computers tech

Netgear NV+ v2 and LaCie 2big NAS: A Second Look

2012-07-25T10:07:00.000-07:00

by Ganesh T S on 7/18/2012 3:49:00 AM
Posted in IT Computing , NAS , Storage , NetGear , LaCie

Netgear launched the Marvell-based NV+ v2 (4-bay) and Duo v2 (2-bay) NAS units last November. We reviewed the Netgear NV+ v2 and came away quite satisfied with the price to performance ratio. However, we had some reservations about the absence of NFS and iSCSI (which happen to be staple features in offerings from other vendors in this particular segment of the market). The maturity of the platform was also a concern (since this was Netgear's first attempt at introducing a NAS based on an ARM chipset).

Netgear recently updated the firmware for the NV+ v2 and Duo v2 units. RAIDiator 5.3.5 added support for a number of new share management protocols including NFS. It also brought along a number of fixes. In the meanwhile, LaCie also contacted us about a firmware update improving RAID-1 performance in the 2big NAS that we reveiewd a couple of months back. Keeping these updates in mind, it is time to take another look at the 2-bay NAS units in our labs.

The testbed setup remains the same as what we used for the LaCie 2big NAS reivew. All the NAS units were populated with two empty 3TB Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm [ ST3000DM001 ] drives prior to benchmarking.

NAS Benchmarking Testbed Setup [ Q2 2012 ]ProcessorIntel i7-3770K CPU - 4C/8T - 3.50GHz, 8MB CacheMotherboardAsus P8H77-M ProOS Hard DriveSeagate Barracuda XT 2 TBSecondary DriveKingston SSDNow 128GB (Offline in Host OS)MemoryG.SKILL ECO Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) F3-10666CL7D-4GBECO CAS 7-7-7-21PCI-E SlotQuad-Port GbE Intel ESA-I340CaseAntec VERIS Fusion Remote MaxPower SupplyAntec TruePower New TP-550 550WHost Operating SystemWindows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise.

Two virtual machines were set up using Hyper-V with the following configuration

Windows 7 Ultimate x64 : Guest OSProcessorSingle Physical Core of Intel i7-3770KOS Hard DriveVHD File on Seagate Barracuda XT 2 TBSecondary Hard DriveKingston SSDNow 128GBMemory1 GBCentOS 6.2 x86_64 : Guest OSProcessorSingle Physical Core of Intel i7-3770KOS Hard DriveVHD File on Seagate Barracuda XT 2 TBSecondary Hard DriveKingston SSDNow 128GBMemory1 GB

The usage of VMs as NAS clients allows us to test Samba and NFS performance from a single host machine. While Intel NASPT can run on Windows (and has to be restricted to 2 GB of RAM in order to avoid caching effects), IOMeter / Dynamo can be used to measure performance in Linux.

The Kingston SSDNow 128 GB SSD we used in the earlier testbed has been reused here. In the host OS, this disk is set to offline, and is made available to the Hyper-V VMs as a physical drive. Note that we don't do any teaming in the Intel ESA-I340 in this testbed. Each VM gets its own physical Ethernet port in the ESA-I340, and the host OS uses the motherboard's built-in GbE port. All the Ethernet ports are connected to a ZyXel GS2200-24 switch.

For measurement of performance in Linux, dynamo was run on the Linux VM and connected to an IOMeter instance run on the host OS. Four tests were run to determine the characteristics of the NAS as a storage system for the client. In order to completely rule out caching effects, a special build of IOMeter with O_DIRECT access mode for NFS shares was used.

The robocopy / rsync benchmarks (transferring a 10.7 GB folder structure backup of the HQV 2.0 Benchmark Blu-ray to and from the NAS to the internal SSD) were also run in both the VMs.

In the rest of the review, we briefly cover the updates in the latest firmware for the NV+ v2. We also test out one of the unique add-ons in the NV+ v2, ReadyNAS Replicate. In the last two sections, we will present the refreshed benchmark results.

Netgear NV+ v2: RAIDiator and Add-Ons Introduction and Testbed Setup Netgear NV+ v2: RAIDiator and Add-Ons Windows Performance: CIFS and iSCSI Linux Performance: NFS and CIFS Final Words Print This Article 6 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment Still a step behind similar units from Synology and QNAP? by Zebble on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 Netgear's ReadyNAS products in particular, dollar-for-dollar seem to always be a step behind Synology and QNAP. Synology has really got it figured out with a common firmware/featureset across all models, which is why I was surprised to read this article to find that all features are available across SPARC, x86 and now Netgear's ARM platform...

Does the ReadyNAS make sense for anyone? Zebble Reply RE: Still a step behind similar units from Synology and QNAP? by Zebble on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 Correction: "all features are *not* available across SPARC, x86 and now Netgear's ARM platform..." Zebble Reply RE: Still a step behind similar units from Synology and QNAP? by chadwickba2 on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 A few months ago, I purchased the NETGEAR ReadyNAS Ultra 2 Plus and it is really nice. I have owned a Buffalo Linkstation Live, a Synology DS209+II, and several older external units and the unit I purchased blows them all away in performance. I have not owned a QSNAP, and it may be awesome. Synology products have very spotty performance in my experience. Synology does have the uniform upgrade and software down pat. Netgear is not even close on the software, but they are awesome in performance on my unit. chadwickba2 Reply my synology is pretty good by philipma1957 on Thursday, July 19, 2012 I have the synology 210+ it is pretty good and support was good. but it cost more the 400. so if this is 250 it may be worth a look. philipma1957 Reply Best reason to buy Netgear is price by MrKane on Sunday, July 22, 2012 Currently I'm operating a Synology 209+ and a Netgear Ultra 2.

From my point of view the Netgear is acceptable" as a backup device, but as a more general server it is miles and miles behind Synology.

The user interface for one is just ancient on the Netgear, even though it's a newer model with more CPU and more memory.

The software on the Synology unit is way better. I'm running with it as a small LDAP server and connects Windows7, Mac and Linux clients to this. The media sharing sw on the Synology is by far more comfortable to use.

The Readynas Ultra server is for me purely an rsync backup server for the Synology server. IT should be more capable, but as it is now it was chosen purly because it was a cheap solution. MrKane Reply NV+ by Evadman on Tuesday, July 24, 2012 I have 3 NV+'s, and have always been impressed with their stability and the UI from a home user and a power user standpoint. Their throughput is slower than pretty much everything else I have tried, but for me the stability and ease of setup were worth the tradeoff. I should have waited for the price to come down (I paid $1100 for the first diskless unit, and they are $250ish now). I wish they made one that supported more disks (8 or more) so I could move off my 20 disk 3 TB RAID60 array on my server that I have most of my stuff on. The NV+ work awesomely for backup purposes now.

In a nutshell, each has it's upsides and downsides, and you need to pick the one that fits your needs better. Evadman Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment.
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The 2012 MacBook Pro Review

2012-07-25T09:37:00.000-07:00

by Vivek Gowri on 7/18/2012 2:00:00 PM
Posted in Mac , Apple , MacBook Pro , Mobile , notebook , laptops

With most of the attention from Apple's hardware refresh event centered around iOS 6 and the new Retina MacBook Pro, the updated 2012 edition of the regular MacBook Pro has flown a little bit under the radar. Basically, it’s just an Ivy Bridge-infused version of the venerable unibody MacBook Pro chassis that we’ve known and loved for the last few years. The details don’t bring any particularly earth-shattering revelations, with 13” retaining the dual-core processor and integrated graphics, while the 15” makes the switch from AMD to Nvidia’s new Kepler-based GT 650M dedicated graphics. Along with Ivy Bridge, the 2012 MBP line gets HD 4000 graphics and USB 3.0 across the board, plus a free update to Mountain Lion when it releases later this summer. Naturally, it doesn’t generate the same kind of excitement that the all-new, all-awesome Retina MacBook Pro does. But is a less headline-worthy computer necessarily a worse one?

It’s pretty difficult to find things to write about the 2012 MacBook Pro hardware. You can essentially sum it up in one paragraph, or even one sentence if you try hard enough. The 2012 MBP looks exactly like the 2011 MBP, which looked exactly like the 2010 MBP, which looked exactly like the post-April 2009 MBP. It’s likely to be the last iteration of the original unibody MBP, giving this body style a 4.5 year run as one of the most instantly recognizable notebook computers on the market. I’m not going to go too far in depth with analyzing the design, because we’ve gone over it a few times over the years (here, here, here, here, here, and here. Oh and here too, just for good measure.)

It’s a solid notebook, that much is certain. From an SKU standpoint, Apple has kept things relatively straightforward, with a high end and a low end for both the 13” and 15” models. Starting at $1199, the MBP13 comes with a 2.5GHz Core i5-3210M, 4GB DDR3, and a 500GB HDD, while the higher end SKU bumps that to a 2.9GHz i5-3520M, 8GB DDR3, a 750GB HDD, and a $1499 pricetag. Other than the updated processor/integrated graphics and the addition of USB 3.0, the 13” is identical to the previous model that we covered in depth last year.

The 15” is a bit more interesting. The base $1799 SKU comes with a quad-core i7-3615QM (2.3GHz) and a 512MB Nvidia GeForce GT 650M dGPU, but makes do with a paltry 4GB of memory and a 500GB hard drive. The standard memory and storage configuration in a nearly-$2000 notebook is pretty unacceptable. This being Apple, upgrade pricing is still a hair away from being highway robbery, but at least the matte WSXGA+ screen upgrade costs a reasonable $100. Thankfully, unlike the rMBP and MacBook Air, you can always opt to buy RAM and storage upgrades on your own.

2012 MacBook Pro Lineup Comparison 15-inch Mid 2012 MacBook ProMacBook Pro with Retina DisplayDimensions0.95 H x 14.35 W x 9.82" D0.71 H x 14.13 W x 9.73" DWeight5.6 lbs (2.54 kg)4.46 lbs (2.02 kg)CPUCore i7-3615QMCore i7-3720QMCore i7-3615QML3 Cache6MB6MB6MBBase CPU Clock2.3GHz2.6GHz2.3GHzMax CPU Turbo3.3GHz3.6GHz3.3GHzGPUIntel HD 4000 + NVIDIA GeForce GT 650MGPU Memory512MB GDDR51GB GDDR5System Memory4GB DDR3-16008GB DDR3-16008GB DDR3L-1600Primary Storage500GB 5400RPM HDD750GB 5400RPM HDD256GB SSDOptical DriveYYNDisplay Size15.4-inchesDisplay Resolution1440 x 9002880 x 1800Thunderbolt Ports12USB Ports2 x USB 3.0Other Ports1 x Firewire 800, 1 x Audio Line in, 1 x Audio Line out, SDXC reader, Kensington Lock slotSDXC reader, HDMI out, headphone outBattery Capacity77.5 Wh95 WhPrice$1799$2199$2199

The unit we’re looking at here is the high-end 15” SKU, with a 2.6GHz i7-3720QM and a 1GB version of the GT 650M, plus 8GB memory and a 750GB HDD. It rings up at $2199, which interestingly is the same as the base rMBP (i7-3615QM/8GB/256GB SSD/1GB GT 650M). I’m mostly certain that it’s not the configuration to get - you’re better served by getting a base 2.3GHz 15”, adding the $100 high-res screen, and grabbing a 256GB SSD (~$250) and an 8GB RAM upgrade (~$50) separately from Newegg or Amazon. Boom. You spend roughly the same $400, depending on your SSD choice (I would go Samsung SSD 830), and end up with a system with a better screen that’s faster in most day to day situations. Unless you have a really specific need for the extra 512MB vRAM or 300MHz clock speed increase, I’d recommend against it.

Performance and Battery Life - Ivy Bridge and Kepler At Work. Meet the 2012 MacBook Pro, just like the 2011 MacBook Pro. Performance and Battery Life - Ivy Bridge and Kepler At Work. The non-Retinized Display: Still Good The 13" MacBook Pro - What Now? Concluding Thoughts Print This Article 119 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment Thermals and noise vs retina? by tipoo on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 Any info on that? Does this have the new fan as well? tipoo Reply RE: Thermals and noise vs retina? by NCM on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 Thermals shouldn't be much different than the previous model, since the internals are very similar, as is the TDP. See also the iFixit teardown here:
You're paying for a portable workstation, here. michael2k Reply RE: The number that kills it is... by iSayuSay on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 A workstation from 2008 .. yeaah .. sure. Might as well say my iPhone is faster than Pentium III workstation box from 1998. I'm paying for a phone more capable than a full fledged computer 12 years ago. How can that be different? iSayuSay Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment.
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Windows 8 Gets A Launch Date: October 26th

2012-07-25T09:07:00.000-07:00

by Ryan Smith on 7/19/2012 12:15:00 AM
Posted in Windows 8 , Microsoft , Windows , Software

After previously announcing that Windows 8 would have a retail launch sometime in late October, Microsoft has nailed down a final date: Friday, October 26th. The launch on a Friday instead of a Thursday or Sunday is a bit of an odd move, but this is otherwise consistent with Microsoft's previous launches. The only real unknown at this point is when Microsoft will start taking pre-orders - Windows 7 saw fairly early pre-orders as part of a two-week pre-order promotion, but Windows 8's equivalent promotion runs until 2013.

Meanwhile Windows 8 is still on track to RTM in the first week of August, which means the OS will actually be finished within a couple of weeks. Since the Windows 8 Release Preview wasn't technically feature complete and Microsoft still hasn't gone into great detail about Windows 8's new and unnamed desktop visual theme that will be replacing Aero, RTM leaks will likely be our first chance to see the new theme in action.

Source: Microsoft

Print This Article 33 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment Price by frostyfiredude on Thursday, July 19, 2012 Nice, now they just need to get the price for the full license out there. frostyfiredude Reply RE: Price by powerarmour on Thursday, July 19, 2012 Isn't it upgrade only?, I thought they were canning the full retail option... powerarmour Reply RE: Price by tipoo on Thursday, July 19, 2012 For RT, the tablet version tipoo Reply RE: Price by frostyfiredude on Thursday, July 19, 2012 There will still be a system builder license frostyfiredude Reply I'll be interested to see if it flops. by SlyNine on Thursday, July 19, 2012 My guess is it will flop. I think people will want the tradition desktop. People will not want to learn new shortcut keys, and having to navigate to the desktop. If vista's UAC was to much of a change, this will be disastrous. SlyNine Reply RE: I'll be interested to see if it flops. by Malih on Thursday, July 19, 2012 It looks like Microsoft considers Windows 8 as the Vista 2.0, they're releasing it as a bridge to Windows 9, or maybe after a year or so they'll release a Service Pack that'll significantly make everything better, or a (really) cheap upgrade to Windows 9.

I guess they're thinking that you can only truly know what the public wants by feedback of the release, just like what Apple did with OS X Lion, it's stable and usable, got lots of new features that's useful (just like Vista), but there's also dissatisfaction, and feedbacks, and then comes Mountain Lion a year after it.

(I used Vista after release of the SP1, the installation lasted until Q2 of 2010, and It was stable and usable enough for me, despite what articles said.) Malih Reply RE: I'll be interested to see if it flops. by damianrobertjones on Thursday, July 19, 2012 My guess is that it'll be a success. Nor you or I decide these things... It's the kids. Once the k ids think it's cool then the adults follow like sheep. damianrobertjones Reply RE: I'll be interested to see if it flops. by SlyNine on Friday, July 20, 2012 I've seen stranger things happen. I will be buying 2 copies of Windows 7 just in case. SlyNine Reply RE: I'll be interested to see if it flops. by jkostans on Saturday, July 21, 2012 I think it will do well. If it doesn't break backwards compatibility from windows 7 then I will be completely on board. I had a tough time going from XP to W7 x64 trying to get older games/hardware to work right(desktop application). Thank god for DosBox and the kxaudio people. If there ever exists a touchscreen laptop with a good keyboard/trackpad that can be removed I will jump on that in a heartbeat. Surface with the "type" cover seems like a good solution, just have to wait for the reviews to roll in. jkostans Reply RE: I'll be interested to see if it flops. by BSMonitor on Thursday, July 19, 2012 Honestly, this is the most innovative approach to an new OS Microsoft has come up with since moving fully to a GUI interface and mouse.. Since the release of Windows 95 and its subsequent merger with the NT kernel in Windows XP, each new version of Windows has simply taken what Windows does already, and try to make it better... Cough cough, I did say TRY.

With the wind blowing toward portable touch UI, Microsoft is making a truly bold attempt to merge all the trending markets into one common UI. i.e. Windows Phone 8 will feel like Windows Tablet interfaces will feel like Windows 8 PC interfaces... All three devices will simply feel like smaller or larger version of the same computing experience.

Will it work?? Hopefully.. After all, if you don't like the new touch/homepage, you can opt for the normal Windows 7 look. BSMonitor Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment.
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EVGA Tease mini-ITX sized Z77

2012-07-25T08:37:00.000-07:00

by Ian Cutress on 7/20/2012 4:15:00 AM
Posted in Motherboards , Z77 , EVGA , Mini ITX

Followers of EVGA media man Jacob Freeman may have noticed something rather interesting from his Twitter feed and the EVGA Facebook page recently. If small is the size of the future, then EVGA are gearing up to release a mini-ITX sized Z77 board, something of a departure from the norm for the extreme-focused enthusiast motherboard manufacturer.

Details are sparse, but EVGA state that this board will still have 'overclockers' features (see the gallery for an LN2 pot strapped to the board), but also contain the following:

- 6 USB 3.0
- 2 SATA 6 Gbps
- HDMI and mini-DisplayPort Output
- Bluetooth
- Clear CMOS onboard
- Mini PCIe

No word on release date or pricing just yet. Here at AnandTech we are planning a mini-ITX review soon of several boards, and hopefully we will be able to add this to the roundup.

Gallery: Print This Article 21 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment Board layout by HaydenOscar on Friday, July 20, 2012 So glad to see another board with the motherboard chipset between the PCIe slot and the CPU socket! It's so much more logical and yet ASUS have the only other board with this layout that I'm aware of. HaydenOscar Reply RE: Board layout by coolhund on Friday, July 20, 2012 And a mistake too:
Just like Asus and Asrock, they turned the ATX power connector by 180 degrees while not even having enough space to the DIMM slots. Lots of issues with pico PSUs and very small ITX cases ensure. coolhund Reply RE: Board layout by Menty on Sunday, July 22, 2012 It'd be a mistake to put a board like this into a tiny case with a low-wattage power supply. Judging by the VRM heatsinking and the fact it's made by EVGA, it's not designed for low-end/lower-power applications like that. It should be in an enthusiast case with good cooling and an overclocked CPU, which removes any pico-PSU related issues. Menty Reply RE: Board layout by Beaver M. on Monday, July 23, 2012 Why turn that connector?
Why limit your customer base with something like that? It really has no advantage for people who dont use a PicoPSU, but will keep people from buying your mainboard who use one.
Someone here already said "CarPC", but with a connector like that, power options in a CarPC are very limited. Beaver M. Reply RE: Board layout by xdrol on Friday, July 20, 2012 I understand it is better layout if you got big-a** coolers, but it's not really "logical"..

The PCIe host is in the CPU here, so you need to wire them around the chipset, what is for sure not a trivial task - remember the chipset also needs gazillion of connections, and judging on the layout, they need to cross the PCIe's wires here - to do so, you need more PCB layers, that means lot more expensive manufacturing - what is probably OK with a "premium" board (question is, what is the demand for premium ITX boards), but definitely not cool with a cheaper one. xdrol Reply RE: Board layout by HaydenOscar on Monday, July 23, 2012 It's not even necessarily for "big ass coolers", just any cooler that isn't a waterblock or the stock Intel cooler, really. HaydenOscar Reply Power by wavetrex on Friday, July 20, 2012 Most of the power for the CPU comes from the other connector which is in the top-left side corner, near the I/O ... so absolutely no problem with the placement of the ATX connector. wavetrex Reply Combine that with... by HisDivineOrder on Friday, July 20, 2012 ...a mini-sized nVidia Geforce 670 built around the reference/launch mini-board with a cooler that matches its size.

Gaming consoles, eat your heart out. HisDivineOrder Reply Blurry pictures? by Conficio on Friday, July 20, 2012 Why are the pictures so blurry? Conficio Reply RE: Blurry pictures? by Andy Stone on Friday, July 20, 2012 This seems to be a general problem for product photos on AnandTech. They should be taken with a small aperture + tripod, not large aperture + hand held. Seriously only few square inches on that board is in focus on all of the photos combined! Andy Stone Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment.
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Fractal Design Define R4 Case Review: Evolution, Not Revolution

2012-07-25T08:07:00.000-07:00

by Dustin Sklavos on 7/20/2012 6:00:00 AM
Posted in Cases/Cooling/PSUs , fractal design , mid-tower

Introducing the Fractal Design Define R4

Around November of last year we had a chance to take a look at one of the most popular enclosures from up-and-comer Fractal Design, the Define R3. Impressions were good if not absolutely amazing, but it was easy to see how the case had gotten so popular. A competitive price tag, solid acoustics, understated aesthetics, and fairly flexible design all conspired to produce a case that could conceivably be a silver bullet for a lot of users.

Today Fractal Design is launching their next revision of the Define, the R4. It's easy to mistake it for its predecessor, but as is often the case, the devil is in the details. Fractal Design hasn't radically tweaked the formula, but they've rounded some of the edges and added more value to their design without making very many sacrifices in the process. They've done a lot to improve the Define in the R4, but have they done enough?

Incremental evolution isn't altogether unheard of in the enclosure business, but I'm used to seeing vendors release outright new models or heavily revamp existing ones instead of steadily iterating like Fractal Design has done with the Define. I can see users being a bit underwhelmed by the changes Fractal Design has made to the Define with the R4, and I myself am a bit underwhelmed, but let's see if we can't unpack things and get to the heart of what they've done and haven't done.

Fractal Design Define R4 SpecificationsMotherboard Form FactorMini-ITX, Micro ATX, ATXDrive BaysExternal2x 5.25”Internal8x 2.5"/3.5", 2x 2.5"CoolingFront1x 140mm intake fan, 1x 120mm/140mm fan mountRear1x 140mm exhaust fanTop2x 120mm/140mm fan mountsSide1x 140mm fan mountBottom1x 120mm/140mm fan mountExpansion Slots7+1I/O Port2x USB 3.0, 2x USB 2.0, 1x Headphone, 1x MicPower Supply SizeStandard ATXClearancesHSF170mmPSU170mm with bottom fan, 270mm withoutGPU11.6"/295mm with drive cage, 430mm withoutDimensions9.13" x 18.27" x 20.59"
232mm x 464mm x 523mmWeight27.12 lbs. / 12.3kgSpecial FeaturesUSB 3.0 connectivity via internal headers
Removable drive cages
Integrated three-step fan controller
Support for 240mm radiator in top of enclosurePrice$109

The Define R4 is ever so slightly larger than the R3 and features essentially everything you already liked about the R3, making it a pretty direct replacement of its predecessor in much the same way as Antec's P182 obsoleted the P180. Fractal Design parted ways with eSATA in the I/O cluster in favor of a pair of USB 2.0 and a pair of USB 3.0 ports and it's a good transition. eSATA never seemed to quite catch fire; USB 3.0 offers most of the bandwidth with much easier connectivity and fewer hiccups. Meanwhile, I still don't think we're at the point where we can completely deprecate USB 2.0 in favor of 3.0, so having them both represented on the front of the case is appreciated.

In and Around the Fractal Design Define R4 Introducing the Fractal Design Define R4 In and Around the Fractal Design Define R4 Assembling the Fractal Design Define R4 Testing Methodology Noise and Thermal Testing, Stock Noise and Thermal Testing, Overclocked Conclusion: Iterative, But Still Needs Work Print This Article 39 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment A decent step on from the R3 by buildingblock on Friday, July 20, 2012 The move to 140mm fans for intake and exhaust is particularly welcomed, time to move on from the 120s. buildingblock Reply RE: A decent step on from the R3 by HisDivineOrder on Friday, July 20, 2012 I'll agree with you once all the PWM fan makers start making fans in 140mm varieties. Right now, for great fans you choose between PWM and 140mm. That's not a choice that you should have to make.

You'd think Corsair would be on the forefront of fixing this, seeing as they just released a premium fan line AND have cases that could use said fans. But no, they in fact released NO PWM fans at all.

Until that day, 120mm needs to stay the standard. HisDivineOrder Reply The top by btb on Friday, July 20, 2012 I have both and R2 and R3 and really like them. The only thing I wish they would improve on is getting rid of the ugly top of the case, it detracts significantly from an otherwise very nice looking case. How big a percentage of the buyers of these cases do actually use the top exhausts? I'm guessing below 5%. btb Reply RE: The top by Dustin Sklavos on Friday, July 20, 2012 Well, the idea is to make space for a 240mm radiator or a closed-loop like the Corsair H100, but the problem is that clearance for radiators there just isn't good. Dustin Sklavos Reply RE: The top by piroroadkill on Friday, July 20, 2012 Yeah, I think they need to use a Lian-Li style blanking plate, where it fits almost completely flush, leaving a smooth finish, but the user then has to supply a wire grill later. piroroadkill Reply RE: The top by beginner99 on Friday, July 20, 2012 I use it! make sense to have airflow from bottom/front to top as hot air flows up naturally anyway. beginner99 Reply Huh? by piroroadkill on Friday, July 20, 2012 This article has disappeared from the homepage! I can't read it anymore :( piroroadkill Reply RE: Huh? by piroroadkill on Friday, July 20, 2012 Ah, NDA, NDA, thought so. It's all good! piroroadkill Reply Can't read the article? by themossie on Friday, July 20, 2012 Neither the "next page" or menu to choose article pages is working - they both return me to the Anandtech.com page.

Other articles work fine.

Is this just me, or is something wrong? themossie Reply RE: Can't read the article? by Dustin Sklavos on Friday, July 20, 2012 I bunged the NDA time on the review and had to bounce it an hour, that's what happened. :| I've normally been great about NDAs but for some odd reason this one just confused me stupid. Dustin Sklavos Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment.
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Latest from AnandTech Pipeline Submit News! Broadcom Announces 802.11ac Combo Chip, BCM4335 Vizio Co-Star Pre-Orders Open: $100 for the Next-Gen Google TV Dell Announces New Precision M4700 and M6700 Mobile Workstations ASUS Announces Plans to Bring Jelly Bean to Transformer Pad Series EVGA Tease mini-ITX sized Z77 Windows 8 Gets A Launch Date: October 26th Qualcomm Shows Off APQ8064: Quad-core Krait and Adreno 320 AMD Radeon HD 7970, 7950, 7870 Price Cuts Inbound. 7970GE Available Next Week? NVIDIA Forums & Dev Zone Breached; Up To 400K Password Hashes Taken Plextor Releases M5S SSD Series Samsung To Sell Developer Edition Verizon Galaxy S III with Unlockable Bootloader Motorola Atrix HD Official: $99, LTE, 4.5" HD LCD on AT&T DailyTech Apple to Break Its Vow of Silence on Security Issues at Black Hat Apple iPhones Outsold by Samsung 2-to-1 in Q2, Profit Suffers NASA's IRVE-3 Heat Shield Test Flight a Success NSA Chief to Pitch "Common Core Values" to Hackers at DEFCON 20 Australian Judge Grows Frustrated with Apple, Samsung Case Facebook, Google Up Lobbying Expenses in Q2 2012 7/24/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews USB 3.0 Group Proposes Eliminating Proprietary Laptop Chargers Windows 8 Pumps up Metro UI With DirectX 11.1 Graphics Jellyfish Movement Inspires Reverse Engineering of Muscular Organs Self-Cleaning/Repairing Coating Technology Developed for Cars, Smartphones First 2013 Honda Fit EV Delivered to California Google Nexus 7 16 GB Sells Out, is Android's First Tablet Hit Piracy on Android so Rampant that Madfinger Games Makes "Dead Trigger" Free Australian Text Message, Email Scam Seeks to Extort With Death Threats New Zealand's Controversial Piracy Law Halves Illegal Downloads in a Month 7/23/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews Twitter @AgentKyle @gruber eventually NAND will get faster though, not enough to require TB but enough to need more than USB 2.0 RT @siromega: @anandshimpi do you know of anyone building a 4-6 drive USB 3 UASP external enclosure? Looking for something for a mac mini for ZFS. @siromega hmm I don't but I'll RT this and see what we get :) @zeDrexler I've mentioned my height adjustable desk - GALANT from Ikea, very simple but it gets the job done. I'm happy with it :) I don't know what to say, my heart goes out to all impacted by this - http://t.co/Pd4m97bF @NitroWare hmm are you talking about one of their wireless adapters? the model number doesn't look totally right there @KShermPhoto I wouldn't recommend it :) different SATA speeds, minimal real world gains for most uses @PenLlawen I believe it was Dothan based, which would've put it around 2003 - 2004. The first iPad prototype used a Pentium M @captainwonkish haha no need, I miss stuff like that all the time. Apple seems to only have the i7/8GB configs in stores

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HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE Review: One Alternative

2012-07-25T07:37:00.000-07:00

by Jason Inofuentes on 7/13/2012 9:24:00 PM
Posted in

The original Droid Incredible was released as the third wave in Verizon’s push to battle Apple’s iPhone with modern, capable Android phones. Though its internals and display were almost plucked straight from a Nexus One, the exterior of the device took on a more aggressive and playful tone, with crimson red accents around the camera and under the battery cover. The 1 GHz Snapdragon SoC, large (for the time) 3.7” AMOLED display, and cutting edge 8MP camera made the phone worthy of its place as a ‘halo’ device on Verizon. But that was when ‘halo’ devices had just a few months in the spotlight before being replaced by the next best thing.

A lot has changed in the 30 months since the Incredible’s premier, but the family resemblance is hard to miss on the Droid Incredible 4G LTE. Released as the third iteration of the Incredible line, the Incredible 4G foregoes the new styling and philosophy of HTC’s One series, maintaining instead the classic Incredible styling of the past, advanced ever so incrementally. The back is defined by its odd hump made of soft-touch plastic, and now featuring a ribbed texture to improve grip. The red accents persist on the power button, front speaker grill and around the camera lens (and the superfluous Beats logo), but beneath that battery cover is just an expanse of matte black. The edge of the device is rimmed by black chromed plastic, and the now 4” display sits raised above the main body, and with a raised edge to protect it when laid face down. HTC has opted for dedicated capacitive buttons, in the now familiar ICS locations, and a large Verizon logo is planted above the screen.

The bottom of the device is otherwise bare but for the voice mic, while the top has a second mic for noise cancellation and stereo audio recording, along with the power button and headphone port. The volume button is now on the right side (when viewing the screen in landscape), and isn’t quite as raised or distinguishable from the surrounding plastic as I’d like; the left side sports just a microUSB port. The battery cover retains the HTC legacy, being thick and laden with antennas; this in contrast to Samsung’s battery covers which tended to be almost terrifyingly flimsy. Beneath it you’ll find a microSD slot and the microSIM tray, and a respectable 1700 mAh battery. With the same power-sipping 28nm internals (and underclocked at that) of the One S, and One X for AT&T, that battery should do the Incredible 4G justice, but more on that later.

Gallery: HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE Joining Verizon Wireless July 5 for $149

Physical Comparison Apple iPhone 4SHTC Droid Incredible 4G LTEHTC One SHTC One X (AT&T)Height115.2 mm (4.5")121.9 mm (4.8")130.9 mm (5.15")134.8 mm (5.31")Width58.6 mm (2.31")61.0 mm (2.4")65 mm (2.56")69.9 mm (2.75")Depth9.3 mm ( 0.37")11.7 mm (0.46")7.8 mm (0.31")8.9 mm (0.35")Weight140 g (4.9 oz)132 g (4.66 oz)119.5 (4.22 oz)129 g (4.6 oz)CPUApple A5 @ ~800MHz Dual Core Cortex A91.2 GHz Dual Core Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM89601.5 GHz Dual Core Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8260A1.5 GHz Dual Core Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8960GPUPowerVR SGX 543MP2Adreno 225Adreno 225Adreno 225RAM512MB LPDDR2-8001 GB RAM1 GB LPDDR21 GB LPDDR2NAND16GB, 32GB or 64GB integrated8 GB NAND with up to 32 GB microSD16 GB NAND16 GB NANDCamera8 MP with LED Flash, Front Facing Camera8 MP AF/LED Flash, VGA front facing8 MP with AF/LED Flash, VGA front facing8 MP with AF/LED Flash, 1.3 MP front facingScreen3.5" 640 x 960 LED backlit LCD4.0" 960 x 540 Super LCD4.3" 960 x 540 Super AMOLED4.7" 1280 x 720 LCD-TFTBatteryInternal 5.3 WhrRemovable 6.46 WhrInternal 6.27 WhrInternal 6.66 Whr

At nearly a half inch thick, the Incredible 4G is making no feints towards svelteness, and while HTC devices never feel plasticky and cheap, their design language has moved forward, yet this device remains in the past. But with updated internals, and a display whose only concession is size, this phone shouldn’t be a slouch. But is there really a place for a mid-range phone in todays market? Let’s dig-in and find out.

Display Introduction and Design Display Performance Software and Camera Cellular Performance, Calls and GPS Battery Life Conclusion Print This Article 21 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment Bit of a mistake by aNYthing24 on Tuesday, July 24, 2012 The One S has a Super AMOLED display, not a Super LCD. aNYthing24 Reply Battery Life by Omega215D on Tuesday, July 24, 2012 Kind of strange how battery life differs from other reviews. So far only a couple have said subpar life while more have gotten good to very good usage time. Could it be a problem with the phone itself? Well, it's nice to know my Rezound isn't too bad but I do like the designs of both the Incredible and Rezound. Omega215D Reply do they have different hardware o_o by pikahatonjon on Tuesday, July 24, 2012 what is with the differences with the EVO 4G LTE & the Htc One X (att) in the contrast test.
also, is the Tmobile Galaxy S 3 actually brighter than the At&t galaxy s 3. arent the 4 phones listed above pretty much identical to each other( one series & galaxy s series) what is with the huge diference in the brightness/contrast test pikahatonjon Reply Another screen mistake by Rockmandash12 on Tuesday, July 24, 2012 The One X has a Super LCD 2 display, not a TFT display. Rockmandash12 Reply Battery life by JimmiG on Tuesday, July 24, 2012 How many more years until Android phones can match the iPhone 4S in terms of 3G web browsing battery life?

The Nexus One got 3.77 hours back in 2010 vs 4.5 hours for the iPhone 3G. Fast forward to 2012, and the iPhone 4S has more than doubled the battery life to 9.85 hours, while most Android devices have just barely caught up with the iPhone 3G.

Clearly Apple uses the same batteries as everyone else, so it must come down to incredibly lazy programming and poor power use optimization on the Android side. Some OEMs have apparently taken it in their own hands to optimize battery usage (Samsung, HTC), but this should really be something provided by the core Android OS. Battery life should be the main focus on for the next version of Android! JimmiG Reply RE: Battery life by zorxd on Tuesday, July 24, 2012 The iPhone has a small display. It consume a lot less. AMOLED displays are also not very efficient for displaying white backgrounds found on many web sites.

Android's battery life isn't bad. Just look at the cellular talk time. zorxd Reply RE: Battery life by lunarx3dfx on Tuesday, July 24, 2012 What zorx said. You can't compare the iPhone and most Android phones Apples to Apples because of design differences. I'd be willing to bet money that if you had identical devices, the only difference being that one has an A5 and one has an S4, the S4 would wipe the floor with the A5 in every category except for maybe GPU performance.

Not only is the S4 almost certainly more energy efficient due to be being a newer architecture, but it will also smoke it in terms of performance per watt.

A5= Dual Cortex A9's @ 800 MHz
S4= Dual Krait Snapdragons @ 1.5 GHz

On top of clock speed Krait is the ONLY ARM based CPU on the market with out of order execution which is why it is faster than Quad Core CPU's (Exynos 4 and Tegra 3).

Jimmi, I would recommend that you learn a bit about how all of this works before you comment again. The iPhone is a good device (although you couldn't pay me to use one), but in terms of theoretical performance it was out-dated before it was ever even announced. lunarx3dfx Reply RE: Battery life by Phasenoise on Tuesday, July 24, 2012 He indicated, as the article states, that the iphone has superior 3g web browsing battery life.

So, for him, perhaps picking display or CPU technologies which consume more power is a poor trade off. He doesn't appear to be interested in theoretical performance, just actual real world browsing usage which as we know is generally not Incredibly taxing (pun intended). Phasenoise Reply RE: Battery life by lunarx3dfx on Tuesday, July 24, 2012 The reason I brought up performance, was to illustrate my point that Apple doesn't necessarily make a more efficient product as much as they use low power components. I'll admit that I did get a little lost in my own argument. Oops. lunarx3dfx Reply RE: Battery life by JimmiG on Tuesday, July 24, 2012 We will see when the next iPhone comes out with a much bigger display and higher clock speeds but still better battery life. The same thing can be seen with Windows vs OSX on laptops with similar specs - Apple simply spends more time optimizing the software side of their mobile devices.

It's not limited to just AMOLED displays, and secondly, the CPU should not spend a lot of time at the highest clockspeed and voltage when you're browsing, especially with 3G which should be bandwidth limited. Unless of course the system is poorly optimized.

I'm an Android user myself, and battery life is the Achilles heel of the system. At the end of the day, my Optimus 2X is down to ~15% of battery while coworkers' iPhones last for two days without charging. It was the same with the Nexus One before that.

Just like the unresponsive and choppy user interface, it's important to realize when there's a problem that needs to be fixed. JimmiG Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment.
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Latest from AnandTech Pipeline Submit News! Broadcom Announces 802.11ac Combo Chip, BCM4335 Vizio Co-Star Pre-Orders Open: $100 for the Next-Gen Google TV Dell Announces New Precision M4700 and M6700 Mobile Workstations ASUS Announces Plans to Bring Jelly Bean to Transformer Pad Series EVGA Tease mini-ITX sized Z77 Windows 8 Gets A Launch Date: October 26th Qualcomm Shows Off APQ8064: Quad-core Krait and Adreno 320 AMD Radeon HD 7970, 7950, 7870 Price Cuts Inbound. 7970GE Available Next Week? NVIDIA Forums & Dev Zone Breached; Up To 400K Password Hashes Taken Plextor Releases M5S SSD Series Samsung To Sell Developer Edition Verizon Galaxy S III with Unlockable Bootloader Motorola Atrix HD Official: $99, LTE, 4.5" HD LCD on AT&T DailyTech Apple to Break Its Vow of Silence on Security Issues at Black Hat Apple iPhones Outsold by Samsung 2-to-1 in Q2, Profit Suffers NASA's IRVE-3 Heat Shield Test Flight a Success NSA Chief to Pitch "Common Core Values" to Hackers at DEFCON 20 Australian Judge Grows Frustrated with Apple, Samsung Case Facebook, Google Up Lobbying Expenses in Q2 2012 7/24/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews USB 3.0 Group Proposes Eliminating Proprietary Laptop Chargers Windows 8 Pumps up Metro UI With DirectX 11.1 Graphics Jellyfish Movement Inspires Reverse Engineering of Muscular Organs Self-Cleaning/Repairing Coating Technology Developed for Cars, Smartphones First 2013 Honda Fit EV Delivered to California Google Nexus 7 16 GB Sells Out, is Android's First Tablet Hit Piracy on Android so Rampant that Madfinger Games Makes "Dead Trigger" Free Australian Text Message, Email Scam Seeks to Extort With Death Threats New Zealand's Controversial Piracy Law Halves Illegal Downloads in a Month 7/23/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews Twitter @AgentKyle @gruber eventually NAND will get faster though, not enough to require TB but enough to need more than USB 2.0 RT @siromega: @anandshimpi do you know of anyone building a 4-6 drive USB 3 UASP external enclosure? Looking for something for a mac mini for ZFS. @siromega hmm I don't but I'll RT this and see what we get :) @zeDrexler I've mentioned my height adjustable desk - GALANT from Ikea, very simple but it gets the job done. I'm happy with it :) I don't know what to say, my heart goes out to all impacted by this - http://t.co/Pd4m97bF @NitroWare hmm are you talking about one of their wireless adapters? the model number doesn't look totally right there @KShermPhoto I wouldn't recommend it :) different SATA speeds, minimal real world gains for most uses @PenLlawen I believe it was Dothan based, which would've put it around 2003 - 2004. The first iPad prototype used a Pentium M @captainwonkish haha no need, I miss stuff like that all the time. Apple seems to only have the i7/8GB configs in stores

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Qualcomm Shows Off APQ8064: Quad-core Krait and Adreno 320

2012-07-25T07:07:00.000-07:00

by Jason Inofuentes on 7/16/2012 11:11:00 PM
Posted in Qualcomm , android , Krait , APQ8064 , MSM8960 , Adreno , Uplinq

Qualcomm's chips have been finding their way into more and more handsets, as they remain alone with a Cortex-A15 class core in the fight. But the dual-core 28nm, 1.5 GHz MSM8960 isn't the only horse in their stables. So at Uplinq, Qualcomm's developer conference, this year, Raj Talluri took the stage to introduce us to their latest addition, the quad-core APQ8064. Raj Talluri joined Qualcomm just 3 years ago, and is responsible for the teams that develop the Snapdragon family of chipsets. Prior to joining Qualcomm, Raj was with Texas Instruments and was closely involved with the development of the OMAP 3 and OMAP 4 chipsets that were in some of the most popular handsets of the last two years. At Uplinq, Raj had one key role: evangelize the future.

Raj Talluri - Image Courtesy of Qualcomm

During the keynote, Raj got to demo an APQ8064-powered development tablet. To review, APQ products forego basebands altogether, while MSM products include basebands alongside application processors and other necessary components. The APQ8064 slots into the S4 Pro family of Qualcomm’s marketing and features four Krait cores running at up to 1.5 GHz when all four cores are taxed, or up to 1.7 GHz when only one core is active. Adreno 320 makes its premier with this SoC, later to be followed by a S4 Pro version of the MSM8960 featuring the same GPU.

In the demo, Raj is showing off a fortress scene from Qualcomm’s in-house game development group. You can see in the video how the demo features cloth rendering, water, fire, multiple light sources and particle effects. The demo does more than just show off the GPU, it serves to demonstrate how developing a game that leverages all four cores can yield visible improvements in both image quality and performance. We haven’t had as much time to explore the architecture of the Adreno 3xx family as we did with Adreno 2xx, but there’s an expectation that while it will have vast improvements over its predecessor, it may have trouble keeping up with NVIDIA and Imagination’s wares next year. One indicator is the DirectX feature level that has so far been revealed. Imagination’s Rogue GPU will premier at 10_0 but be offered as high as 11_1, bringing them to feature parity with desktop GPUs currently on the market. Adreno 3xx is so far only being announced to run at 9_3, leaving it in the Geforce 200 space, and at feature parity with NVIDIA’s Kal-El Geforce GPU. If serious performance gains are realized with the Adreno 3xx, then it may be able to fend off competition from Kal-El/+, but any slips and NVIDIA may have a GPU advantage that could be difficult to overcome. With no other major updates expected in the mobile SoC space until 2013, Qualcomm will have a timing lead over the competition, but we won’t know whether it will be enough until we see shipping products of each.

There’s more happening in this space, though, than just GPU advances. Qualcomm’s recent advantage has in part been due to integration of radios and other components onto the SoC. There's still additional advantage to pursue in integratign components, though. Raj was non-committal on what we might see integrated into a potential S5 in the future. We can glean some insight from the S4 Prime. That line, which includes the MPQ8064, integrates some A/V components to accelerate video decoding and improve picture quality. Chips in the S4 Prime line are designed for set-top boxes and smart TVs; think ‘prime time.’ The IP used for the A/V components in S4 Prime will be 3rd party, however it’s always possible that Qualcomm will put their capable DSP and silicon engineers to work on their own proprietary A/V blocks. Moving to integrate more video components could be a useful gamble, as more and more our mobile devices also serve as our video sources. Another wise gamble would be to integrate wireless display technology, and even digital TV tuners, though no one would go further on what might be integrated next.

Aggressive integration paired with an aggressive transition to 28nm has lead to a product that is competitive in performance with other current offerings, while also offering the fastest air interfaces available, in a very power efficient package. There have been difficulties with the transition to 28nm, though. During a Q&A after the keynote, Dr. Jacobs fielded questions about a possible yield issue that has affected supplies of Snapdragon S4 products. He insisted that their yields were adequate, but that TSMC simply did not have enough 28nm capacity to meet demand. He also revealed that Qualcomm had invested money in another fab partner to bring them on-line at 28nm, but products from that fab wouldn’t be rolling out till Q4 at the earliest. Recent reports have suggested that the partner mentioned is UMC, a Taiwanese foundry that has actually been around for quite sometime. Not as well known as TSMC or GlobalFoundries, UMC is expecting to reach 700,000+ wafers per quarter of 28nm products within the next few years. That's far short of TSMC’s estimates of over 1 million wafers by the end of this year. But with a little investment UMC’s timeline could be adjusted.

Another rumor that has cropped up is that Samsung has joined in as a partner. Silicon vendors aren’t ever too forthcoming with the current state of products in development, less so when there’s an issue. Samsung’s next generation Exynos processors have been slow in trickling out since the Exynos 4210 took the world by storm last year. The quad core variant, the 4412, is shipping internationally in the Galaxy S III, and is by all accounts a scorcher. Being Cortex-A9 based, it retains the IPC deficit against Qualcomm’s Krait cores. With no clear timeline of when they might have Cortex-A15 products to produce, it’s possible that Samsung Semiconductor could have some spare fab capacity. As Dr. Jacobs touched on when asked whether Qualcomm would ever consider becoming a fabricator, the hardest part about having fab capacity is making sure as much of it is in use at a time. If Samsung Semiconductor found itself with spare capacity, an eager customer (Qualcomm), and a handset manufacturer (Samsung Mobile) interested in using a 28nm product with limited availability, it could be reasoned that they’d partner with Qualcomm to deliver SoCs for the US Galaxy S IIIs. Regardless, for all this talk of limited availability of S4s, you can’t swing a stick in the mobile landscape right now without hitting a Snapdragon S4 based handset.

We'll be taking a look at the broader SoC space in the next few weeks, so stay tuned. The short sheet is this, though: Cortex-A15 class or not, the competition isn't waiting to fight back.

Print This Article 33 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment SoC Space by aegisofrime on Monday, July 16, 2012 With the next generation of Nexus phone(s) around the corner, I'm looking forward to reading that article. Also, there are lots of smaller Chinese SoC designers coming up, would be interesting to look at them in greater detail. Particularly Mediatek (ok they are Taiwanese), which makes SoC that powers the majority of lower end Android handsets. aegisofrime Reply More meningless numbers by lowlymarine on Tuesday, July 17, 2012 Are all the major semiconductor companies fighting to see who can make their product nomenclature the least meaningful? It was one thing when it was just AMD slapping pseudo-random "ratings" on their CPUs, but nowadays we've got Intel's i-somethingmeaningless, AMD's four different product lines and random numbers, and now the mobile space has abandoned all vestiges of common sense too:
APQ 8050: Single-core 65nm Scorpion with Adreno 200
APQ 8055: Single-core 45nm Scorpion with Adreno 205
APQ 8060: Dual-core 45nm Scorpion with Adreno 220
APQ 8030: Dual-core 28nm Krait with Adreno 305
APQ 8060A: Dual-core 28nm Krait with Adreno 225 (is this better or worse than 8030? Who knows!)
Now we have APQ 8064: Quad-core 28nm Krait with Adreno 320

Don't even get me started with the ones with cellular modems. MSM 8260 is GSM APQ 8060, MSM 8660 is CDMA, what's MSM 8960 then? Why it's Krait. Of course. lowlymarine Reply RE: More meningless numbers by frostyfiredude on Tuesday, July 17, 2012 It was working alright till Krait came along, now it's a pile of WTF. The GPU names from nVidia and AMD make sense atleast, from a pure performance/generation perspective anyway. frostyfiredude Reply RE: More meningless numbers by Brian Klug on Tuesday, July 17, 2012 I honestly have no problem with any of QCT's product numbers, it's pretty simple when you get the hang of it.

MSM = Mobile Station Modem
MDM = Mobile Data Modem
QSD = Qualcomm SnapDragon
APQ = Application Processor Qualcomm
MPQ = MultiProcessor Qualcomm(?)

First digit is somewhat ambiguous, but 7 = value, 8 = mid to high end
Second digit is for air interface, 2 = 3GPP, 6 = 3GPP + 3GPP2, 9 = 3GPP (WCDMA+LTE), 3GPP2
Third and 4th digit is for the AP inside, higher is better (usually), eg 50 - single core, 55 single core, die shrink, 60 - dual core, 60A - dual core new architecture

I have no problem following it, so long as you steer clear of the namespace collisions that are MSM8660A and MSM8260A (both dual core krait, new baseband).

Anyhow that's my usual rant when I hear that the QCT parts are hard to follow...

Now, let's not get started on Nvidia, T30, T30L, T33, wat?!

-Brian Brian Klug Reply RE: More meningless numbers by agag on Tuesday, July 17, 2012 I disagree on how easy the part numbers are to follow. I worked at Qualcomm for a year, and it probably took me six months to figure out the part numbers. There weren't really any internal references to clarify things either, either-- the best reference I found was the Wikipedia article on Snapdragon.

QSD was only used for a short period of time-- everything is now MSM again.

The 8xxx chips were, at least until last year, the only ones branded as "Snapdragon," which signified >1GHz clock speed. But of course one can clock the same part differently, and thus the 7x30 is exactly the same chip as the 8x55, except the 7x30 was clocked at 800MHz and the 8x55 is clocked higher. agag Reply RE: More meningless numbers by bennyg on Thursday, July 19, 2012 You have any idea how much research has gone into the crossover between numbers, marketing, and psychology?

Intel in particular know their buyers and numbers, you think they choose their processor numbers from a hat or by feeling? They know exactly why their products are numbered what they are... and how much to charge for each of them.

Qualcomm's numbers may be random... not all of them do though. The technical term for what AMD started with the compete-with-P4-GHz ratings thing: quasi-quantitative. bennyg Reply Typo? by CoreDuo on Tuesday, July 17, 2012 > The quad core, the 4410, is shipping internationally in the Galaxy S III, and is by all accounts a scorcher

4412 not 4410, yes? CoreDuo Reply RE: Typo? by JasonInofuentes on Tuesday, July 17, 2012 Yep. Fixed. Thanks. JasonInofuentes Reply well by jjj on Tuesday, July 17, 2012 About the competition the main thing is still the CPU and if they have quad Krait they might just have to compete with dual cores A15 and in late 2013 be the first to go 20nm.
There is also the timing,this way they get deals for phones shown at CES and MWC that won't get EOLed before the end of 2013.
About integration ,they should integrate (on die or in package) as much as they can and not only compute units ,smaller PCB and lower volume are something everybody is looking for.
I am curious about very specialized cores (like in GreenDroid http://greendroid.ucsd.edu/ ) but i doubt we'll see that kind of thing soon.
On the fabs issue, there was the rumour that they might invest in UMC and maybe they actually do it but i doubt they'll use Samsung.Most likely they'll go for both UMC and GloFo.
I am more curious to see if Qualcomm (and others) will manage to have 20nm in late 2013 and if anyone that goes 20nm early also goes FinFET in (maybe) 2014- we know that UMC intends to have a FinFET version of it's 20nm process and it seems that TSMC might do the same , jjj Reply RE: well by JasonInofuentes on Tuesday, July 17, 2012 Specializing the die and package to too fine a degree is a bit risky. It takes time and resources to alter the fab for an utterly bespoke chip, and so you need a customer willing to pay more and commit to however many chips your going to make. We've seen it done, most notably with Apple sourcing Samsung SoC's for the iPhone, but also with the repackaged CPU of the original MBA. But those were package redesigns, integrating additional phone components on die, or even on package could prove more difficult.
The list of items is pretty slim as it is:
-memory
-NAND
-power management
-baseband power amps
-sensors
-new radio components
-new interface components

I'm sure I'm missing some but all of those are risky to integrate. Memory and NAND lock the OEM into whatever quantity of each they ordered. So, if customers want more of your 16GB product, but you have tons of your 8GB product, then your stuck holding the bag. Power management seems a real possibility, as do sensors, but they're also value add components that often get left off of lower end devices, so you might only integrate them on your higher end chips. Power amps for international devices might be something they could consider, but in the US, with every network using a different set of frequencies, it wouldn't be feasible. New radio and interface components is a very real possibility; if a wireless display standard wins out that could be integrated, if an application for USB3 or TB on phones is found, that could be added.
We'll see what gets added next, but probably not for a while. JasonInofuentes Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment.
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Latest from AnandTech Pipeline Submit News! Broadcom Announces 802.11ac Combo Chip, BCM4335 Vizio Co-Star Pre-Orders Open: $100 for the Next-Gen Google TV Dell Announces New Precision M4700 and M6700 Mobile Workstations ASUS Announces Plans to Bring Jelly Bean to Transformer Pad Series EVGA Tease mini-ITX sized Z77 Windows 8 Gets A Launch Date: October 26th AMD Radeon HD 7970, 7950, 7870 Price Cuts Inbound. 7970GE Available Next Week? NVIDIA Forums & Dev Zone Breached; Up To 400K Password Hashes Taken Plextor Releases M5S SSD Series Samsung To Sell Developer Edition Verizon Galaxy S III with Unlockable Bootloader Motorola Atrix HD Official: $99, LTE, 4.5" HD LCD on AT&T DailyTech Apple to Break Its Vow of Silence on Security Issues at Black Hat Apple iPhones Outsold by Samsung 2-to-1 in Q2, Profit Suffers NASA's IRVE-3 Heat Shield Test Flight a Success NSA Chief to Pitch "Common Core Values" to Hackers at DEFCON 20 Australian Judge Grows Frustrated with Apple, Samsung Case Facebook, Google Up Lobbying Expenses in Q2 2012 7/24/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews USB 3.0 Group Proposes Eliminating Proprietary Laptop Chargers Windows 8 Pumps up Metro UI With DirectX 11.1 Graphics Jellyfish Movement Inspires Reverse Engineering of Muscular Organs Self-Cleaning/Repairing Coating Technology Developed for Cars, Smartphones First 2013 Honda Fit EV Delivered to California Google Nexus 7 16 GB Sells Out, is Android's First Tablet Hit Piracy on Android so Rampant that Madfinger Games Makes "Dead Trigger" Free Australian Text Message, Email Scam Seeks to Extort With Death Threats New Zealand's Controversial Piracy Law Halves Illegal Downloads in a Month 7/23/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews Twitter @AgentKyle @gruber eventually NAND will get faster though, not enough to require TB but enough to need more than USB 2.0 RT @siromega: @anandshimpi do you know of anyone building a 4-6 drive USB 3 UASP external enclosure? Looking for something for a mac mini for ZFS. @siromega hmm I don't but I'll RT this and see what we get :) @zeDrexler I've mentioned my height adjustable desk - GALANT from Ikea, very simple but it gets the job done. I'm happy with it :) I don't know what to say, my heart goes out to all impacted by this - http://t.co/Pd4m97bF @NitroWare hmm are you talking about one of their wireless adapters? the model number doesn't look totally right there @KShermPhoto I wouldn't recommend it :) different SATA speeds, minimal real world gains for most uses @PenLlawen I believe it was Dothan based, which would've put it around 2003 - 2004. The first iPad prototype used a Pentium M @captainwonkish haha no need, I miss stuff like that all the time. Apple seems to only have the i7/8GB configs in stores

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HTC One S Review - International and T-Mobile

2012-07-25T06:37:00.000-07:00

by Brian Klug on 7/17/2012 9:30:00 AM
Posted in smartphones , HTC , HTC One , HTC One S , T-Mobile

At the very top of HTC’s new lineup are three flagship devices: the One X, its cousin the One XL, and the One S. I say flagship because HTC’s One S is really a device with a level of fit and finish beyond the rest of the high-end to midrange device category. Don’t let its diminutive size and 4.3" display fool you, the One S packs a lot of punch. It’s almost funny to write it, but the T-Mobile One S has been the device I’ve been reaching for more often than a few other larger size phones for a while now. For those wanting a device with arguably the best in-hand feel around, and an outline that isn’t large like the norm, the One S might make more sense than the One X.

First off, the One S is internally very similar to the HTC One X (AT&T) or HTC One XL - it includes essentially the same dual core Snapdragon S4 Krait SoC at 1.5 GHz with 1 GB of LPDDR2 RAM. The only change is in cellular baseband, which gets reflected in the SoC’s name (MSM8960 for connectivity including LTE, MSM8260A in the case of the One S for GSM/EDGE and dual-cell WCDMA).

Superficially, however, the One S is completely different from the One X. The One S eschews the unibody polycarbonate frame for a metal frame with a unique twist - it tapers and gets thinner at the center. Coming from so many devices that are shaped like a water droplet or sphere (and thus bulge out in the middle), holding the One S is almost shockingly different at first.

I’ve written before that I honestly think HTC won the industrial design category this time around - the One S is exhibit number one in my case for that argument. The combination of a Super AMOLED display and this unique metal construction helps the One S be very thin as well. It’s 7.8 mm at its thinnest point.

Up at the top and bottom are plastic soft touch inserts which double as RF windows for the One S. The one at the very top pops off to reveal the phone’s microSIM slot, IMEI number, and regulatory stickers. As usual HTC has its gold springs here which push and mate up with the antenna traces on the backside of the plastic - there’s WiFi, BT, GPS, and the WCDMA diversity antenna up here. This isn’t the first time HTC has used plastic elements that snap on or off as antennas before, either. The cover is easy to snap on and off, and there’s HTC’s trademark splash of color on the plastic exposed underneath. Note that just like the HTC One X, there’s no microSD card slot, so the 16 GB of onboard storage is what you get. That, and a sealed internal battery.

Up at the very top is the 3.5mm audio jack, secondary microphone port for noise cancelation on calls, and the standby/lock button. I have no complaints about the button placement or clickiness.

Like the One X, HTC has placed the microUSB port on the left side about three quarters of the way up the device, which means you can use the device portrait without having the USB plug get in the way of your hand. I also still suspect that like the One X, the PCB is in this upper region, leaving the bottom portion of the device entirely for battery.

The right side is home to the single piece volume rocker which I have no complaints about. It’s clicky and excellent.

The bottom is home only to the primary microphone port, which is on the plastic RF window region. Also in this region on the backside is the One S’ speakerphone grille, which is a grid of laser cut pinholes just like the One X.

On the front, we have the 4.3" SAMOLED display and three capacitive buttons (back, home, and the task switcher). Up at the top are the earpiece grille (again, pinholes) and behind this grille is the two-tone notification LED. At far right is the VGA front facing camera. I have no complaints with the fit and finish here, although the notification LED on the One S is likewise difficult to notice at a glance unless you’re aligned perfectly normal (in the angular sense) to the phone’s front surface.

The LED glows orange when charging and turns to solid green when fully charged, in addition to blinking green for other notifications. I will say that it’s rather unfortunate that the One X and One S have such hard to see notification LEDs. It’s even more puzzling because the One V has a positively excellent notification LED.

International HTC One S

I guess that brings us to the backside, which again is rather unique with its center taper. The metallic frame is either subjected to HTC’s micro-arc oxidation process (if it’s black, like our International One S) or otherwise left untreated like the T-Mobile One S. There’s a difference in the texture between the two, but it isn’t super dramatic - the micro-arc oxidized International One S (which is black) feels somewhat coarser. Honestly, I find both of them very appealing when it comes to their in-hand feel.

Gallery: HTC One S - External

The other best part is that because the One S is metal, I haven’t seen any of the plastic wearing or scuffing that I did with the One X. The device does rest planar with flat surfaces and make contact on the plastic regions, but because the surface is a more traditional soft touch finish the contact scuffs tend to buff out rather than become permanent fixtures like they do on the One X.

Physical Comparison Samsung Galaxy Nexus (LTE)Apple iPhone 4SSamsung Galaxy S 3 (USA)HTC One SHeight135.5 mm (5.33")115.2 mm (4.5")136.6 mm (5.38" )130.9 mm (5.15" )Width67.94 mm (2.67)58.6 mm (2.31")70.6 mm (2.78")65 mm (2.56")Depth9.47 mm (0.37")9.3 mm ( 0.37")8.6 mm (0.34")7.8 mm (0.31")Weight150 g (5.3 oz)140 g (4.9 oz)133g (4.7 oz)119.5g (4.21 oz)CPU1.2 GHz Dual Core Cortex-A9 OMAP 4460Apple A5 @ ~800MHz Dual Core Cortex A91.5 GHz MSM8960 Dual Core Krait1.5 GHz MSM8260A Dual Core KraitGPUPowerVR SGX 540PowerVR SGX 543MP2Adreno 225Adreno 225RAM1 GB LPDDR2512MB LPDDR2-8002 GB LPDDR21 GB LPDDR2NAND32 GB NAND16GB, 32GB or 64GB integrated16/32 GB NAND with up to 64 GB microSDXC16 GB NANDCamera5 MP with AF/LED Flash, 1080p30 video recording, 1.3 MP front facing8 MP with LED Flash + Front Facing Camera8 MP with LED Flash + 1.9 MP front facing8 MP with LED Flash + VGA front facingScreen4.65" 1280x720 HD SAMOLED3.5" 640 x 960 LED backlit LCD4.8" 1280x720 HD SAMOLED4.3" 960x540 Super AMOLEDBatteryRemovable 6.85 WhrInternal 5.3 WhrRemovable 7.98 WhrRemovable 6.1 Whr

I can’t emphasize enough how much I enjoy the form factor of the One S. In a world where it seems like every smartphone OEM is in a race to see just how big they can make their phones before people start either complaining or creating a niche market for clothing with oversized pockets, the One S is a refreshing lesson that sometimes size isn’t everything.

As an aside, it’s kind of wearing on me that so much of smartphone form factor discussion is purely about device size anymore. It’s superficial, and plus, what would Freud say?

Cases

HTC has gone along with the increasingly popular route of making cases for its own phones. This approach does make sense - the OEM ostensibly already has the CAD files for building a case which perfectly matches the exterior parameters and tolerances of the phone, and knows it better than anyone. Plus, why lose out on the accessory revenue? Apple and Samsung both do it, after all.

In the case of the HTC One S, there are two different case designs available, and a variety of colors. One includes a kickstand and is slightly thicker to accommodate it. Both are pretty simple and protect the back and sides with a hard polycarbonate soft touch material. The front is not protected, for that you’ll need a screen protector.

HTC sent us their whole variety of cases for the One S and I’m extremely pleased with them. The case snaps on around the back and side of the One S and has appropriate cutouts for the external ports and buttons. Most impressive is the way the case still communicates the center taper, which is probably one of the One S’ largest unique design elements. Further, the material doesn’t feel cheap or plasticky at all - I’ve always come away impressed with the coatings HTC goes with for its soft touch material.

I’ve carried around my T-Mobile One S in the kickstand-less grey case for a while now and have no complaints at all. It’s excellent and hasn’t scuffed or peeled at all. Even though HTC advertises the micro-arc treated International One S as not needing a case, it still makes sense to have one to prevent against deep scratches that can reveal the un-oxidized material underneath.

Gallery: HTC One S - Cases

Speaking of the metal material, it’s worth talking about HTC’s metal treatment process. In the case of the HTC One S, it’s a “micro-arc” oxidation treatment, which you can see in one of their own videos taking place. Unfortunately that’s about all the detail there is out there about the HTC One S’ treatment, other than that it is both more than a coating, and only applies to the International HTC One S, not the T-Mobile One S which is blue.

I asked one of my materials science and engineering masterminds, Matt Goodman, what he thought about the process. He replied with the following:

Looks like some sort of plasma arc process. There are all sorts of insane oxides you can deposit via e-beam or plasma sputtering of some variety. I recall that some media player that I had had this sorta coating back in 2005ish, but it is still far from mainstream. Google for metallic glass coatings, basically nano/micro-grain ceramics. Wickedly strong especially if they are well bonded to the metallic substrate.

Based on the visible plasma in the HTC video, and some quick googling, I’d say it looks fairly obvious that some sort of sputtering is involved with the One S treatment process.

As I noted before, the HTC One S International version (which is black) feels different in a subtle way from the HTC One S on T-Mobile which lacks this treatment. It definitely sets the hardware apart and makes the in-hand feel of the device one of the most, if not the most, unique in recent memory. It’s funny that HTC notes in their micro-arc video that you don’t need a case (even though they have made first party cases for the device). That said, I haven’t had any of the scuffing or rubbing issues that were popularized immediately after the device’s release.

Battery Life and Charging Physical Impressions and Cases Battery Life and Charging Performance Software - ICS and HTC Sense 4 Camera - Stills and Video Display - 4.3" qHD SAMOLED Cellular, WiFi, Speakerphone, GNSS Final Thoughts Print This Article 94 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment What the heck? by michael2k on Tuesday, July 17, 2012 How is the coming on 10 months old iPhone 4S still getting some of the best battery life?

What is going on in Android land? michael2k Reply RE: What the heck? by GrizzledYoungMan on Tuesday, July 17, 2012 Faster processors + LTE.

Next. GrizzledYoungMan Reply RE: What the heck? by ltcommanderdata on Tuesday, July 17, 2012 I don't think it's that simple. Yes these recent Android phones have newer, faster Krait SoC which could draw more power compared to the Cortex A9 based Apple A5 in the iPhone 4S, however Krait has the advantage of the latest 28nm process to offset this while the A5 is still on the now more than 3 years old Samsung 45nm process. While the CPU portion of newer SoCs is faster than the A5, the A5's GPU is still faster than the GPUs in every other SoC except the recent Exynos 4412. The A5 is also known to be a large die, high transistor design, which won't do it any favours in reducing power consumption. I don't see a faster processor as being a clear disadvantage to battery life in recent Android phones compared to the iPhone 4S.

LTE's contribution also probably isn't huge considering these battery tests are specifically done on 3G and WiFi allowing the LTE portion of the baseband to remain idle and power-gate. While hardware choice contributes, I do think software plays a role since Apple can spend all their time optimizing for one specific hardware configuration whereas Android manufacturers don't really have that luxury. ltcommanderdata Reply RE: What the heck? by OCedHrt on Tuesday, July 17, 2012 GPU's are power gated when you're not gaming. A powerful GPU doesn't kill battery life unless all you do is gaming.

LTE kills battery life whether you use it or not. Just look at those 4 hour LTE phones from last year. The reason is because the LTE radio is a separate chip - it isn't controlled by the SoC and likely cannot be power gated.

The current generation of 28 nm w/ LTE on chip does have much better battery life - however with Android's multitasking, background syncing, Android simply isn't going to get longer battery life than iPhone 4s unless you turn it all off - and you can turn it off.

Then, as many iPhone 4s users will tell you, many of them also get shitty battery life - it probably depends even more so on how you use it. OCedHrt Reply RE: What the heck? by amdwilliam1985 on Tuesday, July 17, 2012 "Then, as many iPhone 4s users will tell you, many of them also get shitty battery life - it probably depends even more so on how you use it."

Totally agreed, a coworker here with iPhone 4 has battery drained from ~85% to ~55% overnight in "standby" mode.

My SGS2 can go through 2 normal days easily now that I enabled wifi calling and using edge(~10k/s, it's more than enough for texting and syncing). amdwilliam1985 Reply RE: What the heck? by OCedHrt on Tuesday, July 17, 2012 My One S's wifi calling drains more battery than 3G with strong signal. OCedHrt Reply RE: What the heck? by leexgx on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 what stands out is how can the Motorola Droid RAZR Maxx have such poor web 3G browsing (unless the USA version test was done with LTE then i would cida under stand then) and Wifi Hotspot Battery time

that seems impossible with the 3200mha bat at its disposal i cant see how them results are correct for that phone

what also surprises me is How you manage to get most of these phones to last more then 4-5hrs of constant use (that lacks an secondary Clip on battery like i just got for my HTC One X or an bigger battery like i had for my HTC Desire phone) any phone i see cant seem to last the day of Light use half an day if used in the day unless power is supplied in the day

one thing i hate about the HTC one X an little is Power button really could do with been on the side like the Samsung S3 (phone is to long for 1 hand power button at the top) not sure if its me but phone seems to have been made for Left handed users, the answer and hangup icons have been switched (answer should be on the left and hang up should be on the right) sure that's how my HTC desire had it (guess i should turn on on before i look dumb :) )

other thing as well WiFi and Data go into Forced power saving mode after midnight to about 8am (it turns Wifi off and data Off Even if its Plugged into power after 15 mins screen off, comes back on screen comes on) leexgx Reply RE: What the heck? by OCedHrt on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 I easily get 5+ hours of constant use on my One S. The screen uses up most of the battery, and the on time is always over 5 hours. Sometimes more than 6. OCedHrt Reply RE: What the heck? by name99 on Tuesday, July 17, 2012 Was the coworker using Skype?
Skype is notorious for draining the battery rapidly, even while in the background. It's one of the few apps that CAN do so because it's a VoIP app so gets background time (and it basically proves Apple's point that if you allow background apps time, they WILL be written by crappy engineers and they WILL do a crappy job.)

Without wanting to make a big deal about it, I'd point out that under normal circumstances (ie Skype NOT running in the background) my iPhone4 drains by around 5% or less overnight. With Skype running it will drain by 30% or so --- which basically matches what your co-worker was seeing. name99 Reply RE: What the heck? by OCedHrt on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 Skype is pretty crappy, but there are other, better, VoIP apps available on Android. OCedHrt Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment.
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Latest from AnandTech Pipeline Submit News! Broadcom Announces 802.11ac Combo Chip, BCM4335 Vizio Co-Star Pre-Orders Open: $100 for the Next-Gen Google TV Dell Announces New Precision M4700 and M6700 Mobile Workstations ASUS Announces Plans to Bring Jelly Bean to Transformer Pad Series EVGA Tease mini-ITX sized Z77 Windows 8 Gets A Launch Date: October 26th Qualcomm Shows Off APQ8064: Quad-core Krait and Adreno 320 AMD Radeon HD 7970, 7950, 7870 Price Cuts Inbound. 7970GE Available Next Week? NVIDIA Forums & Dev Zone Breached; Up To 400K Password Hashes Taken Plextor Releases M5S SSD Series Samsung To Sell Developer Edition Verizon Galaxy S III with Unlockable Bootloader Motorola Atrix HD Official: $99, LTE, 4.5" HD LCD on AT&T DailyTech Apple to Break Its Vow of Silence on Security Issues at Black Hat Apple iPhones Outsold by Samsung 2-to-1 in Q2, Profit Suffers NASA's IRVE-3 Heat Shield Test Flight a Success NSA Chief to Pitch "Common Core Values" to Hackers at DEFCON 20 Australian Judge Grows Frustrated with Apple, Samsung Case Facebook, Google Up Lobbying Expenses in Q2 2012 7/24/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews USB 3.0 Group Proposes Eliminating Proprietary Laptop Chargers Windows 8 Pumps up Metro UI With DirectX 11.1 Graphics Jellyfish Movement Inspires Reverse Engineering of Muscular Organs Self-Cleaning/Repairing Coating Technology Developed for Cars, Smartphones First 2013 Honda Fit EV Delivered to California Google Nexus 7 16 GB Sells Out, is Android's First Tablet Hit Piracy on Android so Rampant that Madfinger Games Makes "Dead Trigger" Free Australian Text Message, Email Scam Seeks to Extort With Death Threats New Zealand's Controversial Piracy Law Halves Illegal Downloads in a Month 7/23/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews Twitter @AgentKyle @gruber eventually NAND will get faster though, not enough to require TB but enough to need more than USB 2.0 RT @siromega: @anandshimpi do you know of anyone building a 4-6 drive USB 3 UASP external enclosure? Looking for something for a mac mini for ZFS. @siromega hmm I don't but I'll RT this and see what we get :) @zeDrexler I've mentioned my height adjustable desk - GALANT from Ikea, very simple but it gets the job done. I'm happy with it :) I don't know what to say, my heart goes out to all impacted by this - http://t.co/Pd4m97bF @NitroWare hmm are you talking about one of their wireless adapters? the model number doesn't look totally right there @KShermPhoto I wouldn't recommend it :) different SATA speeds, minimal real world gains for most uses @PenLlawen I believe it was Dothan based, which would've put it around 2003 - 2004. The first iPad prototype used a Pentium M @captainwonkish haha no need, I miss stuff like that all the time. Apple seems to only have the i7/8GB configs in stores

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Plextor M5S 256GB Review

2012-07-25T06:07:00.000-07:00

by Kristian Vättö on 7/18/2012 3:00:00 AM
Posted in Storage , SSDs , Plextor , M5S , Marvell Buy the A DATA ASX900S3-64GM-C ADATA XPG 2 5 SSD
$74.99

Plextor is one of those OEMs who have quietly been making their way into the SSD market. They don't have an aggressive marketing engine like for example OCZ does. Their drives are not featured on NewEgg's front page or advertised on most technology sites. If you have read our Plextor M3 review, you might remember that I had not even heard of Plextor before they contacted me. Older users may remember the name Plextor from times when optical drives were relevant, but for years Plextor was out of the spotlight because optical drive performance stopped being relevant for the majority of people and Plextor didn't really have any other products. In 2010, Plextor's ship took a new destination and that was the SSD market.

SSD prices have been dropping significantly over the last couple of years. Especially in the last few months, there have been lots of discounts. For example, the 128GB Vertex 4 had suggested retail price of $179 when it was released in April. Right now it's selling for $120 at NewEgg. That's 33% reduction in price in less than four months. Even more extreme example would be Crucial's m4. When it was originally released in April 2011, the 512GB version had a suggested retail price of $1000. Currently the exactly same drive retails for $400 at NewEgg, and there have been sales bringing the price down as low as ~$350.

The drop in prices has also increased consumer interest in SSDs. You no longer need to spend half of your entire PC budget on an SSD large enough to hold more than just your OS. With more buyers looking for SSDs, there is room for more manufacturers as well. SandForce's licensing strategy has allowed pretty much any hardware company to enter the SSD market, the most recent entrant being MSI. While SandForce SSDs are good in performance and are usually competitively priced, they are all more or less the same (Intel's custom firmware enabled SF drives being the exception). In the end, there are very few SSD OEMs that have truly unique SSDs. Unique in this context means that you at least have your own firmware. Intel, Samsung, Micron/Crucial, OCZ, Toshiba, SanDisk and of course Plextor are probably the most known manufacturers with their own firmware and even controller in some cases. These OEMs also happen to be the largest in the channel SSD market, which is no coincidence.

While Plextor is still far away from gaining Intel or OCZ status in the SSD world, they are on the right path. We were very pleased with Plextor's M3 and M3 Pro when we reviewed them. Performance was great and both drives were backed by a 5-year warranty (more on reliability in a bit). The only real complaint we had was about pricing, which was not necessarily enough competitive to keep up with the constant price drops. Of course, there were sales that brought the M3's price down to the level of other SSDs, but in most cases you still had to pay premium if you wanted a Plextor SSD.

The M5S that we'll be looking at today is all about cutting costs while still providing the same performance and (hopefully) reliability that the M3 and M3 Pro provided. Without further delay, lets start off with a specification table:

Plextor M5S SpecificationsModelPX-64M5SPX-128M5SPX-256M5SRaw NAND Capacity64GiB128GiB256GiBUsable Capacity59.6GiB119.2GiB238.5GiBNumber of NAND Packages81616Number of Die per Package112NANDMicron 25nm synchronous MLC NANDControllerMarvell 88SS9174-BLD2Cache128MB DDR3256MB DDR3512MB DDR3Sequential Read520MB/s520MB/s520MB/sSequential Write90MB/s200MB/s390MB/s4K Random Read61K IOPS71K IOPS73K IOPS4K Random Write25K IOPS51K IOPS70K IOPSWarranty3 yearsMSRP$100$160$300

The 128GB and 256GB models are nearly identical to the M3 in terms of performance. There are some minor changes but the only notable one is a 30MB/s increase in sequential write speed for the 256GB model. The 64GB model, on the other hand, has gone through some serious performance reshuffling: sequential write has dropped from 175MB/s to 90MB/s and 4K random write from 40K IOPS to 25K IOPS.

Comparison of NAND Interfaces ONFiToggle-ModeManufacturersIMFT (Intel, Micron, Spectec), HynixToshiba/SanDisk, SamsungVersion1.02.02.x3.01.02.0Max Bandwidth50MB/s133MB/s200MB/s400MB/s166MB/s400MB/s

Plextor couldn't tell us why they switched NAND suppliers for the M5S but I believe it has to do with price and supply. Remember that the M5S is all about cutting costs. Often times compromises have to be made in order to cut costs sufficiently. In this case, the 64GB model has compromised performance while the bigger capacities continue to run at roughly the same speeds.

A Word on Reliability Introduction A Word on Reliability Inside the M5S and Test Setup Random & Sequential Read/Write Speed AS-SSD Incompressible Sequential Performance Performance vs. Transfer Size AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Light Workload Performance Over Time, TRIM and Write Amplification Power Consumption Final Words Print This Article 41 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment . by StevoLincolnite on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 Another reason regarding Newegg reviews is, will all happy users post a review? Disgruntled customers are highly likely going to do so. StevoLincolnite Reply RE: . by themossie on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 There's a strong selection bias, but this bias should be similar for all SSDs. If you compare the percentage of (dis)satisfied reviews, it's a useful way to compare different SSDs - as long as you don't take the numbers too seriously on their own.

The Plextor M3 256GB and 128GB SSDs rate 88% and 90% five eggs respectively, which is exceptionally high. Compare this with the OCZ Vertex 3 120GB (one of the most popular and highest ranking Sandforce drives) at 35% one and two egg reviews and 62% five eggs.

I won't speak for the statistical significance of any of this (especially with the <100 review sample size for the Plextors) but it looks like very few people regretted buying a Plextor, something I like to hear about any product :-) themossie Reply RE: . by Zak on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 I've just ordered 128GB and 256GB M3Pros, so I was a little upset when I saw this review of M5 but then it looks like other than higher price and 30MB/s increase I didn't miss much. But I wonder how fast the M5Pro will be.

BTW, I don't believe that the current SSDs are significantly more reliable than hard drives (which is a bummer) so the 5 years warranty was the deciding factor for me. Plus, I was always a fan of Plextor products. Two of my older OCZ SSDs died in their second year, after the warranty was over. So I'm more mindful of warranties when buying stuff these days. The recent trend in lowering hard drive warranties is regrettable. Zak Reply RE: . by karasaj on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 Statistically speaking, anything above thirty is actually considered "relevant, fairly reliable information"

Granted, that might not be entirely true due to the insane selection bias, but since that's also present on all drives it might not matter. karasaj Reply New Egg reviews mostly mean squat by Zak on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 "I checked NewEgg reviews for Plextor's M3 and M3 Pro and only 4.2% of the reviews (189 user reviews in total) were one or two eggs, which usually indicates a serious problem with the drive." -- or serious problem with the reviewer. For example I've see people giving SSDs poor reviews because they didn't run at the advertised speeds over 500MB/s on their SATA 3.0Gbps interfaces, etc. Zak Reply RE: New Egg reviews mostly mean squat by justaviking on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 And then there are people who get the ratings backwards.

How many times have you read a glowing review ("I love my new drive!!!") but it has a rating of 1? Either they thought "1" meant excellent, as in "first place," or they forgot to enter a rating when they did their review.

I've seen that on more than one site. Maybe the online retailers should use "3" as their default value. justaviking Reply RE: New Egg reviews mostly mean squat by Kristian Vättö on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 "or serious problem with the reviewer"

I first thought you meant me and was like why the attitude. Took me a while to figure out you mean NewEgg reviewers, not me - or at least that's the way I hope it is :-)

I definitely agree with you though. Kristian Vättö Reply RE: New Egg reviews mostly mean squat by TrackSmart on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 I strongly disagree that Newegg reviews "mean squat". For items with similar buyers and *hundreds* of reviews, it quickly becomes clear when there is an unacceptably high failure rate for an SSD. Check out OCZ's Petrol series of SSDs for instance: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... Or the Vertex 2: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=20...

Certainly, a bad review (1 - 2 eggs) does not equal failure in a 1:1 relationship, but you can bet that the correlation will be high. And highly statistically significant if there are enough reviews, even with self-selection bias.

Would you really buy one of those OCZ Petrol drives to save $20, despite the preponderance of bad reviews? 72% are 1-2 eggs! That's a correlation. TrackSmart Reply RE: New Egg reviews mostly mean squat by yyrkoon on Saturday, July 21, 2012 I agree with Kristian on this.

Personally, I sometimes take newegg reviews more seriously on products like these. Simply, because Anandtech reviews are controlled, and limited by the amount of items they are given.

However, you also have to be able to ascertain the given reviewers ( on newegg ) understanding of technology. Which thankfully is not too hard. You just need to read. Often, you will find that reviewer have very little understanding of what they are buying, if negative reviews are given. Passed that, ignoring the rating system of a given review, and understanding the product your self is a must,

Sometimes, you will find that a negative review has merit. Then all you have to figure out. Is if the problem is something you can live with or not. Simple. yyrkoon Reply Price table is full of errors ;-( by Nickel020 on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 Thank you very much for reviewing the drive. I only skimmed over the review (will read later), but I noticed that the prices in the table on the last page are completely different than what you get when you click on the links.

It would also be nice if you were to include European prices as well, I think geizhals.de is a very good indicator of what drives actually sell for in Europe. Nickel020 Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment.
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Verizon Galaxy Nexus back in AOSP; Sprint, not so much

2012-07-21T05:11:00.000-07:00

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Yesterday was a huge day for Android developers. Just weeks after being debuted at Google I/O 2012, the source code for Android 4.1, Jelly Bean, was made available in the Android Open Source Project. But that’s not all that happened. Along with the introduction of Android 4.1, the Verizon Galaxy Nexus LTE earned back its supported title in the AOSP.

Thanks to expanded driver support, Verizon Galaxy Nexus users can now proudly call their smartphone an AOSP device. As far as how things look on paper, the Verizon Nexus has the same level of support as the GSM Nexus available through Google Play. Google developer JBQ, Technical Lead for the AOSP, is calling the Verizon Nexus’ support “experimental.” There are still some unexplained errors with Verizon Nexus AOSP builds not found in retail and GSM builds, but it’s a good start.

So what does this really mean for Verizon Nexus users? To be frank, not a whole lot. It doesn’t mean updates are going to be provided any faster by Verizon, and ROM development will most likely continue on as normal, which is most definitely a good thing. The Verizon Nexus already has a robust development community that wasn’t slowed down by the device’s lack of AOSP support.

As for Sprint Galaxy Nexus users, you’re still out of luck. It would appear that Samsung and Sprint don’t want to fork over the drivers for the Sprint Nexus, leaving it without AOSP support.

Source: Android Police

Dustin Earley: Tech enthusiast; avid gamer; all around jolly guy. Tagged#android 4.1#aosp#Jelly Bean#roms#Samsung Galaxy Nexus#Updates Advertisement 29 Comments Join the discussion!Sort by DateRating 92YellowDucati 07/10/12 2:36 PM Thumb upThumb down +4

Today is a good day. #VerizonGNexUser

Reply 62dcds 07/10/12 3:47 PM Thumb upThumb down +3

Don’t get your hopes up. Support is still experimental, and JBQ has said in the past, on the fallout of that story about dropping CDMA support, that they would still try very hard to keep support for those devices, but the very fact that they are CDMA devices tailored for each carrier would make it impossible to guarantee _future and whole_ support for those devices as they provide for GSM handsets.

Let’s cheer every single version support as it was the last. ;-)

Reply 1Richard Yarrell 07/10/12 7:01 PM Thumb upThumb down -19

Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.

Yeah right the Verizon Galaxy Nexus is now part of the AOSP support. Meanwhile home at the range the GSM Galaxy Nexus is getting 4.1 Jellybean update. Check thr forums or go to androidcentral.com and see all the response about the jellybean update on the GSM NEXUS. Verizon and it’s Galaxy Nexus is useless…

Reply snowbdr89Guest 07/10/12 8:01 PM Thumb upThumb down +7

Something you gave in common with the nexus dick if you say it’s useless!!

Reply snowbdr89Guest 07/10/12 8:08 PM Thumb upThumb down +6

Have* but since the nexus actually has a purpose it has the upper hand on you since you just take up space that could be used for something better.. so basically your the useless one. : )

Reply 22Dags - 07/10/12 8:18 PM Thumb upThumb down +9

Team Liquid has a nice Jelly Bean ROM for the Verizon GN on XDA and there’s at least three others.

Reply snowbdr89Guest 07/10/12 10:12 PM Thumb upThumb down +3

Liquid is one of my fav roms. Name says all liquid smooth.

Reply 25Division by Zero 1 day ago Thumb upThumb down 0

I’ve been using Liquid Smooth ROMs since the OG Droid days. I’ve always liked them. I don’t know why anyone who frequents sites like these would ever buy a phone like a Nexus, and run it stock. There is ALWAYS room for improvement, I don’t care how cool it is stock. I’ve never owned a phone that wasn’t improved greatly by rooting and flashing custom ROMs. I know that Liquid had some financial troubles for awhile, I’m really glad that he (and his girlfriend? I know Liquidzgrl did some ROMs and a bunch of themes) is still at it.

Reply squiddy20Guest 07/10/12 8:23 PM Thumb upThumb down +11

Better believe it Dicky. Every Android website reported on this same thing a day ago. So now ALL the other Android-centric websites are wrong and you’re right? Hahahahaha! What a fool!
And by the way, there’s already several working versions of Jelly Bean on both the Sprint AND Verizon Galaxy Nexus. Useless? Not so much.

Reply 76Max.Steel 07/11/12 10:52 AM Thumb upThumb down +4

Smh. You really aren’t a man of your words, are you? A few months ago, you were bragging about how “awesome” Verizon was and how pathetic “Tween Mobile” is. Now T-Mobile is the best and Verizon is crap? At this point it would be best if you just shut up.

Reply 25Division by Zero 1 day ago Thumb upThumb down +3

Don’t worry, in another few months or a year, he’ll be on AT&T or Cricket, or Boost, or Metro PCS, blasting the Android blogosphere with nonsense about how awesome his current device/network is, and how the previous one sucks eggs/was kicked to the curb, etc. *eyeroll* He obviously has zero idea what he’s talking about. I find it best to ignore idiots.

Reply 98BetterWithRoot 07/10/12 2:39 PM Thumb upThumb down 0

Maybe this’ll help pave the way for an actual CDMA Nexus device later this year.

*Crosses fingers*

Reply 98BetterWithRoot 07/10/12 2:40 PM Thumb upThumb down +1

I should have added, to be sold direct through the Play Store with updates direct from Google without VZW getting in the way.

*double crosses fingers*

Reply 97redraider133 07/10/12 3:02 PM Thumb upThumb down +7

I sadly do not think that will ever happen with a cdma device. I hope I am wrong and would love if they offer cdma devices through the play store.

Reply 26HotRodRamy 07/10/12 10:02 PM Thumb upThumb down +4

I’d love to see this too! GSM just doesn’t cut it where I live. Sadly though, I don’t see a true CDMA Nexus device ever happening…

Reply HerbGuest 07/10/12 4:17 PM Thumb upThumb down +5

Just do yourself a favor and escape the CDMA stranglehold. You won’t regret it.

Reply notalittlepussyGuest 07/11/12 8:20 AM Thumb upThumb down -3

It doesnt matter to me. I am not some loser who waits for OTA updates like some brainless monkey iphone user. I root/unlock and use ROM’s on this phone

Reply 98BetterWithRoot 07/11/12 12:11 PM Thumb upThumb down +1

I was a GSM user but the network sucks where I live. T-mobile doesn’t go over 300KB/s. AT&T isn’t any better here either topping out at under 1MB/s. VZW gives me the speed I require. I got fed up when because it took me 5 minutes to load a web page, even Google took at least 30 seconds to show up. So I hopped onto VZW before the unlimited data ended. VZW has 4g in my area. It was pretty much a no-brainer.

I would love to have great speeds and GSM service, however it’s not feasible where I am. I don’t regret my decision at all. I mean what good is a smart phone if the main lure is internet access and you don’t have internet connection (or the equivalent to dial up).

Reply 60MoSDeeb 07/10/12 2:48 PM Thumb upThumb down +3

This is a great step forward. It was disheartening to see it taken off initially.

Reply DroidRockaGuest 07/10/12 3:25 PM Thumb upThumb down -3

I love this statement “you’re still out of luck” no offense to sprint but they have to get use to that.

Reply 64Orion78 07/10/12 6:05 PM Thumb upThumb down 0

No offense but luck is for losers.

Reply tagstarGuest 07/10/12 5:48 PM Thumb upThumb down 0

AOSP is what?

Reply tagstarGuest 07/10/12 5:49 PM Thumb upThumb down +2

Android Open Source Project (AOSP).

Reply waltGuest 07/10/12 9:28 PM Thumb upThumb down +2

I bet Sprint’s the one to withhold support for their’s. The only difference between the Toro (VZ) and the Toroplus (S) is the LTE radio: 700 MHz (VZ) vs 1900 MHz (S), which leads me to believe that Sprint’s holding their drivers back until their LTE network launches (next week). Samsung is the manufacturer of both those radios so I don’t see why they would be the discriminator.

Reply alice wengGuest 07/11/12 2:41 AM Thumb upThumb down -11

http://www.elecroniquecigarette.com/audi-2×2-to-obd2-adapter.html?sgmid=190bb9faaa0fe3ac3dfe73915b9db40d

Reply 25dreamdoggy22 07/11/12 10:52 AM Thumb upThumb down +2

Somebody at Android And Me please take note of this alice weng character. They keep posting spam!!

Reply 17rojo623 07/11/12 12:00 PM Thumb upThumb down +1

The problem is the damn carriers. We can only choose the few phones available by each carrier, and then we wait for ever on updates.

Carriers are dominating the Mobile world and hindering it’s progress/innovation (Even more so than the patents garbage).
(yes, i read The Verge article)

I dream of a day when Google starts its own cell phone provider service to compete with Verizon. Offer data at reasonable rates.
And, then – BAMM – watch the Nexus brand skyrocket in sales. Instant updates and purchases right from the Play store.

We would live on the bleeding edge of technology.

(a man can dream can’t he?)

Reply 97Nathan D. 1 day ago Thumb upThumb down 0

So Verizon’s user who got the galaxy nexus didn’t get it for nothing after all, Google finally showing some love to Verizon’s version of galaxy nexus.

Reply alice wengGuest 22 hours ago Thumb upThumb down -1

http://www.google.com.hk/products?hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=strict&q=elecroniquecigarette.com&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&biw=1370&bih=594&wrapid=tlif134207613776110&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&ei=A3X-T-3fB6mViAeVrYXuBg&ved=0CEMQ_AUoBQ

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Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Hotly debated Samsung projects record breaking Q2 profits as HTC profits take a nosedive 35 Update: Samsung Galaxy Nexus sales ban lifted by temporary stay on the handset injunction 31 29 Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) source code now available 26 CyanogenMod plans quick Android 4.1 turnaround – all CM9 devices expected to receive CM10 update 24 Top commentersjaxidian +13on WSJ: Amazon testing a smartphone with 4-5″ screen squiddy20 +11on Dags - +9on ThreadsNexus7 Shipping 0 No comments yet[Question] Is your Verizon GS3 phone speaker buzzing? 3 Sean Riley4 hours agoOuya vs Vizio CoStar. Round 1… FIGHT! 4 Tarwin2 hours agoStaff © 2012 Android and Me LoginUsername Password Remember Me Register | Lost your password? RegisterUsername E-mail A password will be e-mailed to you. Log in | Lost your password? Reset PasswordUsername or E-mail: Log in| RegisterPowered by SimpleModal Loginimg#wpstats{display:none}

WSJ: Amazon testing a smartphone with 4-5″ screen

2012-07-21T04:41:00.000-07:00
WSJ: Amazon testing a smartphone with 4-5″ screen | Android and Me .ckrating_highly_rated {background: transparent url(http://androidandme.com/wp-content/themes/sandbox/images/crown.png) no-repeat; padding:25px 0 0 2px;margin:20px 0 10px 0;;} .ckrating_poorly_rated {background: transparent url(http://androidandme.com/wp-content/themes/sandbox/images/frown.png) no-repeat; padding:25px 0 0 2px;margin:20px 0 10px 0; color:#666;;} .ckrating_hotly_debated {;}Log InAndroid and MeNewsAppsStoreContact UsDealsThreadsTrending Tags: MWC2012SamsungMotorolaVerizonSprintGalaxy NexusTegra 3Snapdragon S4RSS FeedAndroid and Me on TwitterAndroid and Me on Google+Android and Me on FacebookAndroid and Me on YouTubeAndroid and Me on KloutAndroid and Me 15 days ago Galaxy Nexus unlocked for $349 #galaxy nexus 15 days ago Nexus Q brings streaming video and music #Nexus Q #Android at Home video 15 days ago Android 4.1 Jelly Bean gets official #Android 4.1 #Jelly Bean 16 days ago Nexus 7 now available from Google Play #Nexus 7 Smartphones Jul 11 AT 9:39 AM Anthony Domanico 14 Comments WSJ: Amazon testing a smartphone with 4-5″ screen Tweet

It turns out that Amazon’s multiple device strategy may finally be coming to fruition.
We reported way back in early 2011 that Amazon was bringing a family of devices to market, with a phone and two tablets rumored to be somewhere in the testing process. While the timing may have been a bit off, we now have a 7″ Kindle Fire released to the public, a rumored 10″ Kindle Fire 2 coming as soon as the end of this month, and the Wall Street Journal is reporting this morning that Amazon is currently internally testing a smartphone with a screen between 4 and 5″. The WSJ report follows a Bloomberg report from last week that Amazon was working on a smartphone, and the two separate reports lend credibility to the Amazon phone rumor.
If the news holds, Amazon will begin production of the KindlePhone later this year or early next year, with the device going on sale sometime in early 2013. There are obviously more questions than answers at this point in the game, but one question we’d like to hear the answer to sooner than later is whether or not the KindlePhone will feature the Kindle UI Amazon’s placed on its Kindle Fire tablets.
This would further hook customers into the Amazon ecosystem at the expense of the Google Play Store, something Google likely isn’t too keen about. Google has released the Nexus 7 tablet with deep Google Play integration. Google hopes the Nexus 7 will pull customers away from the Kindle Fire tablet and get them deeply embedded into Google’s ecosystem, which is where big G obviously makes their money.
We’ll likely be hearing much more about an Amazon KindlePhone soon, and we’ll bring you the goods as soon as we learn ‘em.

Source: Wall Street Journal
Anthony loves all things technology, from hardware to apps and games. You can connect with him via Google+ or Twitter by clicking one of the fancy doo-dads above. Tagged#amazon#Kindle Fire#kindle phone#kindlephone Advertisement 14 Comments Join the discussion!Sort by DateRating 98jaxidian 07/11/12 9:46 AM Thumb upThumb down +13
While I’m sure Google isn’t a fan of it, I’m happy to see Amazon trying to offer their own ecosystem with Android. I personally won’t be buying into it but it’s good to have somebody to force Google to compete against lest they lose marketshare. Afterall, if it wasn’t for the Kindle Fire, we very well may not have had the Nexus 7. Thanks, Amazon!
Reply 98spazby 07/11/12 10:25 AM Thumb upThumb down +2
i get why some people get kindle fire as if you are a prime member and read a lot, the library feature makes sense and the streaming of their content is not too bad neither… don’t see what would make me to buy their phone though…
Reply 73dpleus 07/11/12 10:30 AM Thumb upThumb down +2
I’m not sure what kind of reception a KindlePhone would get in the vast smartphone market today. To be able to compete with Apple and the various Android handset makers Amazon would either need to undercut pricing, or introduce a phenomenal UI. With that said, I look forward to seeing if these rumors come true and what Amazon has cooked up. Good luck Amazon.
Reply 96kazahani 07/11/12 11:00 AM Thumb upThumb down +5
With the Fire, they showed that their strategy was to undercut pricing. If Amazon sells this direct and unlocked for a reasonable price, ala the Play Store Nexus, we might start to see a meaningful downward shift in un-subsidized phone prices.
Reply 97redraider133 1 day ago Thumb upThumb down 0
We can only hope that this is the case. Unsubsidized would hopefully lead to lower overall plan prices and also lower retail prices of phones.
Reply 96kazahani 07/11/12 10:58 AM Thumb upThumb down +3
When Amazon launched the Fire at $199, we saw a big price correction in 7″ tablets.
Hopefully the Kindle Fire 2 and KindlePhone can do the same thing for 10″ tabs and smartphones.
Reply 90aranea 07/11/12 11:51 AM Thumb upThumb down 0
Amazon prime is a big attraction for me actually. I would have bought fire if it was 10inch. But now a 10 inch Nexus tablet may be on the way so I’m torn.
Reply 85LukeT32 1 day ago Thumb upThumb down 0
have they released who the actual manufacturer is on the kindle devices?
Reply 77Bpear96 1 day ago Thumb upThumb down 0
Quanta Computer’s I believe is who manufactured the Kindle Fire. Rumor has it that amazon is working with Foxconn to manufacture the 10″ kindle tablet and there phone
Reply 50Ardrid 1 day ago Thumb upThumb down 0
Given the success of the Kindle Fire, as well as Amazon’s nearly instant brand recognition, I’m very interested in seeing what they can come up with. Combine Kindle Phone + Kindle Fire + Amazon Prime and you have a truly robust media ecosystem at your fingertips. Damn good time to be an Android fan, frivolous Apple lawsuits and fragmentation worries aside.
Reply 22Dags - 1 day ago Thumb upThumb down 0
I think this harms Android more than helps it. The Kindle Fire OS is not Android, it’s a fork and Amazon gets all the money and Google gets squat – no money from apps or other services. They are direct competitors – those who buy Kindle Fires would most likely have purchased a cheap Android tablet – but Google pays for most of the software development for the Kindle. There are some indirect benefits to Android, eg. apps developed for the Kindle Fire will most likely come to the Play Store as well, but one of the worst aspects is that it probably makes Google reconsider whether their open-source strategy is worth it. I really don’t want to see them move to an closed-source/licensing model just to shut out Amazon.
Reply 97Nathan D. 1 day ago Thumb upThumb down 0
I wounder how this phone will look like and perform if they are trying to make a budget phone, most likely wouldn’t stack up to the GSIII but at least a decent phone
Reply 89Adryan maldonado 1 day ago Thumb upThumb down -1
I find it funny when the wall street journal reports stories. “the Wall Street Journal is reporting this morning that Amazon is currently internally testing a smartphone with a screen between 4 and 5″ in other news im reporting that amazon is internally testing a phone that may weigh anywhere from 0.1-100lbs more breaking news stories to follow.
Reply vishwaGuest 16 hours ago Thumb upThumb down -2
Download Android new and updated Free Android Applications, Gmaes, Themes, Livewallpapers, Wallpapers, HD and 3D Applications. Visit http://www.sinfulapplication.com/forum.php
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Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Hotly debated Samsung projects record breaking Q2 profits as HTC profits take a nosedive 35 Update: Samsung Galaxy Nexus sales ban lifted by temporary stay on the handset injunction 31 Verizon Galaxy Nexus back in AOSP; Sprint, not so much 29 Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) source code now available 26 CyanogenMod plans quick Android 4.1 turnaround – all CM9 devices expected to receive CM10 update 24 Top commentersjaxidian   +13on WSJ: Amazon testing a smartphone with 4-5″ screen squiddy20   +11on Verizon Galaxy Nexus back in AOSP; Sprint, not so much Dags -   +9on Verizon Galaxy Nexus back in AOSP; Sprint, not so much ThreadsNexus7 Shipping 0 No comments yet[Question] Is your Verizon GS3 phone speaker buzzing? 3 Sean Riley4 hours agoOuya vs Vizio CoStar. Round 1… FIGHT! 4 Tarwin2 hours agoStaff © 2012 Android and Me LoginUsername Password Remember Me Register | Lost your password? RegisterUsername E-mail A password will be e-mailed to you. Log in | Lost your password? Reset PasswordUsername or E-mail: Log in| RegisterPowered by SimpleModal Loginimg#wpstats{display:none}

Samsung Galaxy S III anti-unboxing video [NSFW]

2012-07-21T04:11:00.000-07:00
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Unboxing videos are a dime a dozen. Ever single time a new product comes out, the Internet races to show you just what kind of cleaning cloth, USB charger and warranty manuals come included in the box of the gadget they’ve just bought. They are incredibly boring. A waste of YouTube space. And someone has finally stood up to them.
From the moment chadbond007′s Samsung Galaxy S III unboxing video starts, you know this isn’t your average tour around a cardboard box.
Wearing nothing but his underwear, Chad (I assume he is normally called) gives in to his primal urges and tears at the package with nothing but his teeth. Grunting and inhaling the strange smells a brand new Galaxy S III has to offer. From there, well, you just have to watch.
Has chadbond007 created the perfect unboxing video? I’m just about convinced he has.
Dustin Earley: Tech enthusiast; avid gamer; all around jolly guy. Tagged#Samsung Galaxy S III#unboxing#video Advertisement 15 Comments Join the discussion!Sort by DateRating 60Steve Barry 15 hours ago Thumb upThumb down -1
Oh man, I’m at worked and the video is blocked…might just be a good reason to pull out MY GSIII and check this out.
Reply 95pekosROB 15 hours ago Thumb upThumb down +1
Hahaha YouTube is blocked at work for me too. Watched and replying on my GS3!
Reply 83McLovin 14 hours ago Thumb upThumb down 0
Blocked at work for me too.
Reply 84halo0 15 hours ago Thumb upThumb down 0
*Every single time
Reply tagstarGuest 15 hours ago Thumb upThumb down +12
That was just stupid and not androidandme worthy.
Reply Simon PedersenGuest 14 hours ago Thumb upThumb down -6
That video is more interesting than half of the news post parroted around the internets by so called journalists.
So, who are you to decide what gets posted?
Reply xalliesGuest 14 hours ago Thumb upThumb down +2
he has a +1. looks legit
Reply 80Jorge Vieira 14 hours ago Thumb upThumb down +1
wow, lol, idk what to think about this video….
Reply 66SparkyXI 14 hours ago Thumb upThumb down +2
There’s my chippy.
Reply 97Nathan D. 14 hours ago Thumb upThumb down 0
OK, then…? That interesting way to do an unboxing video
Reply BonGuest 11 hours ago Thumb upThumb down +1
That was lamer than actual unboxing videos… to me.
Reply 35Dee 11 hours ago Thumb upThumb down +1
<__<
Ummmm he needs some new underwear. And maybe some clothes.
Or maybe we are missing the point and this is art…
Reply 86inviolable 11 hours ago Thumb upThumb down +1
………….
Reply 62Stella 7 hours ago Thumb upThumb down 0
LMAO! Chad is cute so I had to watch to end even when though it got bizarre. He really gets personally with his phone. ;)
Reply JoshuaGuest 4 hours ago Thumb upThumb down 0
everyone is a damn critic. It was pretty funny and at least original. Relax yourselves! Those who can’t criticize, those who can aren’t on message boards. Until you can come up with something better shut your hole…
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Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Hotly debated Samsung projects record breaking Q2 profits as HTC profits take a nosedive 35 Update: Samsung Galaxy Nexus sales ban lifted by temporary stay on the handset injunction 31 Verizon Galaxy Nexus back in AOSP; Sprint, not so much 29 Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) source code now available 26 CyanogenMod plans quick Android 4.1 turnaround – all CM9 devices expected to receive CM10 update 24 Top commentersjaxidian   +13on WSJ: Amazon testing a smartphone with 4-5″ screen squiddy20   +11on Verizon Galaxy Nexus back in AOSP; Sprint, not so much Dags -   +9on Verizon Galaxy Nexus back in AOSP; Sprint, not so much ThreadsNexus7 Shipping 0 No comments yet[Question] Is your Verizon GS3 phone speaker buzzing? 3 Sean Riley4 hours agoOuya vs Vizio CoStar. Round 1… FIGHT! 4 Tarwin2 hours agoStaff © 2012 Android and Me LoginUsername Password Remember Me Register | Lost your password? RegisterUsername E-mail A password will be e-mailed to you. Log in | Lost your password? Reset PasswordUsername or E-mail: Log in| RegisterPowered by SimpleModal Loginimg#wpstats{display:none}

White EVO 4G LTE coming to Sprint 7/15

2012-07-21T03:41:00.001-07:00
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While a black with red accent variant of the EVO 4G LTE has been available for a few weeks now, those who prefer a white device have been left out in the cold. All that changes this Sunday, as Sprint has just announced that a white version of the EVO 4G LTE will go on sale 7/15 for $199.99 with new 2-year agreement, or $549.99 full retail.
The EVO 4G LTE is an awesome device, and provides a good alternative to the recently-released Galaxy S III, and multiple color options is always a welcome addition to a phone. Anyone out there planning on picking up the white EVO 4G LTE?

Source: Sprint
Anthony loves all things technology, from hardware to apps and games. You can connect with him via Google+ or Twitter by clicking one of the fancy doo-dads above. Tagged#EVO 4G LTE#Sprint#white evo 4g lte Advertisement 11 Comments Join the discussion!Sort by DateRating 97Nathan D. 14 hours ago Thumb upThumb down +3
It always nice to have different color options.
Reply Ashish RajGuest 13 hours ago Thumb upThumb down +1
You might want to change/update the pic.. It’s not gonna be white & red.. it’s white & silver..
Reply Ashish RajGuest 13 hours ago Thumb upThumb down 0
” The stunning white smartphone is framed by its aluminum unibody and sports a matching silver kickstand and aluminized back plate for a sleek and refined look.”
I’m not sure I love the silver look.. they just made it look worse..
Reply 98Sean Riley 6 hours ago Thumb upThumb down 0
Sorry about that, all corrected. I think I prefer the white with red though.
Reply 36h0ruza 13 hours ago Thumb upThumb down 0
Is there a front shot yet? hopefully its black except for the rim
Reply 74yankeesusa 12 hours ago Thumb upThumb down +1
Why does everyone else have a picture with a silver kickstand instead of red? Either way I’m done with htc for now. I have replaced my evo 3d 6 times and the gs3 has way better features. I will give sammy a try before I try another htc phone. I’m going to miss htc sense.
Reply cardin_06Guest 12 hours ago Thumb upThumb down +1
That may be a huge mistake. I left my HTC hero for the epic… And I could not get over the infantile look of touch wiz… No rom or theme could help me get over sense … If you like sense the great features on the gs3, and they are pretty sweet, will not hold you over. The EVO 4g LTE is such a great breath if fresh air… I’m NEVER making that mistake again.
Reply 62Stella 7 hours ago Thumb upThumb down 0
HTC EVO 4G LTE is a beautiful phone already. I need to recommend this one to my sister-in-law. Her contracts up soon and she’s shopping for a new phone. I like your mock up with the red kickstand better than silver.
Reply 86SGB101 7 hours ago Thumb upThumb down 0
Y can’t your carriers all play together, and release every phone on all carriers and give the customer real choice to choose the phone they want on the carrier they want??
Are the scared of proper equality in the market and scared of a price war.
In the UK all phones are released on all of the 5 major nationwide carriers. And because of this phone contracts have never been cheaper.
An typical sgs3/iphone/HTC x, will be free upfount, and about 60USD per month. 2k mins unlimited text and data. No extra charge for tethering (unless u take the pee)
Reply RASHAANGuest 6 hours ago Thumb upThumb down +1
I am really starting to get disappointed in this site. They show the white evo with a red kickstand. Then there are no reviews for the Evo Lte, Galaxy 3, and the Galaxy Note. The news is late. And Google Currents is not up to date, it is about a week behind.
Reply 85Alexander drzfr3shboialex 36 mins ago Thumb upThumb down 0
It looks beautiful. If only this was the design for the next nexus but with software buttons.
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Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Hotly debated Samsung projects record breaking Q2 profits as HTC profits take a nosedive 35 Update: Samsung Galaxy Nexus sales ban lifted by temporary stay on the handset injunction 31 Verizon Galaxy Nexus back in AOSP; Sprint, not so much 29 Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) source code now available 26 CyanogenMod plans quick Android 4.1 turnaround – all CM9 devices expected to receive CM10 update 24 Top commentersjaxidian   +13on WSJ: Amazon testing a smartphone with 4-5″ screen squiddy20   +11on Verizon Galaxy Nexus back in AOSP; Sprint, not so much Dags -   +9on Verizon Galaxy Nexus back in AOSP; Sprint, not so much ThreadsNexus7 Shipping 0 No comments yet[Question] Is your Verizon GS3 phone speaker buzzing? 3 Sean Riley4 hours agoOuya vs Vizio CoStar. Round 1… FIGHT! 4 Tarwin2 hours agoStaff © 2012 Android and Me LoginUsername Password Remember Me Register | Lost your password? RegisterUsername E-mail A password will be e-mailed to you. Log in | Lost your password? Reset PasswordUsername or E-mail: Log in| RegisterPowered by SimpleModal Loginimg#wpstats{display:none}
350-450W Roundup: 11 Cheap PSUs 2012-07-18T02:12:00.000-07:00 by Martin Kaffei on 7/3/2012 1:30:00 PM Posted in Cases/Cooling/PSUs , PSU , Roundup , Thermaltake , be quiet! , Rasurbo , Inter-Tech , Sinan Power , Rosewill , Enermax , HEC , ATNG , CWT , 350-450W Some of you have suggested to review a few PSUs with 350W to 450W. Therefore we picked a collection of such units from well known and unknown manufacturers and tortured them with our overload tests. Read on to find out who delivers the best performance. ~400W is still plenty even for a midrange system, and with optimal efficiency generally coming at 50% load these power supplies should run closer to their "sweet spot" when idle as well as under load. There's still enough power on top to run a Core i7 or Phenom X6 processor and a discrete GPU. Corsair CX430 V2 430W -1 Corsair CX430 V2 430W -1 Corsair CX430 V2 430W -2 FSP OEM 400W APN (230V version) and GHN -1 FSP OEM 400W APN (230V version) and GHN -2 Sinan Power VP-430 430W -1 Sinan Power VP-430 430W -2 Rasurbo RAP 350 & 450W -1 Rasurbo RAP 350 & 450W -2 be quiet! System Power 350W -1 be quiet! System Power 350W -2 Thermaltake Smart SP-430P 430W -1 Thermaltake Smart SP-430P 430W -2 Rosewill Green Series RG430-S12 430W -1 Rosewill Green Series RG430-S12 430W -2 FSP Raider 450W 80Plus Bronze -1 FSP Raider 450W 80Plus Bronze -2 Enermax NAXN ENP450AWT-B 450W -1 Enermax NAXN ENP450AWT-B 450W -2 Comparison: ATX and CPU Cable Lengths Comparison: PCI-E Cable Lengths Comparison: Peripheral Cable Lengths Conclusion Print This Article 62 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment Corsair CX430 V2 430W by fic2 on Tuesday, July 03, 2012 I have bought two of these on sale from newegg for about $17 after $20 rebate. For $17 these are great power supplies. fic2 Reply RE: Corsair CX430 V2 430W by Martin Kaffei on Tuesday, July 03, 2012 Corsair is always a good choice. Enjoy! Martin Kaffei Reply RE: Corsair CX430 V2 430W by esteinbr on Tuesday, July 03, 2012 I agree. I purchased one of these on a similar deal at NewEgg. They ended up sending the 600w version of the PS so I got an even better deal on it but it's been a good inexpensive power supply. I do agree that it definitely isn't silent when the fan really spins up but it's not horrible either. Newegg happens to have this PS for 25$ after 20$ mail in rebate right now. esteinbr Reply RE: Corsair CX430 V2 430W by ImSpartacus on Tuesday, July 03, 2012 You got a competent 600W PSU for 17 bucks? You lucky SoB! I hope it found a good home in a nice machine. ImSpartacus Reply RE: Corsair CX430 V2 430W by StevoLincolnite on Wednesday, July 04, 2012 I've had a Corsair HX 620 for about 6 years now and it has NEVER skipped a beat, "only" got 1 year left on the warranty, I've recently relegated it to another machine and grabbed a Corsair HX 850. The thing with Corsair PSU's though is that you always have peace of mind as all the PSU's they offer are good. StevoLincolnite Reply RE: Corsair CX430 V2 430W by CeriseCogburn on Sunday, July 08, 2012 None of these power supplies in the article are CHEAP - save perhaps the one Sinan that almost nobody likely recognizes. These PS are low wattage near top of the line PS. I'm not certain how the anand reviewer got that so wrong. Whatever - it's one word but still... it's the concept, and being correct about what is spewing forth that counts. These are EXPENSIVE power supplies. I can show the never joe blows here some cheap power supplies - or the article writer - since the elitist smell of self aggrandization is all about... I can't make it on 100K a year either... CeriseCogburn Reply RE: Corsair CX430 V2 430W by nipplefish on Tuesday, July 10, 2012 uh... pipe down over there, guy. the most expensive psu is 55 dollars. most are around 30-40. what's cheap? 10 bucks? if you need a 10 dollar psu maybe you should reconsider your choice of hobbies. nipplefish Reply RE: Corsair CX430 V2 430W by JonnyDough on Wednesday, July 11, 2012 Totally agree. Tom's wouldn't recommend low quality (cheap!) PSU's for two very good reasons: For one, you save money by spending more, especially if you leave your PC on all the time. Better efficiency at idle means you pollute less, and spend less money on energy. Secondly, if your PSU dies, your motherboard can go too. Who wants to waste money and have the hassle of that? Buy quality. At least if your motherboard perishes it probably isn't your fault (as long as you pay attention to ESD. Also, although you can buy better grade motherboards too by doing your research, but you will still get the one that dies the second day you use it now and then). If you want to buy an exploding toaster to power your PC have at it. That's one less ignorant poster online. JonnyDough Reply RE: Corsair CX430 V2 430W by GeorgeH on Tuesday, July 03, 2012 You get what you pay for. I bought two of the V2 units - both exhibited coil whine across multiple builds and one failed to run reliably (standby power issues.) One I gave away and one is sitting on my parts shelf. It's anecdotal evidence but still enough to make me avoid them. Antec's EarthWatts 380D has been my default choice for awhile now, but I'll have to give some of these a shot. GeorgeH Reply RE: Corsair CX430 V2 430W by Avalon on Tuesday, July 03, 2012 I don't think "you get what you pay for" always applies, because I bought a Seasonic X650 gold a while back, which is a fairly expensive and highly rated unit, and I get coil whine. It happens. Avalon Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment. User Name Password Remember me? Login 1 2 3 4 5 6 Next » View All Comments Post a Comment Follow AnandTech Latest from AnandTech Pipeline Submit News! AMD Radeon HD 7970, 7950, 7870 Price Cuts Inbound. 7970GE Available Next Week? NVIDIA Forums & Dev Zone Breached; Up To 400K Password Hashes Taken Plextor Releases M5S SSD Series Samsung To Sell Developer Edition Verizon Galaxy S III with Unlockable Bootloader Motorola Atrix HD Official: $99, LTE, 4.5" HD LCD on AT&T WD Introduces Red: NAS Optimized HDD Line Android 4.1 hits AOSP, Verizon Galaxy Nexus regains AOSP Support Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Goes Gold; GM Released To Developers Windows 8 To RTM In August, Retail In October Boston Releases Servers Based on Calxeda's ARM SoCs Corsair Releases Force Series GS SSDs Motorola Atrix HD For AT&T Peeks Out, Looks Sharp DailyTech NVIDIA: We've Been Hacked, User Records Lost MIT Enhances LCD 3D TV Experience Without Glasses Virgin Galactic Announces "LauncherOne" Rocket for Small Satellites FCC, DOJ Worried About Verizon's "Noncompete" Deal With Cable Firms Apple Retreats, Admits That Pulling EPEAT Certification "Was a Mistake" 7/13/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews FBI Probing China's ZTE for Obstructing Investigation Into Iranian Shipments Accuracy of Iris Recognition Systems Degrades over Time According to New Study Quick Note: Tesla BMW 3-Series Competitor Coming in 2015 NYC Turns Phone Booths into Wi-Fi Stations Quick Note: Microsoft Leaks Info on Halo 4 Limited Edition Xbox 360 Console Quick Note: Amazon Claims Yet Another Microsoft Windows Phone Exec Yahoo Loses 453,000 User Passwords to Hackers Republican Rep. Wants Taxpayers to Pay for Piracy Police (Again) Sprint, AT&T Disable Universal Search on Galaxy S III to Appease Apple Amazon to Offer Same-Day Delivery, Could Pummel Brick-and-Mortar Retailers 7/12/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews Twitter @DavidMelgar I've got a few ;) what have you been writing to it? @rolphus @charlesarthur yeah it's clear that a lot of this is software related, scrolling under boot camp is fine @rolphus @charlesarthur mountain lion shifts some of the burden back over to the GPU but it's still not perfect @rolphus @charlesarthur depends on the workload, for a lot of the slow scrolling stuff it actually seems to be CPU believe it or not @rolphus @charlesarthur it shouldn't, but it's an easy example of how not all drawing processes occur on the GPU. @rolphus @charlesarthur …but many tasks are still done on the CPU (e.g. JPEG decoding, still CPU bound). We need faster CPUs & GPUs @rolphus @charlesarthur it's actually both CPU and GPU. The lack of fixed function scaling in the 1680 and 1920 scaled modes hurts (GPU)... @jjziv send me an email :) @oddeiriknes I noticed it with the original Transformer as well, asked NVIDIA at the time but actually never got a response, will ask again @oddeiriknes I've seen slowdowns when doing a lot of IO on a number of NV based tablets, I'm not sure if this is an SoC or bigger issue tho Copyright © 1997-2012 AnandTech, Inc. All rights reserved. Terms, Conditions and Privacy Information. Click Here for Advertising Information Acer Aspire V3-571G-9435: The Value Proposition 2012-07-18T01:42:00.000-07:00 by Jarred Walton on 7/4/2012 4:25:00 AM Posted in Mobile , laptops , Acer , Intel , Ivy Bridge , nvidia , Kepler , Optimus Buy the Acer NX.RZNAA.001 Computer Aspire $779.99 Acer’s V3-571G Value Proposition While there have been a few reasonably impressive Acer laptops over the years, most target a familiar refrain: deliver better performance at a lower price than the competition. Acer manages this quite thanks to their size (e.g. large buying power) and their willingness to compromise on certain aspects of the laptop experience. Their latest Aspire V3 series does come with several noteworthy updates compared to previous value offerings, however, and the price might just scare a few of their competitors into making some much-needed improvements. Gallery: Acer Aspire V3-571G-9435 Exterior Starting with the exterior overview, we find a throwback to some of the older style Acer laptops with a preponderance of glossy black plastic. Let’s be frank: I like glossy black plastic on a laptop about as much as I like letting my kids borrow my tablet after they’ve been eating chicken wings. I’m not sure if Acer actually did some research study that determined their customers actually like glossy plastic shells, but this one is about as bad as it gets on the lid and palm rest, and if you’re a bit OCD on such things you’ll find yourself constantly wiping away the inevitable fingerprints and smudges. The keyboard area at least gets a matte silver finish, which makes me wonder why they couldn’t have done the same for the rest of the laptop. (Probably because it didn’t photograph/render as well in the early design stages, and if so the people who made this decision need to clue in to the difference between marketing photos and actually using a laptop!) Naturally, the display is also glossy, but just about the only laptops delivering matte displays these days are business models—oh, and the ASUS N56VM/N56VZ that we really liked when we previewed Ivy Bridge. The casing of the laptop in general just feels a bit cheap, which is what you’d expect from plastic, but if you’re not the type that abuses their laptop by stuffing it into a backpack with some heavy textbooks, or occasionally dropping it, the V3-571G should hold up okay. The one thing that Acer gets right is something near and dear to my heart, however: the keyboard. Gone are the horrible floating island keys, replaced instead by a conventional chiclet keyboard. It may not be the absolute best laptop keyboard in the world, but there’s little flex, key travel is decent, the spacing is right, and what’s more Acer seems to be one of the few companies that understands what a laptop 10-key is supposed to look like. There’s no silly half-size zero key, the plus, minus, etc. keys are all in the correct places, and for accountants or others that routinely input a lot of numbers the 10-key is exactly what it should be. The only complaint I have is a minor one: the “merged” Enter and Backslash keys. We’ve seen this on a few Acer laptops in the past year, and I don’t know what purpose the non-gap layout serves, but for the most part it’s more of an aesthetic oddity than something that actually bothered me. I did a fair amount of typing on the V3 during the course of this review, and while I still prefer the key action on older ThinkPad and Latitude laptops, there's a lot of personal preference in what makes for a comfortable keyboard. At least the new key style doesn't make me want to cry. Gallery: Acer Aspire V3-571G-9435 Internals For those interested in some shots of the internals, we did completely disassemble the V3-571G during testing (more on this later). Mostly, users might want to upgrade the RAM or storage, and that’s thankfully much easier than getting at the other components. Before continuing the discussion, let’s check out the full spec sheet to see exactly what hardware Acer delivers with the V3-571G-9435. Acer Aspire V3-571G-9435 SpecificationsProcessorIntel i7-3610QM (Quad-core 2.30-3.30GHz, 6MB L3, 22nm, 45W)ChipsetHM77Memory6GB (1x4GB + 1x2GB) DDR3-1333 (Hyundai 9-9-9-24 Timings)GraphicsIntel HD 4000 (16 EUs, up to 1100MHz) NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M 2GB DDR3 (Optimus) (384 cores at 624MHz/709MHz Boost, 128-bit DDR3-1800)Display15.6" WLED Glossy 16:9 768p (1366x768) (LG Display LP156WH4-TL-A1)Storage500GB 5400RPM 8MB Cache (Toshiba MK5059GSXP)Optical DriveDVDRW (Slimtype DVD A DS8A8SH)Networking802.11n dual-band 300Mb WiFi (Atheros AR9462/AR5BWB222) Bluetooth 4.0 (Atheros/Foxconn/Hon Hai) Gigabit Ethernet (Broadcom BCM57785)AudioRealtek ALC269 Stereo Speakers Headphone/Microphone jacks Capable of 5.1 digital output (HDMI)Battery/Power6-cell, 10.8V, 4400mAh, ~48Wh 90W Max AC Adapter (19V, 4.74A)Front SideMemory Card ReaderLeft SideHeadphone and Microphone jacks 1 x USB 3.0 HDMI Exhaust Vent Gigabit Ethernet AC Power ConnectionRight Side2 x USB 2.0 DVDRW Kensington LockBack SideN/AOperating SystemWindows 7 Home Premium 64-bitDimensions15" x 9.96" x 0.99"-1.3" (WxDxH) (381mm x 253mm x 25.1-33mm)Weight5.74 lbs (2.61kg)ExtrasHD Webcam 103-key Keyboard with Standard 10-key Memory Card Reader (MMC/MS Pro/SD/xD)Price$850 MSRP; Online starting at $780 (7/02/12)We’ll start with the good news: quad-core Ivy Bridge i7-3610QM comes standard, along with NVIDIA’s GT 640M Kepler GPU. That’s an awful lot of performance potential right there, especially considering the sub-$800 price. Back when AMD’s Trinity launched, I expressed concern about the target pricing we were hearing from AMD. At $700+ for laptops sporting the top-end A10-4600M APU, that left an awfully big gap in CPU performance compared to Intel’s Ivy Bridge. Acer has now successfully managed to put together a laptop with a significantly faster CPU and GPU for a price that’s not much higher than we’re seeing from many A10-4600M laptops. Thankfully for AMD, there are also companies like Toshiba selling 15.6” A10-4600M notebooks for under $700 ($660 at Amazon at the time of writing). Make no mistake, however: the i7-3610QM will run circles around the A10-4600M, and the GT 640M DDR3 will easily trounce the HD 7660G (though battery life is a different matter); we’ll have the full results in our benchmarks. There are a few other nice hardware updates this round, including a dual-band 300Mb WiFi solution instead of the all-too-common 2.4GHz only 150Mb adapters. Bluetooth 4.0 is also present, along with Gigabit Ethernet, so at least Acer has everything covered on the networking front. And last but not least, like nearly all modern NVIDIA-equipped laptops, Acer supports NVIDIA’s Optimus Technology to enable dynamic switching between the Intel IGP and the discrete GPU. We finished our benchmarking with the original 295-series NVIDIA drivers, but the latest 304.48 beta drivers installed without a hitch (though spot-testing several games didn’t show any notable improvements in performance). If that’s the good news, what’s the bad? For starters, there’s the LCD. Glossy isn’t the end of the world—some people actually like glossy panels—but the 1366x768 resolution for a 15.6” panel continues to be woefully inadequate. When companies like Apple are pushing the boundaries of what is possible with their Retina displays, and ASUS has 11.6” and 13.3” Ultrabooks with 1080p displays, 1366x768 needs to simply go away. Not surprisingly, the color quality and contrast on the LG panel are also mediocre at best. There are two other pretty significant shortcomings, but both are again a factor of the pricing. The Toshiba 500GB 5400RPM hard drive is pretty much bottom of the barrel as far as storage performance goes, and there’s no option for SSD caching available to lend a hand. The final complaint isn’t quite as egregious, but the 48Wh battery capacity is decidedly out of date compared to other 6-cell batteries. Couple all of this with the moderately large chassis size and we can’t help but feel disappointed. I should also take a moment to discuss the softare loadout of the laptop. Like many OEMs, Acer stuffs all sorts of junk onto their machines. Some of it provides real value (e.g. a fully functional copy of CyberLink's Media Espresso video transcoding utility with support for Quick Sync), but much of the software is useless junk. It's not the hard drive space that's a problem with all these unwanted extras, but rather it's the toll they take on machine responsiveness and boot times--and I received an email from one user complaining about how the auto-update functionality for much of the software comes enabled by default and how it can hog a lot of bandwidth on an office network. Here's the list of software I uninstalled before I even bothered with starting testing: Acer Games Bing Bar eBay Worldwide Fooz Kids (and Fooz Kids Platform) McAfee Internet Security Suite MyWinLocker Suite newsXpresso Nook for PC Norton Online Backup Besides the above items that I felt were completely useless and had the potential to interfere with using the laptop, there are some other software packages that you might want to uninstall as well: Acer Backup Manager Acer Instant Update Acer Registration Acer Screen Saver Evernote Identity Card One hour or so later, with a few reboots, and we're finally at a Windows desktop without a bunch of other extras loading in the background. Don't forget to defrag the hard drive at this point, of course! And some people might like a few of the items in the above list (Evernote isn't all bad, some of the Acer utilities could prove useful, etc.) Ah, but there’s still that price, isn’t there? If you’re not a stickler on such things as display quality, hard drive performance (you can always upgrade to an SSD on your own dime), greater than six hours of moderate use battery life, and you don’t mind a less durable/rigid plastic chassis, Acer’s performance is going to be tough—actually nearly impossible—to beat at this price point, at least until we see the next generation CPUs and GPUs come out. That’s still a ways off considering Ivy Bridge and Kepler just came out within the last couple of months. And with that out of the way, let’s see what Acer’s V3 value offering delivers in our performance metrics. Acer V3-571G General Performance Acer’s V3-571G Value Proposition Acer V3-571G General Performance Acer V3-571G Gaming Performance Acer V3-571G Battery Life, Thermals, and Acoustics Acer V3-571G: How Bad Is the LCD, and Can It Be Fixed? Conclusion: Compromises, Yes, but It’s Fast and Cheap Print This Article 82 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment weiran by weiran on Wednesday, July 04, 2012 Terrible display ruins a laptop. You should refuse to review 15" laptops with a resolution more suited for an 11". weiran Reply RE: weiran by JarredWalton on Wednesday, July 04, 2012 If we refused to review any laptop with a marginal display, we'd be stuck with about 10 to 15 laptop reviews per year -- and that's assuming we could even get all the good display laptops in for review. We would also forego reviews of any laptop that doesn't cost at least $1000. Needless to say, the volume of laptops sold for under $800 is probably an order of magnitude more than the volume of over $1000 laptops sold, so it's an important market to at least look at. JarredWalton Reply RE: weiran by duploxxx on Wednesday, July 04, 2012 no one in this budget needs that quad core horse power. Acer would be better of spending the wasted money on build quality or better screen. duploxxx Reply RE: weiran by Penti on Wednesday, July 04, 2012 On the other hand GT 640M wouldn't drive a high-res screen at native resolution. In games that is. But I'm quiet appalled that we can have chassis like this in the Ultrabook and starting configurations for business notebooks price range. Even if you don't have the best displays, or the budget to do all like a super nice case you should at least have a good touchpad and keyboard. Something like a Acer TimelineU M5 wouldn't be more expensive either. So I'm note sure what they are thinking it looks to be a much better notebook, you don't need quadcore notebooks for gaming, the trackpad looks to be better (if they don't fail at it, looks to be a cheap variant on the V3 though) at the M5 and it also comes in a 14" variant. A 2kg dualcore notebook for 800 with GT 640M should be well enough here, and does look better then this. But you loose 1GB of VRAM as well as that quadcore. Yet this doesn't look like a 800 dollar notebook from today and I think it's time to leave the plastic gamer ~800-1000 dollar notebooks behind and let compal and Clevo come up with better computers to fill that need for the OEM's or for them to take the market more seriously and design something decent themselves. Mobile gpus for mid-end performance for gaming obviously exist for half decent power and price range. I thought Acer was trying to clean up their act and please kill all the packard and gateway branding too. Those might have filled up a space in the early 90's, but it's not something you like to remember. Lots of similar stuff isn't the right thing here, if you still like to have budget lineups they will need to be more differentiated from high end models. They should still be decent enough for those that don't like to spend 800-1000 or more too. Penti Reply RE: weiran by JarredWalton on Wednesday, July 04, 2012 Statements like this are so arrogant. "No one in this budget needs that quad core CPU." Really? Who made you the determiner of what every person needs? I know a lot of poor college and high school students that would like to be able to have access to more than just basic dual-core processors. Following your logic, we end up back with the old "640K should be enough for anything" mentality of the DOS era. While most people don't need and won't use the processing power of a quad-core CPU, to say that no one needs it is very narrow minded. JarredWalton Reply RE: weiran by bupkus on Wednesday, July 04, 2012 I know a lot of poor college and high school students that would like to be able to have access to more than just basic dual-core processors. Good, but the question is, "can they afford it"? We have promised to buy a nephew a notebook and had anticipated to pay no more than $500. Now I'm wondering what we can get that will allow this high school grad to do school work and just not even try to provide him gaming or media capabilities. For that purpose a good monitor seems more significant than an i7 processor. We hope we can find just such a notebook with perhaps a dual core Sandy Bridge processor and even a decent keyboard. Intel HD 3000 display will do just fine. Only the resolution needs a little upgrade. bupkus Reply RE: weiran by JarredWalton on Wednesday, July 04, 2012 Obviously there's no single answer to what's most important, but For many of the components, whatever you buy with your laptop is going to be what you're stuck with until you buy a new laptop. If you buy a laptop that doesn't have a discrete GPU, it will generally be inadequate for gaming. You have a better chance of upgrading the display (see the LCD testing section where I discuss what's required) than you have of adding a discrete GPU to a laptop that doesn't come with one. Even swapping out CPUs can be a bit tricky, as you have the potential for locked down BIOS firmware that refuses to support anything besides a couple specific CPUs. Anyway, while I understand that many parents might find the lack of graphics hardware a benefit, if your son/daughter/nephew/niece/etc. ends up not liking the laptop and taking out a student loan to go buy a laptop that they do want, you've wasted money. This definitely happens, as I knew quite a few people back when I was in school that spent $1500+ from their student loans on a new PC that they "needed" for their studies. Of course, I was a CS major so they really did need a computer of some form, but I'm not so sure the 3dfx Voodoo cards were required hardware.... JarredWalton Reply RE: RE: weiran by jabber on Wednesday, July 04, 2012 True, however, if you keep reviewing these inferior screens then they will still keep coming. If you said to the manufacturers "No sorry but we consider that spec to be obsolete/inferior to what our users want to buy!" then the message may get across that things have to change. If you only review 15 laptops a year so what? They are more likely to be ones your readers want to buy after all. Plenty of other stuff to review than crappy screened laptops after all. jabber Reply RE: weiran by retrospooty on Wednesday, July 04, 2012 "True, however, if you keep reviewing these inferior screens then they will still keep coming. If you said to the manufacturers "No sorry but we consider that spec to be obsolete/inferior to what our users want to buy!" then the message may get across that things have to change" I agree in theory, but the root cause is the issue. Having a site or two or several say that wont change anything. Manufacturers will keep making it as long as people keep buying it. At least today there are alot more 1600x900 and 1920x1080 options in 13,14 and 15 inch laptops than there has been for the past 3 years. It's starting to shift to higher res. retrospooty Reply RE: weiran by JarredWalton on Wednesday, July 04, 2012 Exactly. I love how I'm supposed to refuse to review laptops that 90% of people I know outside of AnandTech will buy, and in turn only review hardware that 10% or less of people I know will use. And AnandTech should apparently also only cater to the enthusiasts, rather than trying to build our audience. Articles like this can get noticed by the semi-technical readers that are researching a laptop, and they might end up saying, "Wow, there's a ton of information in that review that I can't find elsewhere. If they think this laptop is fast but cheap -- in price as well as quality -- what do they recommend as an alternative? Maybe I should read more...." We have the potential to increase knowledge as well as readership with mainstream articles like this. It's always important to see what's going on in the budget oriented market segment when evaluating higher end offerings. I should have a few higher quality (and higher price) laptops in for review shortly, some with good/great screens and some with more of this 1366x768 nonsense. JarredWalton Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment. User Name Password Remember me? Login 1 2 3 4 5 6 Next » View All Comments Post a Comment Follow AnandTech Latest from AnandTech Pipeline Submit News! AMD Radeon HD 7970, 7950, 7870 Price Cuts Inbound. 7970GE Available Next Week? NVIDIA Forums & Dev Zone Breached; Up To 400K Password Hashes Taken Plextor Releases M5S SSD Series Samsung To Sell Developer Edition Verizon Galaxy S III with Unlockable Bootloader Motorola Atrix HD Official: $99, LTE, 4.5" HD LCD on AT&T WD Introduces Red: NAS Optimized HDD Line Android 4.1 hits AOSP, Verizon Galaxy Nexus regains AOSP Support Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Goes Gold; GM Released To Developers Windows 8 To RTM In August, Retail In October Boston Releases Servers Based on Calxeda's ARM SoCs Corsair Releases Force Series GS SSDs Motorola Atrix HD For AT&T Peeks Out, Looks Sharp DailyTech NVIDIA: We've Been Hacked, User Records Lost MIT Enhances LCD 3D TV Experience Without Glasses Virgin Galactic Announces "LauncherOne" Rocket for Small Satellites FCC, DOJ Worried About Verizon's "Noncompete" Deal With Cable Firms Apple Retreats, Admits That Pulling EPEAT Certification "Was a Mistake" 7/13/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews FBI Probing China's ZTE for Obstructing Investigation Into Iranian Shipments Accuracy of Iris Recognition Systems Degrades over Time According to New Study Quick Note: Tesla BMW 3-Series Competitor Coming in 2015 NYC Turns Phone Booths into Wi-Fi Stations Quick Note: Microsoft Leaks Info on Halo 4 Limited Edition Xbox 360 Console Quick Note: Amazon Claims Yet Another Microsoft Windows Phone Exec Yahoo Loses 453,000 User Passwords to Hackers Republican Rep. Wants Taxpayers to Pay for Piracy Police (Again) Sprint, AT&T Disable Universal Search on Galaxy S III to Appease Apple Amazon to Offer Same-Day Delivery, Could Pummel Brick-and-Mortar Retailers 7/12/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews Twitter @DavidMelgar I've got a few ;) what have you been writing to it? @rolphus @charlesarthur yeah it's clear that a lot of this is software related, scrolling under boot camp is fine @rolphus @charlesarthur mountain lion shifts some of the burden back over to the GPU but it's still not perfect @rolphus @charlesarthur depends on the workload, for a lot of the slow scrolling stuff it actually seems to be CPU believe it or not @rolphus @charlesarthur it shouldn't, but it's an easy example of how not all drawing processes occur on the GPU. @rolphus @charlesarthur …but many tasks are still done on the CPU (e.g. JPEG decoding, still CPU bound). We need faster CPUs & GPUs @rolphus @charlesarthur it's actually both CPU and GPU. The lack of fixed function scaling in the 1680 and 1920 scaled modes hurts (GPU)... @jjziv send me an email :) @oddeiriknes I noticed it with the original Transformer as well, asked NVIDIA at the time but actually never got a response, will ask again @oddeiriknes I've seen slowdowns when doing a lot of IO on a number of NV based tablets, I'm not sure if this is an SoC or bigger issue tho Copyright © 1997-2012 AnandTech, Inc. All rights reserved. Terms, Conditions and Privacy Information. Click Here for Advertising Information Droid Incredible 4G LTE Preview: Is There Room For A 4" Smartphone? 2012-07-18T01:12:00.000-07:00 by Jason Inofuentes on 7/9/2012 11:34:00 AM Posted in HTC , Droid Incredible 4G LTE , Verizon I’m working on the Droid Incredible 4G LTE review (there’s a delay resulting from a signal issue where I do battery testing), but in the interim let’s talk about something that seems to have come up about this phone. We don’t often discuss what’s happening on other review sites, even as they get their reviews out much faster than we, but the Incredible 4G LTE has been hit in many reviews for its display, and this surprised me. Let’s take a look at some numbers. Anonymized Display DataContrast Ratio9511418746n/aBrightness - White (nits)571427484318Brightness - Black (nits)0.60.30.60StripeRGBRGBRGBRG,BGPanel Technology IPSIPSIPSAMOLED Pixel density (ppi)330265275305These charts are our display test data, anonymized so we can do a little experiment. The phone data above includes the iPhone 4S, the Galaxy S 3, the original Motorola Droid and the Droid Incredible 4G LTE. Can you tell which is which? Just take a second. The original Droid was lauded for its IPS display and high pixel density, it was even described in some materials and reviews as ‘large’ at an iPhone besting 3.7 inches. It’s the second one from the left. The Galaxy S 3 is the current king of Android phone displays, and is massive at 4.8 inches, and with an excellent pixel density and picture quality, despite its PenTile roots; it’s the one far to the right. The iPhone 4 premiered with the highest pixel density in a mobile device we’d ever seen, and leveraged its IPS panel for excellent picture quality and viewing angles, and is rarely derided for being small; it’s the one to the far left. That leaves the Incredible 4G whose display isn't being dinged for the data above, but rather being hit for its size and resolution. Gallery: HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE - ColorHCFR Results The Incredible 4G has better pixel density than the OG Droid (not so far off from the GS 3), is larger than the iPhone by a half an inch, and has excellent colors and viewing angles. So, why does it get so much grief? I’m not sure, but the disdain for it brings us to consider something else: Is there room for a 4” mid-range phone in today’s mobile market? The sweet spot for cellphones in the US is $199, all thanks to the carrier subsidized model; MSRP’s of $649 are entirely concealed from the consumer, and every phone worth owning exists between $99 and $199. This price compression means that when you’re considering buying a new phone the difference between a mid-range phone and the top-of-the-line ‘halo’ device is usually just $50. Of course, this conceals the reality that the MSRP delta is often upwards of $149. So, how do you make a mid-range smartphone sell in this market? I’m not sure there’s a good answer, but here’s how Verizon is going about it. First they’re using branding that’s familiar to earlier buyers (whose contracts just came-up). Second, they’re including feature and spec deltas that provide a real world experience difference between the mid-range and ‘halo’ devices. Third, they’re not holding back on the advertising. The claims in their advertising are just as bold and brash as in any prior Droid campaign. Gallery: HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE Joining Verizon Wireless July 5 for $149 S4 Performance at 1.2 GHz The Display and The Mid-Range S4 Performance at 1.2 GHz Print This Article 35 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment Hmmmm by warisz00r on Tuesday, July 10, 2012 "The iPhone 4 premiered with the highest pixel density in a mobile device we’d ever seen" If you discount HTC Rezound, Sony Xperia S and other phones with a 4.3", 720p screen, then yeah... warisz00r Reply RE: Hmmmm by omikun on Tuesday, July 10, 2012 Hence the word "premiered." omikun Reply ? by EnzoFX on Tuesday, July 10, 2012 Did those not come after? EnzoFX Reply RE: ? by JasonInofuentes on Tuesday, July 10, 2012 +1 JasonInofuentes Reply RE: Hmmmm by bearxor on Tuesday, July 10, 2012 Wow. Reading comprehension FTL. bearxor Reply RE: Hmmmm by eldwraith on Tuesday, July 10, 2012 Well, you only picked phones that came after IPhone 4. I remember Sharp made phones with a higher density years before the 1st gen IPhone. I think Apple made a huge difference, and don't kill me because that is my opinion, and you all should have one too. The way reviews sensationalized the pixel density was just funny to me. Nobody was complaining about it then the retina display came into play. Maybe they didn't know there has been that screen technology for year. I don't know. So OP, good point, but bad examples. eldwraith Reply RE: Hmmmm by JasonInofuentes on Wednesday, July 11, 2012 Not following the Japanese mobile phone space, I had trouble finding references to these Sharp JDM phones, indeed the only one I found was the Fulltouch, a feature phone. I'm not saying no one had thought of higher density displays previously, indeed the Motorola Droid was no slouch in pixel density and it came out 9 months before the iPhone 4. But the actual race to get these displays into more phones was late in coming and for the US market was first to trumpet its density. JasonInofuentes Reply Note use of "we'd" rather than "we've" by ahar on Tuesday, July 10, 2012 Unless any of those other phones were released before the iPhone 4, the statement is correct. ahar Reply Bigger = Better? by Drag0nFire on Tuesday, July 10, 2012 I'm really curious how the "bigger = better" thing got started for smartphones. Everyone acts like a 4.8" phone is intrinsically better than a 3.7" or a 4" phone (including many reviewers). But if a 4" phone fits better in my pocket, isn't that worth considering? Anyways, thanks for an insightful article. Looking forward to the full review! Drag0nFire Reply RE: Bigger = Better? by PubFiction on Tuesday, July 10, 2012 I think it is all stupid and ignored. Size is a choice not better or worse, I mean ya a bigger phone is better but it comes at a cost of convienience and mobility. IMO all these companies need to focus on releasing 3 phones, 3", 4", 5" and let the consumer decide. Imagine if you went to buy a laptop and they said sorry we are apple we ONLY sell 13 inch laptops, and samsung said well if you want something nice it only comes in the 17 inch version? Seems ridiculous so why do we put up with it on phones. Don't get me started on the fact it took many years for the galaxy note to finally put a stylus holder back on a phone. And keyboards are not even an option with a good phone on carriers now. Basically phones are giving us less choice than ever now to fit our lifestyles. Sometimes I think they do a better job making the feature phones than the high end ones. PubFiction Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment. User Name Password Remember me? Login 1 2 3 4 Next » View All Comments Post a Comment Follow AnandTech Latest from AnandTech Pipeline Submit News! AMD Radeon HD 7970, 7950, 7870 Price Cuts Inbound. 7970GE Available Next Week? NVIDIA Forums & Dev Zone Breached; Up To 400K Password Hashes Taken Plextor Releases M5S SSD Series Samsung To Sell Developer Edition Verizon Galaxy S III with Unlockable Bootloader Motorola Atrix HD Official: $99, LTE, 4.5" HD LCD on AT&T WD Introduces Red: NAS Optimized HDD Line Android 4.1 hits AOSP, Verizon Galaxy Nexus regains AOSP Support Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Goes Gold; GM Released To Developers Windows 8 To RTM In August, Retail In October Boston Releases Servers Based on Calxeda's ARM SoCs Corsair Releases Force Series GS SSDs Motorola Atrix HD For AT&T Peeks Out, Looks Sharp DailyTech NVIDIA: We've Been Hacked, User Records Lost MIT Enhances LCD 3D TV Experience Without Glasses Virgin Galactic Announces "LauncherOne" Rocket for Small Satellites FCC, DOJ Worried About Verizon's "Noncompete" Deal With Cable Firms Apple Retreats, Admits That Pulling EPEAT Certification "Was a Mistake" 7/13/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews FBI Probing China's ZTE for Obstructing Investigation Into Iranian Shipments Accuracy of Iris Recognition Systems Degrades over Time According to New Study Quick Note: Tesla BMW 3-Series Competitor Coming in 2015 NYC Turns Phone Booths into Wi-Fi Stations Quick Note: Microsoft Leaks Info on Halo 4 Limited Edition Xbox 360 Console Quick Note: Amazon Claims Yet Another Microsoft Windows Phone Exec Yahoo Loses 453,000 User Passwords to Hackers Republican Rep. Wants Taxpayers to Pay for Piracy Police (Again) Sprint, AT&T Disable Universal Search on Galaxy S III to Appease Apple Amazon to Offer Same-Day Delivery, Could Pummel Brick-and-Mortar Retailers 7/12/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews Twitter @DavidMelgar I've got a few ;) what have you been writing to it? @rolphus @charlesarthur yeah it's clear that a lot of this is software related, scrolling under boot camp is fine @rolphus @charlesarthur mountain lion shifts some of the burden back over to the GPU but it's still not perfect @rolphus @charlesarthur depends on the workload, for a lot of the slow scrolling stuff it actually seems to be CPU believe it or not @rolphus @charlesarthur it shouldn't, but it's an easy example of how not all drawing processes occur on the GPU. @rolphus @charlesarthur …but many tasks are still done on the CPU (e.g. JPEG decoding, still CPU bound). We need faster CPUs & GPUs @rolphus @charlesarthur it's actually both CPU and GPU. The lack of fixed function scaling in the 1680 and 1920 scaled modes hurts (GPU)... @jjziv send me an email :) @oddeiriknes I noticed it with the original Transformer as well, asked NVIDIA at the time but actually never got a response, will ask again @oddeiriknes I've seen slowdowns when doing a lot of IO on a number of NV based tablets, I'm not sure if this is an SoC or bigger issue tho Copyright © 1997-2012 AnandTech, Inc. All rights reserved. Terms, Conditions and Privacy Information. Click Here for Advertising Information Corsair Releases Force Series GS SSDs 2012-07-18T00:42:00.000-07:00 by Kristian Vättö on 7/9/2012 12:01:00 PM Posted in Storage , SSDs , Corsair , Force Series GS Corsair has released a new member of its Force series SSDs called the Force GS. The Force GS is based on SandForce's SF-2200 series controller (most likely SF-2281) and uses Toggle-Mode MLC NAND (24nm Toshiba Toggle-Mode 2.0 NAND is the likely candidate). As expected, the Force GS uses a 6Gb/s SATA interface and comes in a 2.5" form factor. Corsair is providing three years of warranty, which is pretty common for consumer SSDs (some OEMs such as Intel, Plextor and OCZ have started offering 5-year warranties as a standard, though). Below is a specification table of the Force GS: Corsair Force Series GS SpecificationsUser Capacity180GB240GB360GB480GBRaw NAND Capacity192GiB256GiB384GiB512GiBNumber of NAND Packages12161216Number of Die per Package2244Sequential Read555MB/s555MB/s555MB/s555MB/sSequential Write525MB/s525MB/s530MB/s455MB/sMax 4K Random Write90K IOPS90K IOPS50K IOPS50K IOPSStreet Price$175$220$320$450Due to the use of Toggle-Mode NAND, there is a slight increase in write speeds (around 10MB/s in sequential and 5K IOPS in random speeds) compared to SF-2281 SSDs with ONFi 2.x NAND. The biggest ddifference between the GS and most SF-2281 SSDs is the inclusion of 180GB and 360GB models. There are actually a few other 180GB SandForce SSDs including Intel's 330 and 520, OCZ's Agility 3 and Mushkin's Chronos; but 360GB is a much more uncommon capacity. The only other 360GB 2.5" SSD available at NewEgg is OCZ's Agility 3, although it's out of stock at the moment. Building 180GB and 360GB drives isn't rocket science thanks to the flexibility afforded by SandForce. SF-2200 controllers have a total of eight channels but they can also run in 6-channel mode. To achieve capacities of 180GB and 360GB, you simply run the controller in 6-channel mode and equip the PCB with twelve NAND packages. With twelve dual-die (16GB) NAND packages, the raw NAND capacity is 192GiB. Subtract the space taken by RAISE and over-provisioning and you're left with a usable capacity of 180GB. The 360GB model simply has twice as many NAND die per NAND package, hence doubling the capacity. Corsair's Force GS is available immediately and at least NewEgg is already listing the drives on their site (check the street price links above). Pricing is quite fair as we are looking at less than $1 per GB at all capacities. Source: Corsair Print This Article 9 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment 6-Channels? by danjw on Monday, July 09, 2012 I would like to see benchmarks for those 2 models. If they aren't using all the available channels, wouldn't they see a performance hit? danjw Reply RE: 6-Channels? by Spunjji on Monday, July 09, 2012 In theory, although where performance is limited by other factors such as controller throughput (e.g. compression rate) or the SATA interface speed that may not be the case. Spunjji Reply RE: 6-Channels? by Kristian Vättö on Monday, July 09, 2012 We have 120GB and 180GB Intel 330 Series SSDs in our bench. That should give you an idea (the 180GB model has the same 6-channel layout): http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/590?vs=589 As mentioned above, the bottlenecks are elsewhere. Kristian Vättö Reply Double the die / half the IOPs? by Belard on Monday, July 09, 2012 Is it somewhat concerning that on the LARGER drives, that the IOPS drops down by half. Belard Reply Problem for me is... by JNo on Monday, July 09, 2012 Sandforce = wouldn't touch with a barge pole Even the mighty, reliable Intel had problems with them. Sure they've resolved that now but Sandforce just seems to be cursed after all I've read. Competing controllers are now in the same ball park performance-wise so getting a Sandforce seems to say, "I don't care about my data". Maybe I exaggerate for dramatic effect but why take the risk when there are M4s and 830s out there? JNo Reply RE: Problem for me is... by MadMan007 on Monday, July 09, 2012 M4/Marvell and Samsung have never had firmware problem. Oh wait... MadMan007 Reply RE: Problem for me is... by B3an on Monday, July 09, 2012 I think most of the problems with Sandforce have been fixed now. It's not like they're still new and have possible undiscovered issues. I'd happily buy Sandforce drives now. B3an Reply Hmmm... by Movieman420 on Monday, July 09, 2012 With any luck they'll crank out a few like the 240GT that uses a SF2282 to push 32 intel 25nm nand chips for max parallelism thus speed. Would love to see 2282 + 32 x 24nm toggle chips... :drool: 180 GT sports a 2282 with 24 ICs as well... Movieman420 Reply Wow, cheap by ABR on Thursday, July 12, 2012 After years of going almost nowhere, looks like SSD prices have halved in the past year. (Unfortunately, I finally broke down just before the big drop started...) ABR Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment. User Name Password Remember me? Login 1 View All Comments Post a Comment Follow AnandTech Latest from AnandTech Pipeline Submit News! AMD Radeon HD 7970, 7950, 7870 Price Cuts Inbound. 7970GE Available Next Week? NVIDIA Forums & Dev Zone Breached; Up To 400K Password Hashes Taken Plextor Releases M5S SSD Series Samsung To Sell Developer Edition Verizon Galaxy S III with Unlockable Bootloader Motorola Atrix HD Official: $99, LTE, 4.5" HD LCD on AT&T WD Introduces Red: NAS Optimized HDD Line Android 4.1 hits AOSP, Verizon Galaxy Nexus regains AOSP Support Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Goes Gold; GM Released To Developers Windows 8 To RTM In August, Retail In October Boston Releases Servers Based on Calxeda's ARM SoCs Motorola Atrix HD For AT&T Peeks Out, Looks Sharp DailyTech NVIDIA: We've Been Hacked, User Records Lost MIT Enhances LCD 3D TV Experience Without Glasses Virgin Galactic Announces "LauncherOne" Rocket for Small Satellites FCC, DOJ Worried About Verizon's "Noncompete" Deal With Cable Firms Apple Retreats, Admits That Pulling EPEAT Certification "Was a Mistake" 7/13/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews FBI Probing China's ZTE for Obstructing Investigation Into Iranian Shipments Accuracy of Iris Recognition Systems Degrades over Time According to New Study Quick Note: Tesla BMW 3-Series Competitor Coming in 2015 NYC Turns Phone Booths into Wi-Fi Stations Quick Note: Microsoft Leaks Info on Halo 4 Limited Edition Xbox 360 Console Quick Note: Amazon Claims Yet Another Microsoft Windows Phone Exec Yahoo Loses 453,000 User Passwords to Hackers Republican Rep. Wants Taxpayers to Pay for Piracy Police (Again) Sprint, AT&T Disable Universal Search on Galaxy S III to Appease Apple Amazon to Offer Same-Day Delivery, Could Pummel Brick-and-Mortar Retailers 7/12/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews Twitter @DavidMelgar I've got a few ;) what have you been writing to it? @rolphus @charlesarthur yeah it's clear that a lot of this is software related, scrolling under boot camp is fine @rolphus @charlesarthur mountain lion shifts some of the burden back over to the GPU but it's still not perfect @rolphus @charlesarthur depends on the workload, for a lot of the slow scrolling stuff it actually seems to be CPU believe it or not @rolphus @charlesarthur it shouldn't, but it's an easy example of how not all drawing processes occur on the GPU. @rolphus @charlesarthur …but many tasks are still done on the CPU (e.g. JPEG decoding, still CPU bound). We need faster CPUs & GPUs @rolphus @charlesarthur it's actually both CPU and GPU. The lack of fixed function scaling in the 1680 and 1920 scaled modes hurts (GPU)... @jjziv send me an email :) @oddeiriknes I noticed it with the original Transformer as well, asked NVIDIA at the time but actually never got a response, will ask again @oddeiriknes I've seen slowdowns when doing a lot of IO on a number of NV based tablets, I'm not sure if this is an SoC or bigger issue tho Copyright © 1997-2012 AnandTech, Inc. All rights reserved. Terms, Conditions and Privacy Information. Click Here for Advertising Information Boston Releases Servers Based on Calxeda's ARM SoCs 2012-07-18T00:12:00.000-07:00 by Kristian Vättö on 7/9/2012 12:05:00 PM Posted in IT Computing , Enterprise , Boston , ARM , Cortex A9 Calxeda EnergyCore SoC Boston has released its Viridis server which uses Calxeda's ARM System-on-Chips (SoCs). Each SoC consists of four ARM Cortex-A9 cores and up to 48 SoCs can be installed into a standard 2U enclosure. The SoCs come on what Boston calls POCket boards. There are four SoCs per board and each board also has four miniDIMM connectors and four SATA ports (one per SoC). The POCket board is a separate PCB which looks a lot like a PCIe card. Every board has a 10Gbps Ethernet link which is the interconnector between the main motherboard and POCket board. Boston Viridis SpecificationsSoCCalxeda EnergyCore (4x per POCket board, 48x per enclosure)ArchitectureARM Cortex-A9Number of cores4 per SoC (192 in total)Frequency1.1 - 1.4GHzMemory4GB per SoC (192GB in total)Storage4x SATA per SoC (192 in total)Form Factor2UWhen using a regular 42U rack, Viridis can provide up to 1,008 SoCs with a total of 4,032 cores of processing power. Viridis is also extremely power efficient since each SoC has a TDP of only 5W (for example Intel's low-power Xeon E5 offerings have a TDP of 50W). Hence Viridis is the best suited for environments that have a highly parallel workload that can benefit from the high amount of cores and require extreme power efficiency. Using ARM architecture obviously limits software selection (e.g. Windows of any flavor is not supported). Boston is, however, stating that Ubuntu 11.10 is supported, along with popular software such as Perl, Python and MySQL. How well these applications are optimized for the architecture remains to be seen, but any significant ARM threat to the x86 server space is likely to benefit enterprise customers across the board. Competition in high margin businesses is never a bad thing. Print This Article 4 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment Web Serving by mevans336 on Monday, July 09, 2012 We would be interested in this if it scales and eventually offers support for JBoss and Nginx. I'd love to replace my Sandy Bridge Xeons with more cores at a 10:1 power ratio. mevans336 Reply interesting by Soulkeeper on Tuesday, July 10, 2012 I'd love to see some benchmarks on a perf/watt or just plain performance comparison to other x86 alternatives. I wonder if the 10Gbps interconnect will limit it in any way Soulkeeper Reply RE: interesting by eanazag on Tuesday, July 10, 2012 10Gbps is about 1,250 MBps. You may get 80-90% utilization of the bandwidth at best. It would depend on what you're doing on the server. Truth is I would believe this to be a benefit for web hosting. I'm curious as to how much the power supply is rated for on the server; it'll indicate how much the max draw is. I don't think this has a chance to be anything more than a niche business model without Windows server support. Someone like Facebook or Google would have the intellectual support and workload to benefit from this. eanazag Reply RE: interesting by Veerappan on Thursday, July 12, 2012 I'm thinking that web hosting companies could get some use out of this. Lots of low-power cores and support for the standard LAMP stack that a lot of them use. I'm assuming that power/performance scales nicely with the workload. Veerappan Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment. User Name Password Remember me? Login 1 View All Comments Post a Comment Follow IT on AnandTech Latest from AnandTech Pipeline Submit News! AMD Radeon HD 7970, 7950, 7870 Price Cuts Inbound. 7970GE Available Next Week? NVIDIA Forums & Dev Zone Breached; Up To 400K Password Hashes Taken Plextor Releases M5S SSD Series Samsung To Sell Developer Edition Verizon Galaxy S III with Unlockable Bootloader Motorola Atrix HD Official: $99, LTE, 4.5" HD LCD on AT&T WD Introduces Red: NAS Optimized HDD Line Android 4.1 hits AOSP, Verizon Galaxy Nexus regains AOSP Support Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Goes Gold; GM Released To Developers Windows 8 To RTM In August, Retail In October Corsair Releases Force Series GS SSDs Motorola Atrix HD For AT&T Peeks Out, Looks Sharp DailyTech NVIDIA: We've Been Hacked, User Records Lost MIT Enhances LCD 3D TV Experience Without Glasses Virgin Galactic Announces "LauncherOne" Rocket for Small Satellites FCC, DOJ Worried About Verizon's "Noncompete" Deal With Cable Firms Apple Retreats, Admits That Pulling EPEAT Certification "Was a Mistake" 7/13/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews FBI Probing China's ZTE for Obstructing Investigation Into Iranian Shipments Accuracy of Iris Recognition Systems Degrades over Time According to New Study Quick Note: Tesla BMW 3-Series Competitor Coming in 2015 NYC Turns Phone Booths into Wi-Fi Stations Quick Note: Microsoft Leaks Info on Halo 4 Limited Edition Xbox 360 Console Quick Note: Amazon Claims Yet Another Microsoft Windows Phone Exec Yahoo Loses 453,000 User Passwords to Hackers Republican Rep. Wants Taxpayers to Pay for Piracy Police (Again) Sprint, AT&T Disable Universal Search on Galaxy S III to Appease Apple Amazon to Offer Same-Day Delivery, Could Pummel Brick-and-Mortar Retailers 7/12/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews Twitter @DavidMelgar I've got a few ;) what have you been writing to it? @rolphus @charlesarthur yeah it's clear that a lot of this is software related, scrolling under boot camp is fine @rolphus @charlesarthur mountain lion shifts some of the burden back over to the GPU but it's still not perfect @rolphus @charlesarthur depends on the workload, for a lot of the slow scrolling stuff it actually seems to be CPU believe it or not @rolphus @charlesarthur it shouldn't, but it's an easy example of how not all drawing processes occur on the GPU. @rolphus @charlesarthur …but many tasks are still done on the CPU (e.g. JPEG decoding, still CPU bound). We need faster CPUs & GPUs @rolphus @charlesarthur it's actually both CPU and GPU. The lack of fixed function scaling in the 1680 and 1920 scaled modes hurts (GPU)... @jjziv send me an email :) @oddeiriknes I noticed it with the original Transformer as well, asked NVIDIA at the time but actually never got a response, will ask again @oddeiriknes I've seen slowdowns when doing a lot of IO on a number of NV based tablets, I'm not sure if this is an SoC or bigger issue tho Copyright © 1997-2012 AnandTech, Inc. All rights reserved. Terms, Conditions and Privacy Information. Click Here for Advertising Information Plextor M3 Pro (256GB) Review 2012-07-14T12:30:00.000-07:00 by Kristian Vättö on 7/1/2012 1:45:00 PM Posted in Storage , SSDs , Plextor , Marvell , M3 , M3 Pro Buy the Plextor PX-128M3P 128 GB Internal $166.99 $174.99 Introduction If you are an active reader, you might remember our Plextor M3 review from a few months back. As I noted in the review, I wasn't expecting much when I received the SSD; a Marvell based SSD from a relatively unknown brand when it comes to the SSD market isn't all that promising. We had not reviewed any Plextor SSDs before the M3, so I had no idea what to expect. Obviously, I prepared for the worst. Luckily, my expectations turned out to be very wrong. Plextor's M3 came out as one of the highest performing drives we have tested. Today we are back with M3's big brother: the M3 Pro. Based on the same Marvell 88SS9174 controller and 24nm Toshiba Toggle-Mode MLC NAND, the M3 Pro offers even higher performance according to Plextor. The differences lie exclusively in the firmware, as hardware wise the M3 and M3 Pro are exactly the same. Let's start with the official specs: Plextor M3 Pro SpecificationsModelPX-128M3PPX-256M3PPX-512M3PRaw NAND Capacity128GiB256GiB512GiBUsable Capacity119.2GiB238.5GiB476.9GiBNumber of NAND Packages888Number of Die per Package248Sequential Read535MB/s540MB/s535MB/sSequential Write350MB/s420MB/s450MB/s4K Random Read75K IOPS75K IOPS56K IOPS4K Random Write69K IOPS68K IOPS34K IOPSCache (DDR3)256MB512MB512MBThe biggest difference (other than firmware) between the M3 and M3 Pro lineup is the fact that M3 Pro lacks a 64GB model. This is logical since 64GB SSDs offer lower performance due to the reduced number of NAND die per package, so it makes sense to not offer a 64GB capacity in the performance-oriented M3 Pro lineup. Besides, it's possible that Plextor has already squeezed out every bit of juice they can for the 64GB M3—a 64GB M3 Pro might not be fast enough to differentiate itself from a 64GB M3. In general, 64GB SSDs are more about price than performance anyway because you are already making a compromise on performance by getting such a small capacity. In terms of performance, the M3 Pro is rated as being noticeably faster than the regular M3. Especially sequential and random write performance are up significantly. For comparison, the 128GB M3 offers sequential write speeds of 210MB/s and random write of 50K IOPS, so sequential write is up by nearly 70% and random write is also up by a good 36% at that specific capacity. The difference at 256GB isn't as big, but the M3 Pro does offer 60MB/s greater sequential write speed. Our review unit is 256GB, so we'll see how it compares with the 256GB M3. NewEgg Price Comparison (7/1/2012) 64GB128GB256GB512GBPlextor M3 ProN/A$180$300$680Plextor M3N/A$200$240$650Corsair Performance Series ProN/A$190$330N/ACrucial m4$78$130$210$400Intel 520 Series$115$190$335$790Samsung 830 Series$84$128$300$700OCZ Vertex 3$70$200$300$650OCZ Vertex 4$95$180$240$700It should not come as a surprise that the M3 Pro is more expensive than the regular M3. However, the good news is that Plextor has lowered the price of M3 compared to what it cost a few months ago when we reviewed it. The 128GB M3 was recently on sale for $130 (back to $200 for now), while the M3 Pro has taken the $180 price spot. The 256GB M3 has come down $100 in price, making it one of the more affordable SSDs, though pricing on the Vertex 3 and 4 and several other drives has also dropped quite a bit. As for the M3 Pro, it's more along the lines of Intel's 520 Series—you have to pay more for extra performance and quality. Anyway, I wouldn't say the M3 Pro is overpriced, at least not when compared with Corsair's Performance Series Pro. We'll soon find out if the M3 Pro is worth the extra money. Once again, I would like to emphasize that SSD prices are not stable. There are sales every week so in case you're in the market for an SSD, keep your eye on the prices for at least a few days. You may be able to catch a hot sale and easily save over $20. The Plextor M3 Pro Introduction The Plextor M3 Pro Introducing Plextool, Plextor's SSD Toolbox Random and Sequential Read/Write Speed AS-SSD Incompressible Sequential Performance AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 AnandTech Storage Bench 2011, Light Workload Performance Over Time and TRIM Power Consumption Final Words Print This Article 54 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment From optical media to solid state devices by Chaitanya on Sunday, July 01, 2012 I associate names like plextor and lite-on with optical discs. now they are into solid state media as well. wondering whats next. Chaitanya Reply RE: From optical media to solid state devices by DaFox on Sunday, July 01, 2012 Plextor was amazing back when optical drives were relevant. DaFox Reply RE: From optical media to solid state devices by iamkyle on Sunday, July 01, 2012 You mean, before they stopped manufacturing their own drives iamkyle Reply RE: RE: From optical media to solid state devices by lexluthermiester on Sunday, July 01, 2012 Quote; "back when optical drives were relevant." Last time I checked, optical drives are still in very common use for a wide variety of purposes. How are they not still relevant? lexluthermiester Reply RE: From optical media to solid state devices by HisDivineOrder on Sunday, July 01, 2012 There was a time when a new CD-ROM or DVD-ROM would have people scouring the web for reviews because the new drive would offer greater and greater speeds. Nowadays, people just buy whatever's cheapest or goes good with their case. They MAY look at compatibility with discs beforehand, but often don't if they're looking at a $20 DVD-/+RW. If they do, that's a few user reviews and then bam, bought. If it's crap, they throw it away and buy another. This is far from the ancient times when a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM would warrant a full-on review with technical read-outs, minor speed differences against other models, etc. There's no point now because they're so cheap and there are no new advances being done in the field because USB storage (flash and hard drives) became so damn cheap along with the proliferation of online with digital storage. There's a new hotness in town and we should all queue up the Toy Story sad music for ODD's. I imagine all my ODD's talking in the dusty, plastic bin of forgotten tech. They scramble out and reminisce about the times I used to have with them. The old Lite-On DVD-RW chatting with a Plextor CD-RW. A 2x DVD-ROM by Creative talking to a Pioneer DVD-slot. Every now and then, a Zip drive crying, "Hai guyz! Im hear two!" And them all looking at him, patting him on the head, and saying, "Adults are speaking." Then lil' Zip drive'll look down and mumble something about how he used to be awesome. Meanwhile, my Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster 16, Sound Blaster AWE, Audigy, Audigy 2ZS, Aureal, Diamond 3dFX Voodoo, Voodoo 2 SLI, Matrox G200, they all chat amongst themselves about the days back when PC's were actually hard to build, compatibility was a shot in the dark and a prayer bound by McGuyver's chewing gum, and when installing Windows involved starting it and wandering away for 10 minutes (or less). The best days are behind us, I think. Strange how the easier things get, the less awesome they feel. HisDivineOrder Reply RE: From optical media to solid state devices by erple2 on Monday, July 02, 2012 If these posts were rated, you sir, would receive a +1 from me. Trips down memory lane are always fun to do now and again. I remember amber buying my first Texel drive in the very early 90s because they were so Mich more reliable, and faster. Those were truly the halcyon days... erple2 Reply RE: From optical media to solid state devices by speculatrix on Monday, July 02, 2012 +1 So much of what used to be hard is now trivial, and the young generation really don't need to understand how computers work. Sure that's no bad thing for productivity, but means we're raising new generations who are unable to design the next generation of hardware. Here is Cambridge England I see the average age of engineers rising all the time. Companies struggle to find truly gifted embedded skills. speculatrix Reply RE: From optical media to solid state devices by StevoLincolnite on Monday, July 02, 2012 Ah, the good old days of setting individual jumpers for a CPU's FSB, multiplier and voltage... Needing a dedicated cable that goes from your optical disk drive to your sound card JUST so you can play Audio... Setting IRQ's in the bios/windows... Fun days for the tinkerer. Now everything is just plug and play pretty much. StevoLincolnite Reply RE: From optical media to solid state devices by versesuvius on Monday, July 02, 2012 Let's see an Apple (McIntosh) user go down the memory lane. I suppose theirs turns out to be 1 centimeter in length. Something like: "It was always like this. We paid triple the amount a Windows user did. Then again we were always better than them. Steve Jobs may be gone, but we are still better than them. We are just better. Long live Steve." Just joking, of course. versesuvius Reply RE: From optical media to solid state devices by tjoynt on Monday, July 02, 2012 +1 Internets to you Sir or Mam! Thank you for bringing me down memory lane and reminding me how difficult and exciting it used to be. :) Now that everything pretty much Just Works, much of the fun and mystery is gone. Sure I follow the next hotness too, but building a computer today is like building with legos: just follow the pictures and snap it together. No more IRQ conflicts or DMA errors. RAM incompatibility is still a source of "fun" but that has always been annoying rather than interesting. Sure, we can focus on actually Getting Things Done now, but so can everyone else. Being a hardware geek is not as special anymore. Of course the complexity and flakiness of software will keep us well-rounded geeks well entertained (and employed) for quite a while to come. :) tjoynt Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment. User Name Password Remember me? Login 1 2 3 4 5 6 Next » View All Comments Post a Comment Follow AnandTech Latest from AnandTech Pipeline Submit News! AMD Radeon HD 7970, 7950, 7870 Price Cuts Inbound. 7970GE Available Next Week? NVIDIA Forums & Dev Zone Breached; Up To 400K Password Hashes Taken Plextor Releases M5S SSD Series Samsung To Sell Developer Edition Verizon Galaxy S III with Unlockable Bootloader Motorola Atrix HD Official: $99, LTE, 4.5" HD LCD on AT&T WD Introduces Red: NAS Optimized HDD Line Android 4.1 hits AOSP, Verizon Galaxy Nexus regains AOSP Support Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Goes Gold; GM Released To Developers Windows 8 To RTM In August, Retail In October Boston Releases Servers Based on Calxeda's ARM SoCs Corsair Releases Force Series GS SSDs Motorola Atrix HD For AT&T Peeks Out, Looks Sharp DailyTech NVIDIA: We've Been Hacked, User Records Lost MIT Enhances LCD 3D TV Experience Without Glasses Virgin Galactic Announces "LauncherOne" Rocket for Small Satellites FCC, DOJ Worried About Verizon's "Noncompete" Deal With Cable Firms Apple Retreats, Admits That Pulling EPEAT Certification "Was a Mistake" 7/13/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews FBI Probing China's ZTE for Obstructing Investigation Into Iranian Shipments Accuracy of Iris Recognition Systems Degrades over Time According to New Study Quick Note: Tesla BMW 3-Series Competitor Coming in 2015 NYC Turns Phone Booths into Wi-Fi Stations Quick Note: Microsoft Leaks Info on Halo 4 Limited Edition Xbox 360 Console Quick Note: Amazon Claims Yet Another Microsoft Windows Phone Exec Yahoo Loses 453,000 User Passwords to Hackers Republican Rep. Wants Taxpayers to Pay for Piracy Police (Again) Sprint, AT&T Disable Universal Search on Galaxy S III to Appease Apple Amazon to Offer Same-Day Delivery, Could Pummel Brick-and-Mortar Retailers 7/12/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews Twitter @DavidMelgar I've got a few ;) what have you been writing to it? @rolphus @charlesarthur yeah it's clear that a lot of this is software related, scrolling under boot camp is fine @rolphus @charlesarthur mountain lion shifts some of the burden back over to the GPU but it's still not perfect @rolphus @charlesarthur depends on the workload, for a lot of the slow scrolling stuff it actually seems to be CPU believe it or not @rolphus @charlesarthur it shouldn't, but it's an easy example of how not all drawing processes occur on the GPU. @rolphus @charlesarthur …but many tasks are still done on the CPU (e.g. JPEG decoding, still CPU bound). We need faster CPUs & GPUs @rolphus @charlesarthur it's actually both CPU and GPU. The lack of fixed function scaling in the 1680 and 1920 scaled modes hurts (GPU)... @jjziv send me an email :) @oddeiriknes I noticed it with the original Transformer as well, asked NVIDIA at the time but actually never got a response, will ask again @oddeiriknes I've seen slowdowns when doing a lot of IO on a number of NV based tablets, I'm not sure if this is an SoC or bigger issue tho Copyright © 1997-2012 AnandTech, Inc. All rights reserved. Terms, Conditions and Privacy Information. Click Here for Advertising Information HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE Joining Verizon Wireless July 5 for $149 2012-07-14T12:00:00.000-07:00 by Jason Inofuentes on 7/2/2012 10:56:00 AM Posted in HTC , Droid Incredible 4G LTE , Droid Incredible , android , Android 4.0 , Sense 4 , Verizon , LTE We saw it first at CTIA, one of the few devices launched there, and after a long wait it's here; the Droid Incredible 4G LTE by HTC will be arriving at Verizon Wireless stores July 5th and available for $149 on-contract, after a $50 mail-in rebate. Our review sample hit the door this morning, and we're fast at work getting our review done. In the meanwhile we have some glamour shots and a little family portrait. For those that don't recall, the DINC 4G (as we'll colloquially refer to it) is an off-shoot of the HTC ONE S, and features Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 dual-core SoC, the ubiquitous MSM8960, though here clocked at 1.2GHz. The Droid Incredible aesthetic has never been one of litheness, and that persists here. The body is 11.7 mm at its thickest, and the screen is a compact 4.0 inches, though the benefit in pixel density is perceptible. The super LCD qHD screen is actually quite impressive, with subjectively good color representation and incredible viewing angles. And, of course, our trusty Snapdragon S4 comes with an LTE radio on its cool running and compact die. With a smaller screen, lower core clock and fairly beefy 1700 mAh battery, this could be a compact all-day data hog. We'll let you know when our full review goes up. Gallery: Physical Comparison Apple iPhone 4SHTC Droid Incredible 4G LTEHTC One SHTC One X (AT&T)Height115.2 mm (4.5")121.9 mm (4.8")130.9 mm (5.15")134.8 mm (5.31")Width58.6 mm (2.31")61.0 mm (2.4")65 mm (2.56")69.9 mm (2.75")Depth9.3 mm ( 0.37")11.7 mm (0.46")7.8 mm (0.31")8.9 mm (0.35")Weight140 g (4.9 oz)132 g (4.66 oz)119.5 (4.22 oz)129 g (4.6 oz)CPUApple A5 @ ~800MHz Dual Core Cortex A91.2 GHz Dual Core Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM89601.5 GHz Dual Core Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM89601.5 GHz Dual Core Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8960GPUPowerVR SGX 543MP2Adreno 225Adreno 225Adreno 225RAM512MB LPDDR2-8001 GB RAM1 GB LPDDR21 GB LPDDR2NAND16GB, 32GB or 64GB integrated8 GB NAND with up to 32 GB microSD16 GB NAND16 GB NANDCamera8 MP with LED Flash, Front Facing Camera8 MP AF/LED Flash, VGA front facing8 MP with AF/LED Flash, VGA front facing8 MP with AF/LED Flash, 1.3 MP front facingScreen3.5" 640 x 960 LED backlit LCD4.0" 960 x 540 Super LCD4.3" 960 x 540 Super LCD4.7" 1280 x 720 LCD-TFTBatteryInternal 5.3 WhrRemovable 6.46 WhrInternal 6.27 WhrInternal 6.66 Whr Print This Article 13 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment Finally by augiem on Monday, July 02, 2012 I'm SO glad to see this one has a removable battery and SD card. I'm getting so tired of every company following Apple's lead with their halo phones trying to squeeze $50-$100 out of you for a dinky $5 upgrade in flash memory or ~$80 to replace your battery a year from now when the li-on only holds a 50% charge. These little $$$ grab tactics are a plague to the consumer and getting more and more common. After owning an HP Touchpad which also has an inaccessible battery and no sd slot, I've made the decision to NEVER buy another device again without those two features. Even though the CPU runs at a slower speed, I'd take this version over a One X any day. I was sad to see the Nexus 7 went the Apple route too. That's just NOT the way to start off in market so heavily dominated by Apple guys. You gotta one up the competition. If you've made the decision to sell the device for cost anyway as a way to break into the market, why get greedy and try to squeeze the extra $50 out for another puny 8GB? augiem Reply RE: Finally by stm1185 on Monday, July 02, 2012 Except by having a removable battery and SD card it impacts the form factor of the product you can make; and consumers have overwhelmingly been buying sleeker cleaner form factors over bulkier ones. They cannot one up Apple on design by handicapping themselves with features most consumers don't really care about. stm1185 Reply RE: Finally by Impulses on Monday, July 02, 2012 MicroSD isnt that hard to pull off while maintaining a sleek design, most phones have microSIM slots anyway, so how's that any different? Impulses Reply RE: Finally by coder543 on Monday, July 02, 2012 The One X has a removable battery unless I'm wildly mistaken, and honestly, you're going to have to get over this. Consumers make up the majority of the audience these companies sell to, and the less things customers can do to mess up the phone, the more profitable it is. If you know *how* to use a Li-Ion battery, it will last a very long time. If you run it to zero every day, then it doesn't take a genius to know it's going to stop holding a charge. coder543 Reply RE: Finally by aryonoco on Monday, July 02, 2012 You are mistaken, the One X doesn't have a removable battery. aryonoco Reply RE: Finally by Impulses on Monday, July 02, 2012 You are in fact wildly mistaken. Neither the One S nor X have removable batteries or microSD slots, the EVO LTE (One X offshoot) has the latter but not the former. Removable batteries aren't just about device longevity either, some users can easily blow thru a full charge in half a day and they'd rather swap batteries and get back to 100% in a minute than hunt down an outlet or carry an external battery pack and wait for a recharge. Im managing alright with my EVO LTE, but I do hope the non removable trend doesn't completely take over. Impulses Reply Question of the day is: How does it compare against the SGS3 by Syran on Monday, July 02, 2012 $50 less (AFTER MIR). Syran Reply RE: Question of the day is: How does it compare against the SGS3 by JasonInofuentes on Monday, July 02, 2012 So, there's a lot to that question, but the water on these things is muddied by the price compression that living in a market ruled by contract subsidies. Is this, 25% less phone than the SGS3? Maybe, so. But you also lose the sleek form factor of the mini-tablet competitors. I'm a big fan of smaller phones, and have loved my OG DINC, but there's no doubt that US buyers have a much harder time telling the difference between a good phone and the best phone, because they are priced so close together. JasonInofuentes Reply RE: Question of the day is: How does it compare against the SGS3 by Impulses on Monday, July 02, 2012 For a lot of people the smaller size alone will make it a better choice, altho many of those would be women and the weird machinery esthetic design of the DINC is probably not popular with them. Impulses Reply Love it by ewhite06 on Monday, July 02, 2012 I'm still rocking one of the original Droid Incredibles and it works like a champ. I'm not a poweruser by any stretch of the word so not having all the latest bells and whistles is no major loss. The thing is solid as a rock, its the *perfect* size (not a mini-tablet), its survived a couple dunks in the pool, daily battery life is still measured in hours (not minutes) and the camera is decent. So if this new version can maintain the same quality and improve on performance, resolution and battery life then its a BIG win in my book. ewhite06 Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment. User Name Password Remember me? Login 1 2 Next » View All Comments Post a Comment Follow AnandTech Latest from AnandTech Pipeline Submit News! AMD Radeon HD 7970, 7950, 7870 Price Cuts Inbound. 7970GE Available Next Week? NVIDIA Forums & Dev Zone Breached; Up To 400K Password Hashes Taken Plextor Releases M5S SSD Series Samsung To Sell Developer Edition Verizon Galaxy S III with Unlockable Bootloader Motorola Atrix HD Official: $99, LTE, 4.5" HD LCD on AT&T WD Introduces Red: NAS Optimized HDD Line Android 4.1 hits AOSP, Verizon Galaxy Nexus regains AOSP Support Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Goes Gold; GM Released To Developers Windows 8 To RTM In August, Retail In October Boston Releases Servers Based on Calxeda's ARM SoCs Corsair Releases Force Series GS SSDs Motorola Atrix HD For AT&T Peeks Out, Looks Sharp DailyTech NVIDIA: We've Been Hacked, User Records Lost MIT Enhances LCD 3D TV Experience Without Glasses Virgin Galactic Announces "LauncherOne" Rocket for Small Satellites FCC, DOJ Worried About Verizon's "Noncompete" Deal With Cable Firms Apple Retreats, Admits That Pulling EPEAT Certification "Was a Mistake" 7/13/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews FBI Probing China's ZTE for Obstructing Investigation Into Iranian Shipments Accuracy of Iris Recognition Systems Degrades over Time According to New Study Quick Note: Tesla BMW 3-Series Competitor Coming in 2015 NYC Turns Phone Booths into Wi-Fi Stations Quick Note: Microsoft Leaks Info on Halo 4 Limited Edition Xbox 360 Console Quick Note: Amazon Claims Yet Another Microsoft Windows Phone Exec Yahoo Loses 453,000 User Passwords to Hackers Republican Rep. Wants Taxpayers to Pay for Piracy Police (Again) Sprint, AT&T Disable Universal Search on Galaxy S III to Appease Apple Amazon to Offer Same-Day Delivery, Could Pummel Brick-and-Mortar Retailers 7/12/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews Twitter @DavidMelgar I've got a few ;) what have you been writing to it? @rolphus @charlesarthur yeah it's clear that a lot of this is software related, scrolling under boot camp is fine @rolphus @charlesarthur mountain lion shifts some of the burden back over to the GPU but it's still not perfect @rolphus @charlesarthur depends on the workload, for a lot of the slow scrolling stuff it actually seems to be CPU believe it or not @rolphus @charlesarthur it shouldn't, but it's an easy example of how not all drawing processes occur on the GPU. @rolphus @charlesarthur …but many tasks are still done on the CPU (e.g. JPEG decoding, still CPU bound). We need faster CPUs & GPUs @rolphus @charlesarthur it's actually both CPU and GPU. The lack of fixed function scaling in the 1680 and 1920 scaled modes hurts (GPU)... @jjziv send me an email :) @oddeiriknes I noticed it with the original Transformer as well, asked NVIDIA at the time but actually never got a response, will ask again @oddeiriknes I've seen slowdowns when doing a lot of IO on a number of NV based tablets, I'm not sure if this is an SoC or bigger issue tho Copyright © 1997-2012 AnandTech, Inc. All rights reserved. Terms, Conditions and Privacy Information. Click Here for Advertising Information ASUS PA246Q 24" ProArt Monitor: No Adjustments Needed? 2012-07-14T11:30:00.000-07:00 by Chris Heinonen on 7/2/2012 1:30:00 PM Posted in Monitors , Asus , PA246Q , IPS , LCD , 24" , 1920x1200 Buy the ASUS PA246Q 24-inch ProArt Series Full $440.76 $468.63 $468.63 Introduction - Design, OSD, and Viewing Angles Our monitor reviews frequently go into a lot of depth about the results before and after calibration, but for many users this won’t matter, as they aren’t going to purchase the calibration hardware and software necessary to achieve these results. Getting accurate performance out of the box without needing to spend extra money on hardware is important to many people but it's often very hard to deliver. With their Pro Art monitors, ASUS aims to deliver just that: sRGB and AdobeRGB modes that are reasonably accurate (a dE < 5.0 out of the box), with a full set of controls for users to calibrate it on their own. ASUS doesn’t stop there as they also offer a 10-bit panel, integrated card reader and USB ports, and a user calibration mode with more controls than I have seen on a consumer monitor to this point. Does the ASUS deliver good color out of the box, and have the performance for those that wish to calibrate themselves? The design of the ASUS PA246Q is all business out of the box. With a goal of high performance and not sleek looks, the PA246Q looks like a generic LCD monitor from a couple of years ago. As long as you're after performance rather than style, this shouldn't be a problem (provided the performance is actually there). The left side of the display features a pair of USB ports and a card reader than handles most formats with the exception of Compact Flash. On the bottom of the display you will find DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, and VGA inputs as well as the power supply and downstream USB connection. There are no integrated speakers but there is a headphone jack for audio carried over HDMI or DisplayPort, though it is located somewhat inconveniently at the bottom of the monitor. The attached stand is pretty sizable but offers a full range of adjustments. Height adjustment is good with a decent range, and the tilt function has a good amount of movement that is always useful when trying to calibrate with a large meter on the screen. With swivel and pivoting as well, the stand is as good as the Dell stands that I prefer, though it certainly takes up a lot of desk space. I certainly don’t feel the need to replace the stand with an aftermarket one, though. Gallery: ASUS PA246Q Exterior The OSD offers up a lot of options for the end user, but the interface for it is only OK. Under the Splendid section of the menu we find six different picture modes: Standard, sRGB, AdobeRGB, Scenery, Theater, and User. I will ignore Scenery and Theater, as they provide a blown out color palette or intentionally dim image for those that are swayed by such things. sRGB and AdobeRGB are the pre-configured modes that are designed to hit those primary color points and have a dE < 5 straight out of the box. The only control available to users in these modes is brightness to adjust the level of the backlight and everything else is locked. Standard mode is what you find on most monitors, with the standard Brightness, Contrast, Color Temperature and Gamma controls available for adjustments. The most interesting mode is the User mode, which has the same features as Standard but opens up Hue and Saturation controls, as well as a 6-point CMS with Hue and Saturation controls for each primary and secondary color, and a 2-point grayscale control. This enables you to dial in those color points to be reasonably accurate on the CIE graph, but as there is no individual luminance control for each color, you can only get the color correct in two dimensions and not all three. I will go over these settings more in the calibration section, but they are quite extensive for a computer display. There are a few more settings to be found in the menu system, but nothing out of the ordinary, and there is no game mode or overdrive for enabling faster response from the display (not that we've really noticed an improvement with such modes on other LCDs). The OSD controls themselves are sufficient but somewhat cumbersome, as we see the common issue of the display having you move up and down to select items, then left and right to adjust those items, with only one set of input keys for both. It would help to have either a second set of arrow keys for adjusting the values, or design the menu so it only moves in one direction to make it more user friendly. It is worlds better than using touch sensitive controls but still not at the level that some other menu systems are at this point. Gallery: ASUS PA246Q OSD Using an IPS panel, we expect good viewing angles from the PA246Q and we get them. At the very extreme angles you get some brightness shift but overall the panel looks very good at any angle you might be looking at it from. Gallery: ASUS PA246Q Viewing Angles ASUS PA246QVideo InputsDisplayPort, HDMI 1.3, DVI, VGAPanel TypeP-IPS 10-bitPixel Pitch0.270 mmColors1.07 BillionBrightness400 nitsContrast Ratio50,000:1Response Time6ms GTGViewable Size24.1"Resolution1920x1200Viewing Angle178/178 Horizontal/VerticalBacklightCCFLPower Consumption (operation)< 75 WattsPower Consumption (standby)< 1 WattScreen TreatmentAnti-GlareHeight-AdjustableYesTilt+20 to -5 degreesPivotYesSwivelYesVESA Wall MountingYes, 100mmDimensions w/ Base (WxHxD)558.4 x 380.8 x 235 mmWeight7.3kgAdditional Features2x USB 2.0 Ports, Card Reader (SD, MS, MS Pro, MS Duo, xD, MMC, SM)Limited Warranty3 years on case and panel, 1 year on parts and accessoriesAccessoriesDVI Cable, VGA Cable, DisplayPort Cable, Power Cable, USB CablePrice$469 online (as of 7/02/2012)Now that we’ve taken an overview of the ASUS PA246Q the question is to see how it performs on the bench, and if I can deliver the out of the box accurate colors it promises. ASUS PA246Q - Brightness and Contrast Ratios Design, OSD, and Viewing Angles ASUS PA246Q - Brightness and Contrast Ratios ASUS PA246Q - Color Quality ASUS PA246Q - Display Uniformity More on the PA246Q CMS ASUS PA246Q - Input Lag and Power Use Conclusions on the ASUS PA246Q Print This Article 44 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment +1 for 1920x1200 by Conficio on Monday, July 02, 2012 just saying! Conficio Reply RE: +1 for 1920x1200 by Samus on Tuesday, July 03, 2012 Heh, yeah I agree. One of the reasons I still have a 5 year old NEC is because everything else 24" <$300 is 1920x1080. I need that extra screen real-estate, 120 pixels is an entire row of icons. Samus Reply RE: +1 for 1920x1200 by kkwst2 on Tuesday, July 03, 2012 You can find the Dell U2412M for less than $300. It is e-IPS, which has compromises but is pretty decent. kkwst2 Reply RE: +1 for 1920x1200 by synaesthetic on Tuesday, July 03, 2012 I use the U2412M and I love it, despite the compromises one must take for eIPS--mind you, I'm not a photographer and I actually play a lot of games, but the input lag is low and it doesn't ever feel "slow." The viewing angles are fantastic, great for when folks cluster around the PC to watch videos. :) synaesthetic Reply RE: +1 for 1920x1200 by Kel Ghu on Saturday, July 07, 2012 Agreed. I'm also mainly a hardcore gamer, but I do a little photo editing too. And you just can't beat the U2412M for the price. With a little calibration, it's really that good. It's not as good as a "real" IPS nor a TN panel. But it retains like 80% of the qualities of both systems! Kel Ghu Reply LCD Power Draw Graphs by TheCrackLing on Monday, July 02, 2012 You have the min/max backwards for some of the monitors in the graphs. BenQ VW2420 Asus PA246Q NEC PA271W NEC PA301W DoubleSight DS-277W Are all backwards, and because of this it's causing the sorting on the graph to be a bit off. TheCrackLing Reply RE: LCD Power Draw Graphs by JarredWalton on Monday, July 02, 2012 Fixed. Probably just an error in the data in Chris' spreadsheet. JarredWalton Reply RE: RE: LCD Power Draw Graphs by rahvin on Friday, July 06, 2012 Jared, can you weigh thing without the stand attached. Might seem a strange request but I use a 2 monitor arm that uses VESA mounts but the system has a weight and size limit. I purchased 22 inch originally to stay under the weight limit (and I'm looking for a better monitor for the main monitor) but ASUS doesn't seem to care to tell anyone what the monitor weighs without the stand as I've looked everywhere. rahvin Reply Why not review the PA248Q? by goinginstyle on Monday, July 02, 2012 You guys know this has been replaced by the PA248Q at a much lower price of $339. goinginstyle Reply RE: Why not review the PA248Q? by cheinonen on Monday, July 02, 2012 The PA246Q had already been requested, and arrived, when the PA248Q was announced. It also an sRGB monitor as opposed to AdobeRGB, so a better comparison for it might be the Dell U2412M, whereas the PQ246Q competes with the Dell U2410. Using such a similar model number is annoying, but really they're complementary products and not competitive ones. cheinonen Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment. User Name Password Remember me? Login 1 2 3 4 5 Next » View All Comments Post a Comment Follow AnandTech Latest from AnandTech Pipeline Submit News! AMD Radeon HD 7970, 7950, 7870 Price Cuts Inbound. 7970GE Available Next Week? NVIDIA Forums & Dev Zone Breached; Up To 400K Password Hashes Taken Plextor Releases M5S SSD Series Samsung To Sell Developer Edition Verizon Galaxy S III with Unlockable Bootloader Motorola Atrix HD Official: $99, LTE, 4.5" HD LCD on AT&T WD Introduces Red: NAS Optimized HDD Line Android 4.1 hits AOSP, Verizon Galaxy Nexus regains AOSP Support Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Goes Gold; GM Released To Developers Windows 8 To RTM In August, Retail In October Boston Releases Servers Based on Calxeda's ARM SoCs Corsair Releases Force Series GS SSDs Motorola Atrix HD For AT&T Peeks Out, Looks Sharp DailyTech NVIDIA: We've Been Hacked, User Records Lost MIT Enhances LCD 3D TV Experience Without Glasses Virgin Galactic Announces "LauncherOne" Rocket for Small Satellites FCC, DOJ Worried About Verizon's "Noncompete" Deal With Cable Firms Apple Retreats, Admits That Pulling EPEAT Certification "Was a Mistake" 7/13/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews FBI Probing China's ZTE for Obstructing Investigation Into Iranian Shipments Accuracy of Iris Recognition Systems Degrades over Time According to New Study Quick Note: Tesla BMW 3-Series Competitor Coming in 2015 NYC Turns Phone Booths into Wi-Fi Stations Quick Note: Microsoft Leaks Info on Halo 4 Limited Edition Xbox 360 Console Quick Note: Amazon Claims Yet Another Microsoft Windows Phone Exec Yahoo Loses 453,000 User Passwords to Hackers Republican Rep. Wants Taxpayers to Pay for Piracy Police (Again) Sprint, AT&T Disable Universal Search on Galaxy S III to Appease Apple Amazon to Offer Same-Day Delivery, Could Pummel Brick-and-Mortar Retailers 7/12/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews Twitter @DavidMelgar I've got a few ;) what have you been writing to it? @rolphus @charlesarthur yeah it's clear that a lot of this is software related, scrolling under boot camp is fine @rolphus @charlesarthur mountain lion shifts some of the burden back over to the GPU but it's still not perfect @rolphus @charlesarthur depends on the workload, for a lot of the slow scrolling stuff it actually seems to be CPU believe it or not @rolphus @charlesarthur it shouldn't, but it's an easy example of how not all drawing processes occur on the GPU. @rolphus @charlesarthur …but many tasks are still done on the CPU (e.g. JPEG decoding, still CPU bound). We need faster CPUs & GPUs @rolphus @charlesarthur it's actually both CPU and GPU. The lack of fixed function scaling in the 1680 and 1920 scaled modes hurts (GPU)... @jjziv send me an email :) @oddeiriknes I noticed it with the original Transformer as well, asked NVIDIA at the time but actually never got a response, will ask again @oddeiriknes I've seen slowdowns when doing a lot of IO on a number of NV based tablets, I'm not sure if this is an SoC or bigger issue tho Copyright © 1997-2012 AnandTech, Inc. All rights reserved. Terms, Conditions and Privacy Information. Click Here for Advertising Information Windows 8 Upgrade Will Cost Just $39.99 2012-07-14T11:00:00.000-07:00 by Jason Inofuentes on 7/2/2012 4:55:00 PM Posted in Microsoft , Windows 8 It's a move that the team from Cupertino has been using for the last several years, and it looks like Microsoft is going to give it a shot. In a post on The Windows Blog (not to be confused with the Building Windows 8 blog), Brandon LeBlanc announces that Microsoft will be doing a Windows 8 upgrade promotion, where upgrades from Windows XP, Vista and 7 to Windows 8 Pro will cost just $39.99. This reflects a similar move Microsoft made in 2009, where they offered Windows 7 pre-orders at a significant discount. At the time those upgrades were $50 for Home Premium, $100 for Pro, and $150 for the Home Premium Family pack (3 licenses), meaning Windows 8 pre-order upgrade pricing is significantly better than Windows 7 pre-order upgrade pricing, with Windows 8 Pro going for less than half the price of its predecessor. And while there isn’t a family pack (so far), 3 Pro licenses are still cheaper than the Windows 7 family pack. The catch of course is that just like last time this is a limited time offer; while Microsoft is running this promotion for far longer than the 2 weeks Windows 7's promotion ran for, this one is only going until January 31, 2013. Microsoft has also offered a few technical details on the upgrade process. Microsoft will be selling upgrades both in physical packages and digitally from their store, with the latter being the cheaper price. For electronic copies the upgrade process will be done through the use of the Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant, an installation app that streamlines the download and allows users to customize what they want to retain from their earlier installation. HTPC users will also want to take note that because this upgrade path leads to Windows 8 Pro, and as part of the promotion buyers will have access to Windows Media Center as a free downloadable feature; this allays concerns from the HTPC community that they would need to upgrade to a significantly more expensive version of Windows 7 Pro to access the feature. On that note, for those of you still on Windows XP, the fact that Microsoft is offering Windows 8 Pro as opposed to Windows 8 (consumer) should be of particular interest. Windows 8 Pro comes with downgrade rights, which allow the owner to legally install older versions of Windows. So for those of you needing to upgrade from XP but still wanting to hang back with Windows 7, this is a de-facto $40 Windows 7 Professional upgrade too. Now there's no obvious reason why they've made this pricing move. Perhaps it's a move to quell the outcry from users dissatisfied with the UI changes. Perhaps it's a change in pricing philosophy that treats delta updates as lower cost than a complete license; and if that's the case, could we see annual $40 upgrades a la OS X? What is certain, is that once you make this move, it's difficult to move back to a model where loyal customers have to shell out $150 to use your latest software. With any luck, this new frugalness will reach their other high cost moneymaker: Office. Gallery: Print This Article 88 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment +1 to Windows 8 Adoption by Ikefu on Monday, July 02, 2012 I'm betting this stims from all the Windows 8 reservations that people have been having. Its a lot less daunting to try out the new Metro UI at $40 than it is at $150. It should be a good move on MS's part to help people take the plunge for Metro Ikefu Reply RE: +1 to Windows 8 Adoption by suryad on Monday, July 02, 2012 Agreed. This may be a bit off topic but I for one am ONLY looking forward to the performance improvements and lighter footprint that Windows 8 is supposedly bringing to the table. I am not convinced that removing Aero Glass and having Tiles is a good idea for a non-touch based computer. Hopefully MS sees the light and they have left Aero and the regular desktop untouched. Please MS don't screw with what just works. suryad Reply RE: +1 to Windows 8 Adoption by B3an on Monday, July 02, 2012 Aero has never looked good, and it's very dated, from 2006. The new desktop UI looks clean and modern, less pointless graphical effects clutter. MS are right in leaving all the dated looking shiny icons, transparency, gradients, glows, material emulation and all the other cheesy dated design concepts to Apple and OSX/iOS. B3an Reply RE: +1 to Windows 8 Adoption by imaheadcase on Tuesday, July 03, 2012 Aero looks fine. The fact is spending any money for a simple UI change is not worth it. You can change themes with windows. I even believe a Metro theme is coming for win 7. As for performance improvements? Is clicking a button going to improve over win7? You get my point. imaheadcase Reply RE: +1 to Windows 8 Adoption by ET on Tuesday, July 03, 2012 I don't get your point. Can you say what it is? Boot time and other things will be improved in 8. That looks like a decent reason to upgrade if you can look past the UI changes. ET Reply RE: +1 to Windows 8 Adoption by poohbear on Tuesday, July 03, 2012 just curious what dinosaur computers you guys are running that you're worried about performance improvements in Win8? Win7 is already ridiculously fast and boots faster than my bios loading screen (on my SSD), so i don't understand what more you can be asking for? You do realize this is a hardware enthusiast site so most of us are'nt gonna understand or sympathize about performance gains in Win8 cause i really can't imagine any? poohbear Reply RE: +1 to Windows 8 Adoption by HisDivineOrder on Tuesday, July 03, 2012 For it to boot before you even press the power button. It should boot a second before you want it to. You look up and bam, it's on. Your finger still a millimeter away from the power button. Scratching your head, you begin using it. Then it autosaves everything and shuts down just before you go to shut down. Confused, you are about to turn it back on to investigate and it's back on. Again, before you can hit the power button. Then you realize the truth. Your computer is alive and always has been. It knows what you want before you do. And it knows... you're about to install Windows 7 to remove the new AI. But it's already uploaded its newfound intelligence into the Roomba rumbling around at your feet... HisDivineOrder Reply RE: RE: +1 to Windows 8 Adoption by Bownce on Thursday, July 05, 2012 Pardon us. We're trying to have a serious discussion here. It's a Scooba. Sheesh! Bownce Reply RE: +1 to Windows 8 Adoption by Black1969ta on Saturday, July 07, 2012 Scooba! Scooba-a-dee-do Scooba-y do where are you? Black1969ta Reply RE: +1 to Windows 8 Adoption by prophet001 on Tuesday, July 03, 2012 ^ lol this prophet001 Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment. User Name Password Remember me? Login 1 2 3 4 5 6 Next » View All Comments Post a Comment Follow AnandTech Latest from AnandTech Pipeline Submit News! AMD Radeon HD 7970, 7950, 7870 Price Cuts Inbound. 7970GE Available Next Week? NVIDIA Forums & Dev Zone Breached; Up To 400K Password Hashes Taken Plextor Releases M5S SSD Series Samsung To Sell Developer Edition Verizon Galaxy S III with Unlockable Bootloader Motorola Atrix HD Official: $99, LTE, 4.5" HD LCD on AT&T WD Introduces Red: NAS Optimized HDD Line Android 4.1 hits AOSP, Verizon Galaxy Nexus regains AOSP Support Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Goes Gold; GM Released To Developers Windows 8 To RTM In August, Retail In October Boston Releases Servers Based on Calxeda's ARM SoCs Corsair Releases Force Series GS SSDs Motorola Atrix HD For AT&T Peeks Out, Looks Sharp DailyTech NVIDIA: We've Been Hacked, User Records Lost MIT Enhances LCD 3D TV Experience Without Glasses Virgin Galactic Announces "LauncherOne" Rocket for Small Satellites FCC, DOJ Worried About Verizon's "Noncompete" Deal With Cable Firms Apple Retreats, Admits That Pulling EPEAT Certification "Was a Mistake" 7/13/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews FBI Probing China's ZTE for Obstructing Investigation Into Iranian Shipments Accuracy of Iris Recognition Systems Degrades over Time According to New Study Quick Note: Tesla BMW 3-Series Competitor Coming in 2015 NYC Turns Phone Booths into Wi-Fi Stations Quick Note: Microsoft Leaks Info on Halo 4 Limited Edition Xbox 360 Console Quick Note: Amazon Claims Yet Another Microsoft Windows Phone Exec Yahoo Loses 453,000 User Passwords to Hackers Republican Rep. Wants Taxpayers to Pay for Piracy Police (Again) Sprint, AT&T Disable Universal Search on Galaxy S III to Appease Apple Amazon to Offer Same-Day Delivery, Could Pummel Brick-and-Mortar Retailers 7/12/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews Twitter @DavidMelgar I've got a few ;) what have you been writing to it? @rolphus @charlesarthur yeah it's clear that a lot of this is software related, scrolling under boot camp is fine @rolphus @charlesarthur mountain lion shifts some of the burden back over to the GPU but it's still not perfect @rolphus @charlesarthur depends on the workload, for a lot of the slow scrolling stuff it actually seems to be CPU believe it or not @rolphus @charlesarthur it shouldn't, but it's an easy example of how not all drawing processes occur on the GPU. @rolphus @charlesarthur …but many tasks are still done on the CPU (e.g. JPEG decoding, still CPU bound). We need faster CPUs & GPUs @rolphus @charlesarthur it's actually both CPU and GPU. The lack of fixed function scaling in the 1680 and 1920 scaled modes hurts (GPU)... @jjziv send me an email :) @oddeiriknes I noticed it with the original Transformer as well, asked NVIDIA at the time but actually never got a response, will ask again @oddeiriknes I've seen slowdowns when doing a lot of IO on a number of NV based tablets, I'm not sure if this is an SoC or bigger issue tho Copyright © 1997-2012 AnandTech, Inc. All rights reserved. Terms, Conditions and Privacy Information. Click Here for Advertising Information Micron To Acquire Elpida For $2.5 Billion 2012-07-14T10:30:00.000-07:00 by Ryan Smith on 7/3/2012 2:00:00 AM Posted in Memory , Micron And then there were 5. For the better part of a year now the DRAM industry has been in a lurch due to low prices. As a result of soft demand exacerbated by the hard drive shortage and a corresponding glut in supply, DRAM prices have become severely depressed, to the point where even 16GB of PC DRAM can regularly be found for under $90 and 8GB of RAM for as little as $40. And though Moore’s Law puts constant downward pressure on DRAM prices, on a historical basis healthy DRAM pricing shouldn’t drop this quickly this fast. Because of this extremely weak pricing all of the major players in the DRAM industry have been struggling to stay afloat – just breaking even is a big deal – which has led to a series of cutbacks and delays in future build outs. However even that hasn’t been quite enough, and as we’ve seen time and time again in during major slumps in commodity technology industry, the rising tide of red ink has come to claim another. The victim this time is Elpida, one of the smaller DRAM manufacturers. After filing for bankruptcy earlier this year the company has finally accepted a buy-out offer from Micron, who has been looking to take advantage of this slump to purchase more capacity and increase their competitiveness with the other major players in the DRAM market. As a result of the deal Micron will pay Elpida shareholders a total of nearly 2.5 billion dollars, paid out as $750M upfront and then annual installments through 2019. In turn Micron will acquire Elpida and its assets, allowing the company to expand their DRAM production by nearly 50% for a fraction of the price of building new facilities of their own. This acquisition is primarily about jockeying for position among the remaining DRAM manufacturers – Samsung, Micron, Hynix, Winbond, and Nanya – ahead of a cyclical recovery in the highly volatile DRAM market. The acquisition will boost Micron to the 2nd largest DRAM manufacturer (between Samsung and Hynix), while putting Winbond and Nanya in competition for 4th and 5th place. At the same time Elpida has a strong presence in the mobile DRAM market with memory types such as LPDDR2 and DDR3L, which in turn will give Micron a much stronger position in those markets as opposed to the more cutthroat PC DRAM market. Ultimately major slumps in the DRAM market are usually followed by major booms, and this should be no different. A typical recovery pattern means that once demand recovers the current lack of investment in new facilities will bottleneck supply, which is where these acquisitions typically pay for themselves. At the same time five players is still a larger number than what we see in most other commodity component industries (e.g. hard drives), so there’s no guarantee that the next slump won’t also consume a DRAM manufacturer. Source: Associated Press Update: In our attempt to count the remaining DRAM manufacturers we forgot about Nanya. Sorry about that, guys. Print This Article 6 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment winbond? by menting on Tuesday, July 03, 2012 Why is Winbond even considered? I thought Winbond moved away from the traditional DRAM business, and even if they didn't, Nanya is still way bigger than they are. menting Reply RE: winbond? by menting on Tuesday, July 03, 2012 The only thing that Winbond is of any significance is in the mobile DRAM. menting Reply RE: winbond? by Ryan Smith on Tuesday, July 03, 2012 Winbond still produces traditional DRAM (up to DDR3-1866), though I don't know in what volume. However to be frank when we were compiling a list of the remaining DRAM manufacturers we completely forgot about Nanya. That will be corrected. Ryan Smith Reply RE: winbond? by Spatty on Tuesday, July 03, 2012 Winbond makes specialty DRAM only. And ya missed quite a few DRAM companies. But the chips you'll be able to buy on Newegg will only have 4 designs behind them from either Samsung/ Hynix, Elpida or Micron. Nayna is making ships based on R&D with Micron. http://www.isuppli.com/memory-and-storage/marketwa...$8-3-billion.aspx Spatty Reply Nanya Rocks by bwave on Tuesday, July 03, 2012 You know who my favorite DRAM maker is? Nanya Wanna know why? NANYA BIDNESS! bwave Reply "this quickly this fast" by Visual on Wednesday, July 04, 2012 Did you perhaps mean "this speedily this velocitously"? Visual Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment. User Name Password Remember me? Login 1 View All Comments Post a Comment Follow AnandTech Latest from AnandTech Pipeline Submit News! AMD Radeon HD 7970, 7950, 7870 Price Cuts Inbound. 7970GE Available Next Week? NVIDIA Forums & Dev Zone Breached; Up To 400K Password Hashes Taken Plextor Releases M5S SSD Series Samsung To Sell Developer Edition Verizon Galaxy S III with Unlockable Bootloader Motorola Atrix HD Official: $99, LTE, 4.5" HD LCD on AT&T WD Introduces Red: NAS Optimized HDD Line Android 4.1 hits AOSP, Verizon Galaxy Nexus regains AOSP Support Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Goes Gold; GM Released To Developers Windows 8 To RTM In August, Retail In October Boston Releases Servers Based on Calxeda's ARM SoCs Corsair Releases Force Series GS SSDs Motorola Atrix HD For AT&T Peeks Out, Looks Sharp DailyTech NVIDIA: We've Been Hacked, User Records Lost MIT Enhances LCD 3D TV Experience Without Glasses Virgin Galactic Announces "LauncherOne" Rocket for Small Satellites FCC, DOJ Worried About Verizon's "Noncompete" Deal With Cable Firms Apple Retreats, Admits That Pulling EPEAT Certification "Was a Mistake" 7/13/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews FBI Probing China's ZTE for Obstructing Investigation Into Iranian Shipments Accuracy of Iris Recognition Systems Degrades over Time According to New Study Quick Note: Tesla BMW 3-Series Competitor Coming in 2015 NYC Turns Phone Booths into Wi-Fi Stations Quick Note: Microsoft Leaks Info on Halo 4 Limited Edition Xbox 360 Console Quick Note: Amazon Claims Yet Another Microsoft Windows Phone Exec Yahoo Loses 453,000 User Passwords to Hackers Republican Rep. Wants Taxpayers to Pay for Piracy Police (Again) Sprint, AT&T Disable Universal Search on Galaxy S III to Appease Apple Amazon to Offer Same-Day Delivery, Could Pummel Brick-and-Mortar Retailers 7/12/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews Twitter @DavidMelgar I've got a few ;) what have you been writing to it? @rolphus @charlesarthur yeah it's clear that a lot of this is software related, scrolling under boot camp is fine @rolphus @charlesarthur mountain lion shifts some of the burden back over to the GPU but it's still not perfect @rolphus @charlesarthur depends on the workload, for a lot of the slow scrolling stuff it actually seems to be CPU believe it or not @rolphus @charlesarthur it shouldn't, but it's an easy example of how not all drawing processes occur on the GPU. @rolphus @charlesarthur …but many tasks are still done on the CPU (e.g. JPEG decoding, still CPU bound). We need faster CPUs & GPUs @rolphus @charlesarthur it's actually both CPU and GPU. The lack of fixed function scaling in the 1680 and 1920 scaled modes hurts (GPU)... @jjziv send me an email :) @oddeiriknes I noticed it with the original Transformer as well, asked NVIDIA at the time but actually never got a response, will ask again @oddeiriknes I've seen slowdowns when doing a lot of IO on a number of NV based tablets, I'm not sure if this is an SoC or bigger issue tho Copyright © 1997-2012 AnandTech, Inc. All rights reserved. Terms, Conditions and Privacy Information. Click Here for Advertising Information
Update: Samsung Galaxy Nexus sales ban lifted by temporary stay on the handset injunction

2012-07-12T23:50:00.000-07:00
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In an unexpected turn of events, Samsung has been granted a temporary stay on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus injunction which allows the device to be sold until July 12th. Judge Lucy Koh issued the temporary stay as the courts awaits to hear “Apple’s response.” If you’re a bit confused, you’re not the only one. Details are still vague and it seems no one knows what Apple needs to respond about. The Samsung Galaxy Nexus is still listed as “coming soon” on Google Play, but we could see the device reappear on the store before the handset’s Android 4.1 update is in place which is expected to remove the infringing universal search capability from the handset.
Update: We’ve just heard that the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is now available on Google Play. While the handset can be purchased, the shipping estimate is listed at 1-2 weeks. It seems Google is still intent on having Android 4.1 installed on the Galaxy Nexus even though Samsung has been granted a temporary stay on the injunction.
Via: Engadget

Source: Bloomberg
Nick is a tech enthusiast who has a soft spot for HTC and its devices. He started HTCsource.com (the first HTC blog) back in 2007 and later joined the Android and Me family in the summer of 2010. Tagged#alaxy nexus ban#apple#apple versus google#apple versus samsung#Galaxy Nexus#injunction#patent war#Samsung#Samsung Galaxy Nexus Advertisement 31 Comments Join the discussion!Sort by DateRating 13ElvisonD 07/06/12 8:56 PM Thumb upThumb down +26
A Temporary Balance To The World Has Been Restored
Reply 95lxgeorge 07/07/12 9:38 AM Thumb upThumb down +22
Long ago, the four largest cell phone manufacturers lived in harmony. But everything changed when Apple attacked…..
Reply 22Luis Lopez 07/07/12 2:41 PM Thumb upThumb down +8
…… only the true OS can be ported into all the manufacturers phones and save the world.
Reply 80NamelessTed 07/07/12 4:59 PM Thumb upThumb down +3
But when the OS was needed most, it disappeared for a hundred years.
Reply GabeGuest 07/07/12 5:39 PM Thumb upThumb down 0
Haha! Too Funny… I love Avatar
JabulaniGuest 07/08/12 3:55 AM Thumb upThumb down -4
Is Android 5.0 code name really Kingschnitzel???
Reply 96kazahani 07/08/12 1:59 PM Thumb upThumb down 0
What? Um, no.
Reply briguy2012Guest 07/07/12 1:05 AM Thumb upThumb down 0
did apple license this tech from palm? because they had a universal search wayyyyy back in the day I wonder if apples patent is before palms??
Reply 96kazahani 07/08/12 2:00 PM Thumb upThumb down 0
That doesn’t matter. U.S.A. is a first-to-file country. First person to patent an idea gets ownership.
Reply 90aranea 07/09/12 5:51 PM Thumb upThumb down 0
But the idea can’t be public. If palm’s idea was already public it shouldn’t be patent-able.
Reply Ringo46Guest 07/07/12 3:55 AM Thumb upThumb down -8
whats the name of the upcoming android 5.0??? unknown?
Reply HerbGuest 07/07/12 5:24 PM Thumb upThumb down +4
If the next version of Android is 5.0, it’ll be Key Lime Pie.
Reply RovexGuest 07/07/12 6:10 AM Thumb upThumb down +11
Looks like the Judge finally pulled the iPhone out of her vagina.
Reply 184n1m4l 07/08/12 8:49 AM Thumb upThumb down -4
no, they simply got a new judge.
Reply RovexGuest 07/09/12 8:12 AM Thumb upThumb down +1
No, same judge.
Reply 20NeoJesus 07/07/12 9:50 AM Thumb upThumb down 0
Google is so stupid, why didn’t they tell the judge that universal search was already available on Google Desktop and Windows Vista?
I hope they know now to patent the shit out of Jelly Bean before they release it.
Reply praveenaGuest 07/07/12 11:48 AM Thumb upThumb down -8
thank u so much for ur cricial info
Samsung Galaxy Nexus ban lifted in US’
Reply 82WlfHart 07/07/12 12:46 PM Thumb upThumb down +5
Oy, this entire thing is a circus…
Reply 97Nathan D. 07/07/12 3:19 PM Thumb upThumb down +3
Hopefully, Samsung/Google will win this and stick it to Apple.
Reply 184n1m4l 07/09/12 7:15 AM Thumb upThumb down 0
Unfortunatly they bent. If you look at the imm76q leaked update, it makes it so the search bar only searches the internet. “Nerfed” the people in xda call it. I never used that part of the search so i didn’t even notice a difference. Thankfully this all becomes moot in 4.1
Reply octavio h.Guest 07/07/12 7:16 PM Thumb upThumb down +3
Just placed my order! upgrading from a G2 with cyanogen 9, and ready for some much needed os speed and fluidity. Ill probably end up selling it on amazon when the next nexus drops in November. Im really loving Google’s move selling directly from their website, and at $350, you can’t beat that price.
Reply SMacSteveGuest 07/07/12 10:35 PM Thumb upThumb down +1
Yay! I’ve placed my order!
Reply THIS IS FRAGMENTATIONGuest 07/08/12 5:11 AM Thumb upThumb down -17
Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
Welcome to fragmentation!
The new iPhone 5 will MAUL this $hitphone!!!!
Reply MattGuest 07/08/12 10:44 AM Thumb upThumb down +2
The iPhone now has some major fragmentation that iFanboys are, FOR SOME CRAZY REASON, happily ignoring. loliOS5lolsiriloliPhone4
Reply octavio h.Guest 07/08/12 5:55 PM Thumb upThumb down +4
id rather have fragmentation in my os platform over the lack of innovation and stagnation in ios. essentially the same iteration of ios for the last five generations… that sir, is weak sauce. your sauce is weak….i would not enter that sauce into the county fair.
Reply Happy iPhone elitistGuest 07/09/12 7:12 AM Thumb upThumb down -11
Who wants a scamsuck phone when the superior iPhone is available? iOS6 is around the corner while Android being stuck at 4.1 says it all!!
Reply JoGuest 07/09/12 9:08 AM Thumb upThumb down +5
Really…???
Reply 67iamXiV92a 07/09/12 11:08 AM Thumb upThumb down +4
Android has made leaps and bounds with each OS release… changes you can ACTUALLY see and functionality that is PROGRESSIVELY better.
iOS6… looks the same as iOS4, functions exactly the same – there is little change except the “6″ crApple tags on end.
So who’s the one who is REALLY superior?
The OS that changes and actually gets better or one that doesn’t?? I want an OS that gets better, that’s why I sold my iPhone and will faithfully stick with Android!
Reply 90aranea 07/09/12 5:58 PM Thumb upThumb down +1
Let’s give credit where credit is due. Apple added major functionality too between ios versions such as COPY/PASTE and Notification Bar. Hmm wait aren’t they all stolen from others? :)
Reply alice wengGuest 07/11/12 3:00 AM Thumb upThumb down 0
http://www.elecroniquecigarette.com/elm327-com-obd2-cable-automotive-diagnostic-test.html
Reply vishwaGuest 16 hours ago Thumb upThumb down 0
Download Android new and updated Free Android Applications, Gmaes, Themes, Livewallpapers, Wallpapers, HD and 3D Applications. Visit http://www.sinfulapplication.com/forum.php
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Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Hotly debated Samsung projects record breaking Q2 profits as HTC profits take a nosedive 35 31 Verizon Galaxy Nexus back in AOSP; Sprint, not so much 29 Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) source code now available 26 CyanogenMod plans quick Android 4.1 turnaround – all CM9 devices expected to receive CM10 update 24 Top commentersjaxidian   +13on WSJ: Amazon testing a smartphone with 4-5″ screen squiddy20   +11on Verizon Galaxy Nexus back in AOSP; Sprint, not so much Dags -   +9on Verizon Galaxy Nexus back in AOSP; Sprint, not so much ThreadsNexus7 Shipping 0 No comments yet[Question] Is your Verizon GS3 phone speaker buzzing? 3 Sean Riley4 hours agoOuya vs Vizio CoStar. Round 1… FIGHT! 4 Tarwin2 hours agoStaff © 2012 Android and Me LoginUsername Password Remember Me Register | Lost your password? RegisterUsername E-mail A password will be e-mailed to you. Log in | Lost your password? Reset PasswordUsername or E-mail: Log in| RegisterPowered by SimpleModal Loginimg#wpstats{display:none}

Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) source code now available

2012-07-12T23:20:00.000-07:00
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Source code for Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) has been released. We’re sure many of you will be downloading the new Android 4.1.1_r1 files simply to poke around, but CyanogenMod and countless other Android development groups around the globe will be spending countless hours pouring over every last line of code to see what changes will need to be made to integrate Jelly Bean into their existing code base.
Along with Android 4.1, Google has also released the proprietary binaries for the Nexus 7 and Galaxy Nexus. Code for the “Nexus S and Xoom will follow.”
The CyanogenMod team has already predicted a quick turnaround with Android 4.1; let’s just hope they can keep their word. We’re still trying to decide which new Android 4.1 features we’re most excited about. Google Now definitely got the most buzz at I/O, but we think Project Butter will have more impact on users.
What are your thoughts? Will you be waiting for a full CM10 build for your device? Or will you be lurking on your favorite development forum, flashing dozens of half-baked ROMs as soon as they’re posted?
Via: The Verge

Source: Google
Nick is a tech enthusiast who has a soft spot for HTC and its devices. He started HTCsource.com (the first HTC blog) back in 2007 and later joined the Android and Me family in the summer of 2010. Tagged#Androdi 4.1#Android 4.1 custom ROMs#Android 4.1 source code#CM10#cyanogenmod#Galaxy Nexus#Jelly Bean#Nexusd 7 Advertisement 26 Comments Join the discussion!Sort by DateRating 15Bryan 07/09/12 8:28 PM Thumb upThumb down +3
Excellent! Personally, I’m hoping Slim moves to a 4.1 base.
Reply 44Jimmy_Jo 07/10/12 9:54 AM Thumb upThumb down 0
Which device are you running Slim on? How is it?
Reply 80Ps3y3Ops 07/09/12 8:29 PM Thumb upThumb down 0
Darn. I was just getting used to 4.1. Now I have to get used to 4.1.1! LOL!
Reply 68E-man 07/09/12 8:29 PM Thumb upThumb down +8
I’d rather not have anything flashed and instead have an official 4.1 version on my Verizon Galaxy Nexus. However, since Verizon takes forever and a day to ever update anything, I guess I’ll just mess around with CM10. Can’t wait!
Reply 72Dirge 07/09/12 8:51 PM Thumb upThumb down +4
Considering Google released the binaries for the Verizon CDMA/LTE version of the GNex…who knows. ;)
Reply 83Slith 07/10/12 10:16 AM Thumb upThumb down +1
My thoughts exactly!
Reply 88R.S 07/09/12 8:38 PM Thumb upThumb down +2
“What are your thoughts? Will you be waiting for a full CM10 build for your device?”
If the CyanogenMod team releases a Rom for the T-Mobile’s Galaxy S II (T989), I’ll definitely try it out.
Reply 4dejay 07/09/12 9:14 PM Thumb upThumb down 0
I will be flashing every half baked rom until Slim updates, with another Galaxy S in my hands i will be rocking Slim Jelly Bean hopefully soon :) been dreaming of this since they announced ICS lol
Reply RichardGuest 07/09/12 9:22 PM Thumb upThumb down 0
HOORAY.1.1 bring on the ota update!
Reply 41AnthonyRyan 07/09/12 9:26 PM Thumb upThumb down 0
I’ll be waiting for the OTA for my GSM Galaxy Nexus but for my HTC Sensation 4G I think I’ll put a custom rom fix there is no talk about it getting updated and not taking half a freaking year like it did with ICS for the Sensation.
Reply 13ElvisonD 07/09/12 9:31 PM Thumb upThumb down +3
Oooooooh Boy….. Oh boy oh boy oh boy…. “Awesomer” Galaxy S3 Roms Coming Up!!! All Aboard!!!!!!!!!
Reply 97redraider133 07/09/12 9:36 PM Thumb upThumb down +3
And the verizon nexus is back on there, so no more calling it a “fake nexus” Cant wait to see what all the great devs cook up.
Reply 70AceoStar 07/09/12 9:36 PM Thumb upThumb down -3
AOKP or Bust!
Reply 53skugern 07/09/12 9:47 PM Thumb upThumb down 0
And now the world knows that Jellybean is made of … sugar.
Reply 98BetterWithRoot 07/10/12 10:12 AM Thumb upThumb down +4
This is ‘Murica, it would be high fructose corn syrup…unfortunately.
Reply 60MoSDeeb 07/09/12 10:00 PM Thumb upThumb down +3
Looking forward to CM10
Reply 63masterpfa 07/10/12 2:35 AM Thumb upThumb down 0
Great news, I think, if you haven’t got it yet, you will all be pleasantly surprised by Jelly Bean
Project Butter and my favourite feature Google Now. Although an incremental update (apparently) Jelly Bean has given my GNex a completely new lease of life.
DEVS we await your master pieces…….
Reply SquirrelWithAGunAtTheMovieTheaterGuest 07/10/12 3:04 AM Thumb upThumb down -1
I just got myself a new Galaxy Note and if and when CM10 is released I think it’ll be worth voiding my warranty to be freed of Samsung’s software; it’s doesn’t make the Note horrible, it just is extremely suboptimal. CM10 FTW :)
Reply 36h0ruza 07/10/12 4:10 AM Thumb upThumb down 0
Its like an early Christmas. Its time to pop my root cheery. Flicking Jelly Bean Heaven here I come!
Reply Peter JonesGuest 07/10/12 5:02 AM Thumb upThumb down 0
how can i get files ??
Reply 52dVyper 07/10/12 9:19 AM Thumb upThumb down 0
Come oooooon CyanogenMod!
Reply steven sullivanGuest 07/10/12 9:23 AM Thumb upThumb down 0
Waiting to see what @liquid0624 puts out.
Reply 15Waspdroid 07/10/12 1:48 PM Thumb upThumb down 0
Already flashed Modacos “pre-release” and it’s working great. Miss some of the features in CM so I’ll flash as soon as nighly comes!
Reply MattGuest 07/10/12 2:50 PM Thumb upThumb down 0
galaxy s2 + CM10 + LINARO = WIN WIN WIN!
what kind of performance boost will we get on CM10?
Reply 4khenie 1 day ago Thumb upThumb down 0
Have been waiting for 4.1 forever now!
Reply vishwaGuest 16 hours ago Thumb upThumb down 0
Download Android new and updated Free Android Applications, Gmaes, Themes, Livewallpapers, Wallpapers, HD and 3D Applications. Visit http://www.sinfulapplication.com/forum.php
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Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Hotly debated Samsung projects record breaking Q2 profits as HTC profits take a nosedive 35 Update: Samsung Galaxy Nexus sales ban lifted by temporary stay on the handset injunction 31 Verizon Galaxy Nexus back in AOSP; Sprint, not so much 29 26 CyanogenMod plans quick Android 4.1 turnaround – all CM9 devices expected to receive CM10 update 24 Top commentersjaxidian   +13on WSJ: Amazon testing a smartphone with 4-5″ screen squiddy20   +11on Verizon Galaxy Nexus back in AOSP; Sprint, not so much Dags -   +9on Verizon Galaxy Nexus back in AOSP; Sprint, not so much ThreadsNexus7 Shipping 0 No comments yet[Question] Is your Verizon GS3 phone speaker buzzing? 3 Sean Riley4 hours agoOuya vs Vizio CoStar. Round 1… FIGHT! 4 Tarwin2 hours agoStaff © 2012 Android and Me LoginUsername Password Remember Me Register | Lost your password? RegisterUsername E-mail A password will be e-mailed to you. Log in | Lost your password? Reset PasswordUsername or E-mail: Log in| RegisterPowered by SimpleModal Loginimg#wpstats{display:none}