IFA 2013

So this week in Berlin, Germany was IFA, a consumer electronics show that is similar to CES but focuses on products geared towards Europe. This week several key players in the mobile electronics industry revealed new products. In this post we'll take a brief look at these amazing products

First we will start with Samsung, on Wednesday Samsung held its usual IFA Unpacked event where the 3rd generation Galaxy Note smartphone or "Phablet" if you prefer was announced.
Images bellow: Galaxy Note 3 

The Galaxy Note 3 features a 5.7 inch full HD Super AMOLED display, depending on what region you live in either a 1.9 ghz Exynos 5 Octa CPU or a Snapdragon 800 CPU clocked at 2.3 ghz. the device comes with 3GB of RAM and either 32 or 64 GB of onboard storage with an microSD expansion slot. The Note 3 comes with a rear facing 13 megapixel camera that on some versions is capable of recording video in 4K (yes thats right 4K!), it has also a 2 megapixel front facing camera for video chatting. Android 4.3 ships on the device along with Samsung's TouchWiz UI on top of it (which you might like or extremely dislike). The Galaxy Note 3 comes with of course the familiar S Pen but introduces a whole slew of new features and software with it. (ill go more in-depth in a future post)

Galaxy Gear 

So in addition to the Note 3, Samsung announced two other products. One of them is the Galaxy Gear. This is Samsung's first smartwatch and its meant to be a companion for your Galaxy device. At first support for the watch will only be available on the Note 3 but Samsung says that future software updates to the Galaxy S3, S4  and Note 2 will enable support. Non-Samsung phones will also be supported in the future as well. 

Images below: Galaxy Gear 

The Galaxy Gear features a 1.63 inch Super AMOLED display, a single-core 800 mhz processor and 512 mb of RAM.There is a 1.9 megapixel camera in the strap.The Galaxy Gear uses bluetooth 4.0 low energy to pair up with your smartphone and it can display messages, notifications as well as receive and make calls via your phone. The watch also has a small selection of apps that can be downloaded onto it. 

Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition 

The final product Samsung announced during its unpacked event is a brand new version of the Galaxy Note 10.1 inch tablet that was released last year. The new Note 10.1 improves on everything last year's model had to offer. (I used last year's model for several months and I have to commend Samsung on the amazing job they did with the new model because it fixes all of the complaints i had with it.)

Images below: Note 10.1

The Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition comes with a 10.1 inch WQXGA Super Clear LCD display (2560 X 1600) It has a 1.9 ghz Exynos 5 Octa CPU with 3GB of RAM. Android 4.3 ships on board along with TouchWiz. The device has an 8 megapixel rear facing camera with flash and a 2 megapixel camera on the front. Like Samsung's Galaxy Tab 3 line it also has a physical home button and capacitive back and menu buttons for Android controls. Like its smaller brother the Note 3, this device ships with all new S Pen functionality. 

Okay so now to move away from Samsung, lets talk about Sony and the new Xperia  Z1 cameraphone.

Previously known by its code name the Honami, the Xperia Z1 brings the best qualities the Xperia Z and Z Ultra phones have to offer into one device. 

Images below: Xperia Z1 courtesy of PhoneArena 

The Xperia Z1 features a 5 inch full HD display with Sony's TRILUMINOUS screen tech that first appeared on the Z Ultra. It features a 2.2 ghz quad-core Snapdragon 800 CPU with 2GB of RAM and it has 16 gb of internal storage along with a MicroSD card slot. Android 4.2.2 ships with the device along with Sony's UI. The main feature of this phone is its camera. the Z1 features a 20.7 megapixel Exmor RS sensor with a 27mm wide angle lense and F 2.0 Aperture. This phone should be capable of taking some amazing pictures with that camera and oh yeah like the Xperia Z and Z Ultra its waterproof! 

In addition to the Xperia Z1, Sony also introduced two attachable cameras that can be clipped onto any smartphone, giving it the same high quality imaging experience you would find on Sony's cameras. 

The DSC-QX100 Offers Carl Zeiss optics and Sony's amazing imaging technology in a 35 mm 3.6x Optical zoom lens with F1.8 Aperture

The DSC-QX10 comes with a Sony G Lens with 10X Optical Zoom that Sony says should vastly expand your smartphone's potential 

These camera's use Sony's BIONZ imaging processor which Sony promises should deliver accurate color, rich tones with minimal noise 

To move away from Sony, Asus also made several product announcements at IFA 2013. Among the devices where two new FonePads, several tablets and a computer that dual boots Android and Windows 8. ill briefly touch on each 

Fonepad Note 6

This device features a 6 inch full HD display, a Intel Atom Z2580 dual-core CPU with 2GB of RAM and 16GB  or 32GB of internal Storage with a MicroSD card slot. The device also features a 8 megapixel rear camera and a 1.2 megapixel front facing camera. It comes with Android 4.2.2 and has a Stylus much like a device from a competitor I mentioned earlier. 

Image courtesy of PhoneArena 

FonePad 7 

Asus marketed this device as being a Phablet but really its a tablet with phone capability. The device has a 7 inch 1280 x 800 display and runs on the older Intel Z2560 CPU clocked at 1.6 GHZ and it offers less RAM than its 6" brother (the amount is not specified but im going to guess its 1GB) The device ships with Android 4.2 and comes with 8,16, or 32GB of internal storage. It offers a 5 megapixel rear camera and a 1.2 megapixel front camera. The device is intended to be affordable. 

Image courtesy of PhoneArena 

ASUS MeMO Pad 8 & 10 

Asus introduced two affordable tablets, the MeMo Pad 8 and 10. Both of these tablets come with 720P displays, a 1.6 ghz quad-core chipset with 1GB of RAM and Android 4.2. The MeMO Pad 8 comes with 8gb of internal storage and a 5 megapixel rear camera and a 1.2 megapixel front camera. The MeMO Pad 10 comes with 16 gb of storage and only a 2 megapixel rear shooter along with a 1.2 megapixel front shooter. 

Images courtesy of PhoneArena

ASUS Transformer Book Trio 

Of all of the devices ASUS announced at IFA, the most interesting of them was the Transformer Book Trio. The Transformer Book Trio is a device that comes as a tablet with an attachable keyboard dock. The device has a 11.6 inch 1080 x 1920 IPS display and weighs 35.27 ounces. The most interesting feature this device has it dual boots Android and Windows 8. 

Image courtesy of PhoneArena 

Now how the ability to dual boot OSes works is when the device is being used solely as a tablet, its running Android. The tablet itself has a dual-core 1.6 ghz Intel Atom Z2760 processor with 2 gb of RAM. It also comes with a 5 megapixel camera on the rear.  When the device is attached to its keyboard dock it runs a full version of Windows 8. The keyboard dock has its own hardware necessary to run Windows which includes 4GB of RAM and a Intel I7 Haswell processor and 1TB of storrage. The keyboard dock interestingly though can be hooked up to a external display to function as a PC. 

ACER Liquid S2 

Finally the last device i want to touch on that was announced at IFA is the Acer Liquid S2. Acer didnt have a huge presence at IFA but this device caught my attention because like the Galaxy Note 3 it can record video at 4K resolution. The device features Android 4.2.2 with Acer's custom UI running on top of it. Its powered by a 2.2qhz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 CPU with an Adreno 330 GPU and backed by 2GB of RAM. It has a 13 megapixel rear-facing camera that is capable of recording video at 4K resolution. The device has a 6 inch 1920 x1080 IPS display and a 3300 mah battery. 

Image courtesy of PhoneArena 

So that about wraps up the major product announcements from IFA 2013. Sure there were others but these were the most significant. IFA this year i found to be more interesting than CES was and now we wait till CES 2014. I appologize for the lack of updates to this blog as myself and Sabareesh have been quite busy lately. My next post will be about the Galaxy Note 3 and a indepth look into its features. I may also choose to talk about my thoughts on the Note 3 and the direction Samsung is taking its mobile business. I will try to have that up soon. -Mathew 

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?.

GALAXY S4 GT-I9500 SOFTWARE UPDATE

Earlier we hear about the GT-I9505 the qcomm version of the galaxy S4 has been received a software update addressing issues like
-New Camera firmware
-Smearing issue has been fixed (Purple effect while scrolling)
-Smart Pause Toggle
-Move Apps to SD Card
-HDR Video (Can record HDR video)
-Semi-transparent status bar
-New Icons in Settings
-Secure boot status (About Phone)
-Increase legibility (Display) (New feature)

Sadly it wasn't made available for the EXYNOS octa version GT-I9500. It was just 4 days before they said it would come soon to GT-I9500 and here it is finally!.. am really happy to announce that the update is available in india for all the galaxy s4 GT-I9500 users!. All the above mentioned are working just fine!. you can either update your phone via OTA or connect to KIES. Have fun.