 (133g) and the iPhone 5 (112g). As I mentioned earlier, being too light is not an advantage compared to regular phones (120-140g), but being too heavy can be, especially if it’s that large of a phone.

Why Android will keep leading

I believe it’s safe to say that Android is the most advanced mobile operating system right now, even with Jelly Bean. And if Google releases a new version of Android, which always happens around November, it’s going to arrive with even more features, and stay 2 steps ahead of the competition. Whether it’s Android 4.2 or Android 5.0, that’s irrelevant, because either way it will bring new features.

I strongly believe it’s going to be Android 5.0 unless Google screwed up something, or has a new overhaul of Android coming up, and instead of keeping it until Android 6.0 for next fall, it is going to delay Android 5.0 to the next Google I/O, and unveil it there. At the same time it, Google I/O could become Android’s main event where Google would be showing the “major” version of Android for the year, instead of keeping it for the fall, like it has been done so far .

With the exception of Gingerbread/Honeycomb, which was a strange transition period for Android, when Google split the team in two, to work on two versions of Android in parallel, Google has always unveiled the “major” dot-oh version of Android in fall (1.0, 2.0 and 4.0). So again, unless Google is getting ready to overhaul Android, and doesn’t want to wait until next fall to call it Android 6.0 (major overhauls happened at even numbers 2.0, 4.0…6.0?), it will most likely unveil Android 5.0 this fall with new Nexus devices, to be not only even better competition for WP8 and iOS 6, but probably for Windows 8, too.

As far as Android hardware goes, almost without exception, Android manufacturers have led the market. Again, I very much doubt iPhone 5 has Cortex A15 chips inside, and there’s just no WP8 device that will have either S4 Pro or Cortex A15 chips inside this year, while Android devices will.

So as iOS and the iPhone keep falling further and further behind, and Microsoft and Nokia keep trying to catch up, Android is undoubtedly remaining not only the leader in market share, but also in having the best all-around software, and the most cutting edge and highest performance hardware.

We’ve all been witnesses to Android’s astronomical growth over the past few years. There was a time when Android devices represented just a fraction of the sales of the iPhone. Now the sales of Android phones are 4 times bigger than the iPhone’s, globally, with a market share of 68% vs 17%.

Just yesterday Andy Rubin announced that half a billion Android devices were sold to date, and the number is growing at over 1.3 million per day. With that kind of expansion, it’s not surprising to see research company IHS announce that Android will exceed 1 billion total devices in 2013.

Even if Android becomes stagnant over the next year, selling 1.3 million devices per day, that’s still close to 500 million devices in a 12 months time span. But we still have a few months left until the end of the year, so surpassing 1 billion next year should be easy enough.

Worldwide annual shipments of Android phones will rise to 451 million in 2013, up from 357 million in 2012, according to an IHS iSuppli wireless communications smartphone report from information and analytics provider IHS. These massive totals will mean that combined shipments for every year since the first smartphone using Android shipped in 2008 will reach 1.1 billion by the end of 2013. In contrast, the number two smartphone operating system, Apple’s iOS, will amount to 527 million in cumulative shipments in 2013 and will not reach the one billion level until 2015.

IHS also believes that while the iPhone will reach 1 billion by 2015. Android will be on its way to 3 billion by then.

“The Androids are taking over the world of smartphones,” said Daniel Gleeson, mobile analyst for IHS. “We expect the Android operating system to become the first to reach the milestone of one billion shipments during its lifetime. For Google, this accomplishment highlights the success of its growth strategy for Android, which is based on providing the operating system as an open-source platform to third-party smartphone brands free of charge. Google hopes to make significant revenues from mobile advertisements and other services. Such an open-source model means that Google offers handset makers the ability to customize Android easily, and by also eliminating licensing fees, is greatly encouraging adoption among smartphone handset manufacturers.”

It seems Google’s strategy of open sourcing Android and giving it away for free has been very compelling to manufacturers, and it’s what’s leading to this explosive growth and popularity of Android on all types of smartphones and other devices. As hardware gets ever cheaper, we’ll see Android get into lower-end and lower-priced handsets, and growing even more in countries like India or in African countries. Android is truly becoming the “Windows” of smartphones.

Now that Google has acquired Motorola, they are able to make their opinions clear about whether they think Android is or will ever be suited for desktop use. With the termination of Motorola’s Webtop, it’s becoming clear that Google has no intention of ever using Android as a desktop OS. So the question is, will Google ever compete for the desktop market?

Google still has ChromeOS, which I’ve always thought is designed for $200 machines, or devices that are free on contract. But Google doesn’t usually understand how to price these “new category” devices when they are first launching them (see original Google TV and Motorola’s Xoom). I think ChromeOS hasn’t succeeded in a meaningful way so far because the devices it’s running on are too expensive when you’re just getting a “browser”, and because HTML5 and other web technologies are simply “not there” yet.

Sergey Brin has said before that he can see ChromeOS and Android merging together at some point in the future. This could be why Google is killing Motorola’s Webtop, and why they seem to have no intention of porting Android to desktop PCs. Perhaps they want to give ChromeOS one more major push, by integrating it with Android. That would offer users a tablet or smartphone experience in standalone mode, and a desktop experience when docking the device to a PC monitor with a keyboard and mouse.

Although Google has said for a long time that ChromeOS will be ported to ARM, that hasn’t happened yet. It seems the technical issues were quite challenging. Also they are probably doing a favor to Intel’s Paul Otellini (Google board member) by supporting ChromeOS on Intel chips first.

I think it’s a very bad strategic choice. If Atom ever gets popular in the mobile world, it will ultimately play in Microsoft’s favor, because they can actually from making x86 apps work on their mobiles devices. Meanwhile, Google has no real benefit from supporting Atom, and by helping Intel they are just indirectly helping Microsoft.

Google may finally be ready to port ChromeOS to ARM, as some leaks were showing they are working on porting it to Samsung’s Exynos 5 Dual chip, but we don’t know yet if that’s just another netbook type device, or a smartphone/tablet that comes with both Android and ChromeOS. I hope they will do the same with Google TV, and merge the smart TV platform with Android, so you can dock your Android phone to any TV.  But this may be a distant goal.

When is this sort of integration going to arrive to Android? My guess is in the next version of Android, which I hope will arrive this fall.

This is not very good news for Google. After creating a very compelling and affordable tablet that sells for only $200, which could easily become a best seller in China, where people are a lot more price-sensitive, Google finds itself being denied access to the Chinese market with the Nexus 7.

It seems the Chinese Government hasn’t forgotten how Google wanted to leave the country in 2010 because they refused to censor the type of things the Government wanted them to censor. That was a very admirable thing Google did back then, but it obviously wasn’t very pragmatic.

When you plan on turning on a country’s Government like this, first make sure that you are not the only one doing it, especially if we’re talking about a huge country that you want to be in for the next few decades or so. If say 20 huge tech companies would’ve joined together to protest the censorship and restrictions that China imposed, then they might’ve had a chance in changing the Government’s mind. But they went against it alone, while other companies like Microsoft had no problem obeying the local censorship rules.

The China government’s negative attitude is interpreted as a response to Google’s announcement of withdrawing from the China market in March 2010, the sources pointed out. It is difficult for the Nexus 7 to enter the China market, even through sale of Asustek’s marketing network there, the sources indicated.

The Chinese Government would also like to give preference to its own white-label companies, and give them the opportunity to establish themselves as strong brands and sellers before someone like Google and Asus enter the market with the Nexus 7, even though those companies are using Google’s own software, Android. It doesn’t sound exactly fair, but short of a massive protest from all Android manufacturers, what can Google do?

Without the China market, the cumulative global sales volume of Nexus 7 will reach an estimated 3.5 million units at the end of 2012, the sources noted.

Although Google has been expecting to sell 8 million Nexus 7 units by the end of the year, it seems those numbers took into account selling the tablet in China too. Now those plans may be ruined unless Google finds a way to get out of this situation soon. Otherwise, it looks like the Nexus 7 may only be selling 3.5 million units by the end of the year, which is a respectable amount, although it’s no blockbuster.

Ainol made a big splash last year when it delivered the first tablet to come out with ICS, and, equally impressive, costing only $100.

Google worked with the Chinese company to help them release such a cheap tablet that came with the latest version of Android so soon after release. Now Ainol is doing it again with, Novo 7 Crystal, a new dual-core tablet that is released with Jelly Bean out of the box and has a 7-inch IPS display at 1024×600 resolution. The new tablet costs just $139.

The other specs of the Ainol Novo 7 Crystal include a Cortex A9 CPU, a Mali 400 GPU, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of internal storage. The new Ainol tablet will be Wi-Fi-only, although there’s room for a 3G modem on board. It weighs only 328 grams, and measures 11.2 mm in thickness. It also comes with a microSD slot, and mini-HDMI and mini-USB ports. The tablet will launch on September 28.

While Google has just released the Nexus 7, they clearly want as many Android tablets on the market as possible, especially if they happen to use the stock version of Android, like the Ainol Novo 7 Crystal does. Android tablets haven’t sold that well, and a lower price point might convince a lot of people, especially in Asian countries, to buy them over anything else out there.

If they keep it up, Ainol could become a big tablet name in Asia, but also in Western countries. The Chinese company could sell its affordable slates to regular people who don’t need all the bells and whistles of a higher end tablet. As long as the Novo 7 Crystal provides a good experience, and allows them to check their e-mail, check Facebook, and browse the web, most people will be satisfied with it, even if lacks a well-known logo on the back.

Oppo Finder

You may have not heard much about Oppo, and that’s because it’s a Chinese company, but it has already released some very interesting smartphones, like the Oppo Finder, which is currently the thinnest smartphone on the market, measuring only 6.65 mm in thickness, and the Oppo Find5 X990, called the thinnest quad core smartphone.

Oppo Find 5

But soon it’s about to have an even more interesting device on the market – the Oppo Find 5, which will be a 5-inch phone with a 1080p screen and 441 PPI. This may very well be the first phone to ship with this resolution, and the first phone with such a crazy high pixel density.

As you can see below, the closer you get to 500-600 PPI, the closer you get to achieving paper-like LCD’s. The ideal pixel density may be 1200 PPI for really crisp photographic papers, but I figure we have at least a decade until we’ll have screens or processors that can handle that (there’s always e-ink until then).

The Oppo Find 5 one will certainly be one of the devices pushing us towards that future, with its 441 PPI screen. It has more than a great screen though. It also has a quad core S4 Pro processor, which sounds like a perfect match for a resolution this high, and it will arrive with Jelly Bean on board.

Yesterday at their event, Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, made what seemed like a surprising comment about the OMAP 4470 chip, which is powering the new Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ (the new Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD 7″ have OMAP 4430 and OMAP 4460 respectively). Amazon said that OMAP 4470 can do 50% more floating-point operations per second than the Tegra 3, while the dual-channel LPDDR2-466 RAM on the Fire HD has 40% more bandwidth than what Tegra 3 comes paired with. So is it true?

First, we need to understand where the OMAP 4470 is coming from. Initially, OMAP 4470 was supposed to be a dual-core 1.8 GHz processor, while the OMAP 4460 was supposed to hit 1.5 GHz. It seems TI failed in both missions — the OMAP 4460 arrived at 1.2 GHz per core, on the planned timeline; the OMAP 4470 arrived significantly later than expected (spring 2012) and clocked at only 1.5 GHz per core.

The OMAP 4470 uses a PowerVR SGX MP1 GPU, although it’s important to note that it’s running at a 384 MHz, compared to the PowerVR SGX MP2 in Apple’s A5 chip, which has 2 cores, both running at just 250 MHz. This is usually TI’s strategy with their chips — they use an older core, but they raise the clock speeds. I don’t like this approach, because it means TI will always be behind others when it comes to new GPU features, like OpenGL ES 3.0 or OpenCL. Moreover, they won’t even be able to get these new features on the upcoming OMAP 5 chips, because they will use an overclocked PowerVR SGX543 MP2, at a time when everyone would have moved already to a the next-gen architecture.

However, in terms of raw performance, TI’s chips should be pretty competitive, and the OMAP 4470′s GPU should be almost as fast as Apple’s A5 GPU. As you can see in these benchmarks from Anandtech, the GPU in the Apple A5 is 30%-80% faster than the Tegra 3, depending on the workload.

It’s possible Texas Instruments also made further optimizations to the SoC to get even closer to that PowerVR SGX5 43MP2 performance, considering they’ve made their overclocked PowerVR SGX543 MP2 exceed the performance of the PowerVR SGX543 MP4 by 5% in their upcoming OMAP 5. This means the above charts should give an approximate GPU performance difference between OMAP 4470 and Tegra 3.

As for the memory bandwidth, one of the biggest drawbacks of the Tegra 3 is that it still doesn’t support dual-channel memory, which means memory bandwidth is a bottleneck in some cases. OMAP 4470 reduces this problem by using dual-channel along their processors.

So, while we don’t have any benchmarks of these chips and devices yet, Jeff Bezos’ comments on Tegra 3 vs. OMAP 4470 are likely true. Still, it’s important to remember that, although the GPU has become very important lately, especially as it’s needed to run these high resolution displays, the CPU is still the most important part of the SoC, as it helps you run not just graphics related elements, but pretty much everything. With that said, Tegra 3 is still a quad-core CPU vs the OMAP 4470 which is dual-core.

Also, Tegra 3 is quite old already, and Tegra 3+ is about to ship soon.

It seems that ICS is finally becoming a significant part of the Android ecosystem, just after Jelly Bean has been announced. The Android team has announced that ICS is now on 20.9% of the devices on the market, while Jelly Bean is available on only 1.2%, the bulk of which I assume is taken by the Nexus 7 and CM10 ROMs.

Gingerbread has fallen to 57%, although it’s clearly still the main version developers need to target for the foreseeable future. It might not be until Android 6.0 gets launched a year from now, that ICS will represent over 50% of the market. Meanwhile, Jelly Bean and Android 5.0 (and possibly another Android 5.1 that’s going to be released at the next Google I/O) will have much smaller market shares.

This is why I’ve said before that I wish Google would just release one major version of Android per year, while giving hints and and leaks about upcoming features throughout the year, to keep people excited about the new “major” release. Instead, Andy Rubin’s team is keeping everything under wraps until days before the release or even until they officially announce it.

I don’t think this “Apple-like” secrecy is beneficial for Google, as they need to make not only users, but also manufacturers excited about the new release. Google needs to show OEMs how excited users are about the next version of Android, and how much they want to see new features in the upcoming devices.

Plus, releasing the software only once a year would allow all manufacturers to say “we’re upgrading all 2011 and 2012 phones with Android 5.0″, or “we’re upgrading all 2012 and 2013 phones with Android 6.0″, because it would be just one upgrade per year for them, instead of two or more. That would also ensure that the bulk of Android users aren’t two versions behind when a new version comes out.

Having one update per year would give manufacturers more time ahead of the release to use the PDK, and release new phones and upgrade the old ones. Google would also have more time to prepare the SDK for the next version and release it much earlier for developers, along with a beta version of its OS. This would help developers prepare their apps for the day one of the new OS release.

I think this strategy of updating software just once per year would create a much better experience for everyone involved, from users to developers and manufacturers.