Google announces a new Nexus 7, much better than the original

Today at a special event in California, Google announced Android 4.3 and a revised Nexus 7 tablet. Android boss Sundar Pichai mentioned that one out of two tablets run Android. With the new Nexus 7, its apparent Google is taking the tablet market seriously. The original Nexus 7 was launched last year with mediocre specs. It ran a NVIDIA Tetra 3 processor and had a horribly low resolution display of 1280 x 800. It originally was only offered in 8 GB and 16 GB storage configurations but was later bumped up to 16 and 32 GB configurations.

Fast Forward to 2013 and along comes the New Nexus 7 or Nexus 7 II as some are calling it. The tablet features a 1.5 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, 2 GB of RAM and has a much, much better screen resolution of 1920 x 1280 pixels. This works out to a PPI rating of about 320, the highest ever on a seven inch tablet.

Powering this amazing tablet is Android 4.3 which yes is still called Jelly Bean. Android 4.3 brings support for Bluetooth 4.0 low energy, which will allow better support for wearable devices like smart watches for example. 4.3 brings support for OpenGL ES 3.0 which should improve graphics performance and Android 4.3 also improves the dialer app to include auto- complete for phone numbers (something Samsung and HTC have had been supporting for years but was omitted from stock Android.) 4.3 also brings added functionality to user accounts on tablets and even improved battery life.

The new Nexus 7 will go on sale in the United States first on July 30th for $229 for the 16 GB model (WiFi) $269 for the 32 GB (WiFi) and $349 for the 32 GB ) LTE model (which will support T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon). The device will launch in additional markets in the coming weeks after that. It will be available directly from the Google Play Store as well as several retailers.

App review:

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SAMAUNG GALAXY S4 AND THE big.LITTLE technology. A story untold

INTRODUCTION:

CPUs are one of the essential parts of any electronic gadgets we find today. They are sometimes clocked from even 50Mhz to 2.3 Ghz in the mobile industry and on the pc market we all heard the AMD announcing the new processors having a maximum clock speed of 5 Ghz which is mind blowing.

The mobile processing is quickly covering up the gap between pc performance and in no time phones will be capable of what an average laptop or pc can do and its not gonna surprise me if its gonna happen next year as we know ARM's A-50 A-57 is on works that supports 64-bit processing. Well lets hold our horses and get back to a not too old iteration and a brand new leap into mobile computing. Yes right from the heading you obviously know am gonna talk about the exynos 5 octa. Whats so special about it that we are looking on to it again? there's a lot happening on it and here i am to discuss a lil more deep about it.

EXYNOS 5 OCTA:

ISSUES:

So far we know exynos octa was the very first processor that has adopted ARM's revolutionary big.LITTLE technology which too far complicated to make it, it has 8 cores of which 4 will be A-7 and the other 4 will be A-15.

The deal about the big.LITTLE is that they only allow 4 cores to work at a time but it can be any 4 of the 8 and on any combination which lead to a better performance boost and also makes battery to last loger. In reality linux kernels wasn't mature enough to spot the difference between a power saving A-7 cortex and the high power processing A-15 thus samsung managed only to make it work in a manner where either 4 A-7 cotex core or 4 A-15 cortex processors could work at a time. It was totally different from what they demonstrated at CES 2013 and everyone including me was totally disappointed about it. I must say that this is a problem with android or any linux based os because all the cpu gpu threading and governing is done by them so only if the kernel has a better understanding on the processors is when you get better performance. As the exynos octa used on the galaxy s4 (GT-I9500) is running android they didn't have better coordination between the kernel and processor as the lack of support of architecture by linux resulted in overheating issues and also affects the software till date in some or the other way.

FIX:

Linux foundation so far has done its best to introduce newer architectures to support as they are big time opensource company so far and they have taken another leap forward to prove it again with adding the support for the big.LITTLE architecture after so much of hard-work on the kernel version 3.10 which is at its final stages on release. Thanks to Linux godfather Linus Torvalds has certified that the official Linux kernel 3.10 is now in its final state; and, as far as our audience is concerned, the big addition to the Linux kernel is with enhanced ARM processor support. Specifically, the Linux kernel 3.10 has added support for big.LITTLE.

 Linux kernel 3.10 is now final -- paving the way for its inclusion in a bevy of Linux distributions, and even offshoots such as Android and Chrome OS. The fresh kernel brings a good number of changes, such as timerless multitasking, a new caching implementation and support for the ARM big.LITTLE architecture. In simplistic terms, the new multitasking method should help improve performance and latency by firing the system timer only once per second -- rather than 1,000 times -- when tasks are running. Meanwhile, users with both traditional hard drives and SSDs will find performance benefits from bcache, which brings writeback caching and a filesystem agnostic approach to leveraging the SSD for caching operations. Also of significance, Linux kernel 3.10 enhances ARM support by including the big.LITTLE architecture, which combines multiple cores of different types -- commonly the Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A15 -- that focus on either power savings or performance. 

CONCLUSSION :

I personally feel that we are yet to see the actually power of the exynos 5 octa and the kernel 3.10 is the right thing to do on updating it to all the devices running it. Samsung was all this time helpless to make people happy with the octa core phone as the kernel didn't support it and now its really a great time to make things right and make its customers happy. I wish samsung brings it up as a stability update for the device like it did previously with a 28Mb updates that always tweaked the kernels than getting it as an update with the newer version of android its too long to wait. I feel once the exynos octa get the 3.10 linux kernel we will surely get 20hrs of battery life on heavy performance and more than 2 days of battery life on a average usage and that's one thing we need the most now. Fingers crossed on hoping samsaung will work on it to straightening thing up for the users. Am really looking forward to it!. Just can't wait. how about you?.