Posted on 07/21/2010 12:22:30 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
You have to hand it to Motorola; as little as a year ago their future looked bleak. Android was still in its infancy and lacking polish, mainstream devices running it were few, and there weren’t public or visible signs of any forthcoming devices which would challenge the dominance of BlackBerry or iOS, especially from Motorola.
A few months later, they launched the Motorola Droid, and a few months after the floodgates opened up - out has poured a steady stream of relatively polished devices running Android 2.x.
It’s been breakneck almost, with new flagships every 3 months on average - the latest is Motorola’s Droid X on Verizon - henceforth just 'X.'
You also have to hand it to Verizon for getting its act together. Previously, they were infamous for crippling device hardware and OSes - the Touch Pro notoriously lacked an entire row of keys, and half the RAM. Their smartphone lineup also used to consist entirely of BlackBerries and Windows Mobile devices. That’s all changed.
Since the first Motorola Droid, they’ve been probably the single most vocal proponent of Android, embracing and billing their lineup of “Droids” as serious iPhone alternatives. The unique combination of being the largest carrier and the largest 3G footprint (and the perception of having above average coverage) has resulted in massive growth of the Android platform. That’s definitely a turnaround for two giants.
Eight months after launch, the Motorola Droid is now a relatively old piece of kit. It’s amazing how fast the market is moving - the fact that an 8 month old handset is now obsolete is a testament to just how breakneck this pace is.
(Excerpt) Read more at anandtech.com ...
I think these smartphones are getting into a Pentium class of processor...
Texas Instruments’ move from the OMAP 3430, used in phones like the Palm Pre, to the OMAP 3630 used in the Droid X is reminiscent of this sort of steady progress I mentioned above.
The OMAP 3430 was built on a 65nm process (like Qualcomm's Snapdragon), while the 3630 is a 45nm shrink (like Apple's A4). Architecturally the two SoCs are very similar. They both use a standard ARM Cortex A8 CPU paired with an Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX 530 GPU. The two SoCs fit in the same size package (12mm x 12mm BGA) and are ball compatible. If a customer wanted to, it could simply drop in a 3630 into an existing 3430 design with minimal engineering efforts.
Note that the most direct competitor to the 3630 is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon. While TI uses a standard Cortex A8 core from ARM, Qualcomm designed its own low power ARMv7 based core that is similar, but not identical to the Cortex A8. Both are dual-issue, in-order architectures - they’re like the original Pentium, but in your phone. Qualcomm also integrated the cellular modem into the Snapdragon SoC while TI’s OMAP 3 is a strict application processor - the modem is housed in a separate chip.
On the CPU side TI doubled the L1 cache of the 3430 to 64KB (32KB instruction, 32KB data). The L2 cache remains unchanged at 256KB. We won’t get a larger L2 until the OMAP 4, which will ship with a 1MB L2 shared among its two cores. There are the usual tweaks and bug fixes which may improve performance per clock a little bit over the 3430, but overall the 3630 just gets a larger L1 as a result of the die shrink - oh and a much higher clock speed.
The Cortex A8 now runs at up to 1GHz. The OMAP 3430 topped out at 800MHz in shipping configurations but most vendors ran it at sub-600MHz speeds to save power. The 3630 in the Droid X runs at a full 1GHz. It's worth pointing out that Qualcomm was able to hit 1GHz on a similar architecture at 65nm by designing its core from the ground up. There's clearly value in these custom designs from a performance and time to market standpoint. These advantages will only become more critical as the SoC performance wars heat up.
I switched over to Verizon just for the Droid X. It is amazing.
The iPhone is great but Motorola is back to being the KING
Actually think I might save a few bucks and have something much more useful...the video cam is very interesting.
We cut our landlines back in 2002.
I’m old and slow.....LOL!
I checked out a Droid X yesterday at Verizon. The screen is the size of my entire blackberry and the GPS was just outstanding. Other features looks pretty cool too.
For all the hype Android 2.2 gets, it still isn’t delivered on the flagship Android phones. It’s not even likely that phones that came out late last year will ever get the update. Even Apple, not known for extending backwards compatibility all that far, supports last year’s iPhone with iOS 4.
Droid X does run Android 2.2....so which phones are the Flagship Android phones?
btt
None of the latest high-speed Android phones are shipped with 2.2, including the Droid X, Incredible, Ally, EVO and Galaxy S. Even this review was done with 2.1. I don't count being able to roll your own 2.2, which puts your phone in an unsupported configuration.
Gee. I have never even owned a cell phone of ancient vintage.
A lot of chip makers seem to have gotten Intrinsity’s speed-enhancing technology for this generation of mobile processors. Sounds right, as Intrinsity would want to license its technology as widely as possible to make the most money.
But then Apple bought Intrinsity, and I don’t think they’re in a sharing mood for the next generation of mobile processors. It’s going to get interesting.
I wonder whether the Apple-bashing Microsofties will complain about Windows Phone 7's lack of copy/paste (Microsoft says you don't need it) and app multitasking. Or will that suddenly be okay on a phone?
I think Samsung still has some vested interest in the company, I could be wrong it’s been a while since I read about it.
My wife has a Vibrant coming in the mail, I’m looking forward to putting it through the paces. Fastest processor and GPU on the market with nothing scheduled to match it until the end of the year.
Any antenna problems?
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