$170/170€, dual-sim on the Qualcomm MSM7227A ARM Cortex-A5, Android 4.0.4 likely with Android 4.1 upgrade.
Here are the full specs:
99.4 g
3.5 ounces
103 x 57 x 13 mm
3.4 x 2.2 x 0.4 inches
Talk time (up to): 5 hours
Standby time (up to): 350 hours
Music listening time (up to): 36 hours
Video playback time (up to): 8 hours
3.2 inch scratch-resistant TFT touchscreen
262 000 colours, 320 x 480 pixels
Google Android 4.0 (ICS)
800 MHz Qualcomm Snapdragon™
3.2-megapixel camera
4x digital zoom
I smash this phone on the table and it’s fine. Sony says they have competitions with people throwing it as far as they can and it still works fine, it doesn’t even get scratched. Have fun with that. It can stay under water for 30 minutes at 1m depth, so it’s not just splash proof, it’s waterproof.
Here are the full specs:
110 g
3.9 ounces
111 x 60.3 x 9.8 mm
4.4 x 2.4 x 0.4 inches
Talk time (up to): 6 hours and 30 minutes
Standby time (up to): 520 hours
Music listening time: 45 hours
Video playback time: 6 hours
3.5 inch scratch-resistant TFT touchscreen
16 million colours, 480 x 320 pixels
Google Android 2.3 (Gingerbread)
1 GHz NovaThor™ U8500 Dual-core Cortex A9
5 megapixel camera with auto focus
16x digital zoom, LED flash
ARM Powered Windows 8 RT Samsung Ativ Tablet shown for the first time. It looks like it can work with a keyboard dock, my guess is the price is going to be $499/499€ without the keyboard, to be confirmed.
Qualcomm is doing huge work optimizing Linux and Windows on their S3 and S4 processors, trying to get as much performance out of the hardware as possible. Rob Chandhok is in charge of software at Qualcomm and in this video he talks about some of the software challenges that Qualcomm is working on to optimize software on their processors.
This demo of Windows 8 RT on Qualcomm S4 seems to be very smooth. There are a few bugs here or there, but overall, it looks quite smooth to me. I think Windows 8 on ARM is going to be more popular than Windows 8 on x86, yet I think that Android will remain far more popular than all forms of Windows.
Bill from http://1pad.cn presents an example of the approx $100 iPhone4-clones being sold in China. They run on the Qualcomm MSM7227 processor platform, providing unlocked WCDMA 3G support. China also has more and more original devices such as the ZTE Blade being sold even less money unlocked with perfectly good capacitive screen and a smooth Android experience.
These are probably some of the cheapest Windows Phone devices to be released on the market. They are waiting for the Tango version of the Windows Phone software before releasing these.
Mike Demuth @aeqx is one of the worlds top Sony fanboys, admin on the top Sony Ericsson forum (now discontinued) of se-world.info. He provides a review of this new latest high-end Sony Android Smartphone the Sony Xperia S at CeBIT 2012 in Hanover.
The most technical and awesome unboxing of the new Sony Xperia S (some blogs seem to say it’s currently one of the best smartphones on the market) is done by Diogo Ferreira, one of the leaders of Cyanogenmod alternative/optimized Android development for improved Android firmwares on the Sony Android platform.
Telstar is showing a 3.5″ Retina Display and 4.3″ WVGA to be sold for $119 with a minimum order quantity of 1000 units, using the Qualcomm MSM7227A ARM Cortex-A5 (the 4.3″ may have the MSM7227 ARM11, to be confirmed).
Here’s my 21-minute highlights video of the Windows 8 on ARM “Consumer Preview” event keynote at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
After the presentation, I was able to ask a few questions to Steven Synofsky and Michael Anguilo, here are some of those replies that I got:
– Desktop apps on Windows Store and Windows Store for ARM: They’ll clarify it to my email later. Steve Synofsky says it’s clear in the blog post. Windows Store is for Metro apps but there is a “parallel thing” (paraphrasing) for Desktop apps, the whole Third Party Desktop Apps for Windows 8 are not to be previewed on the Consumer Preview release yet.
– Multi-booting other OS when secure boot is in use. Steve Synofsky says that is up to the OEM. Secure Boot is a feature Microsoft provides as an option. The whole point of Secure Boot is that people cannot just “boot stuff from their garage”. But he did not seem to dismiss that OEMs can dual-boot for example Android or Ubuntu on the same device.
He didn’t say if Microsoft plans to do backroom deals with manufacturers to force them only to load Windows 8 and nothing else on devices or not, I guess not, but you never know… Maybe they do not apply “rebates” for OEMs that make things a bit “too open”, does that make any sense?
– Windows 8 remains just TI, Qualcomm, Nvidia business for now on ARM, as with Windows Phone, Microsoft limits the number of ARM Partners that can fully hardware accelerate their software platform for now. I think a lot of the other ARM chip providers are in discussions with Microsoft to see when they can also support their software. My guess is Microsoft wants a very high performance for the first supported ARM SoCs, that is why it only is being demonstrated on TI OMAP4470, Nvidia Tegra3 and Qualcomm Krait MSM8960 for now.
If I do get in contact with someone from Microsoft over email to get clarifications for Windows on ARM, please let me know in the comments what type of questions remain to be answered.
