LG's MWC 2011 Press Conference

More often than not, companies seem not to know how to actually sell their products. This came to me in the midst of a football (soccer) match, in which I found a commercial of the new LG Optimus 2X, and I’ll try to explain to you why.

It starts with something simple: dual core. What does “dual core” stand for you? If you’re reading this, then you’re either really interested in the mobile industry, or have some sort of computer science background. In either case, for you and me, dual core stands for a processor with two independent units capable of executing two independent processes at the same time.

If you’re happy with that, you’re terribly wrong.

You see, you and me represent nothing but a fraction of customers a phone of this kind could cause an effect on. The potential client who’s watching the match and reads “dual core” does not understand what it means, and even if you tried to explain it to him, he wouldn’t understand it, and he doesn’t have to. It’s our job as experts in this field to break it down to people and make them realize the huge difference it can make to have two cores at your disposal instead of “just” one (even though some people believe ‘phones’ do not need dual core processors, but I strongly disagree)

So the question is, how? How do you make a person with no knowledge of computer science whatsoever realize the advantages of a product such as this one? How do you explain it to them? Well it’s fairly simple: with examples. Make a user realize how a single core phone can struggle under certain workloads against a dual core device in real life, in situations they can relate to, but WITHOUT making them go through a crash course in computer engineering. The irony here is, LG has a video where it attempts to depict the difference it makes to have a product with dual core with dual memory channel such as theirs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnHykOcWKAg

Granted, the video is not completely common-user friendly, since it ends up talking about CPU cores and memory channels, but it showcases the fact that someone inside LG’s marketing factory knows something or two can be said about their products better with examples any human being can relate to. Which leads me to my next point: is no marketing at all, better than bad marketing?

Well of course not! How are people going to enter a shop and ask for your product if they don’t even know it exists in the first place!? Well, they won’t, but the fact is if you keep filling up their favorite TV shows with ads targeted just for nerds and techies who can’t buy every phone in the planet to satisfy every manufacturer’s needs, they’ll stop taking your company seriously. And that’s something you clearly DON’T want.

In short, ads should be targeted correctly, and for the right people: the mass market of common users.

If you’ve spent millions of dollars developing a flagship product, don’t spend your marketing efforts trying to woo tech enthusiasts; they probably already know your product exists and when you’re launching it in their country (if you are, anyway) Your target is the everyday consumer, who doesn’t really know what he wants, and just knows he could do better with something new: your product. If you fail to make him understand your product is what he needs to buy, blame no one, but yourself, your strategy, and your inability to change what needed to be changed.

Since 2009, we’ve seen the attempts of an old company, filled with the history and the DNA of being the first to introduce and build the concept of a smartphone at a software level (Calculator, Agenda, Contacts & Calendar, multi-tasking, MP3 player, PC sync via USB, and a large etc.), trying to make itself at home in this new era competing against an army of iPhones Androids, BlackBerries and the lot.

Official illustration of multi-tasking on a webOS device

The truth is, as you all know, webOS is an achievement, a milestone in the history of mobile OSs. It made multi-tasking not easy, because easy is what all aspire to, but user-friendly. A user knows, just by unlocking a webOS device, how many apps are simultaneously open and consuming the device’s resources. The implementation was brilliantly defined as “cards”, where every card reflected an open app.

But as always, there’s a lot more to be said. webOS redefined what a Contacts app should be, what search in a mobile device means, what unobtrusive notification means (although I believe Android is more elegant here) and what user-friendlyness means, across the board. Where did it take them? Unfortunately, not as far as it should’ve. When Palm introduced the Pre at 2009’s CES, the world stopped. It was completely unexpected, and it represented not only a true effort at building something new & better, bu also a clear statement from Palm: “I want my pride back.”. webOS was the brainchild of a new wave of engineers at Palm, including Mike Bell, Peter Skillman, Michael Abbott, ex-Apple employee Jon Rubinstein, who took the helm of the company’s main business in 2007, and Matias Duarte, believed to be responsible for webOS’ breakthrough UI, and current employee at Google’s building no. 44 with the Android team. The Pre was released in June 2009, followed by the Pixi the following fall. Sales appeared to be good in the beginning, but clearly, webOS was not having the impact it should’ve had in the minds of consumers.

A fan-made Palm Pre advertise which clearly reflects both the device and the OS’s capabilities.

2010 was supposed to be the year in which Palm’s products shined. They doubled their devices’ memory, rebranded them, and struck a deal with Big Red to sell them. The devices ended up being poorly advertised, and consumers did not fall for them, despite being so much more intuitive than Android, and possibly iOS. Money started to fall short, and not even personal letters sent from Jon Rubinstein himself to the company’s employees helped to calm the waters. In the end, after much speculation about potential sales, Palm was acquired by none other than HP, and since then, no official statements about the company’s strategy have surfaced.

Official HP webOS 2.0 logo

Since HP’s acquisiton, Palm has given developer previews of the next generation of webOS, webOS 2.0, and released the Pre 2 as a hardware platform for webOS 2.0 developers. But leaving aside webOS 2.0, and the much-needed hardware upgrade to the Pre, Palm has yet to make its next move. These events cannot be even considered as such in the compan’s history since Palm has barely spoken publicly about them, which makes us believe that whatever Palm has been planning since the original Pre was released, will be shown at their February 9th event.

Official HP Palm teaser for their February 9th “Think beyond” event.

To be honest, I can’t wait.

Yes, the line. The line that has always separated and categorized the gadgets we put inside our pockets, gadgets we’ve been taking with us everywhere since, well, always. And now, here we are, in 2011, where the introduction of a brand new device threatens with tearing apart a concept we’ve had in our minds since forever.

Let’s go back in time. Before the iPhone. Before the iPod. Before portable MP3 players. Before the 90s even. What was “cool” back then? The Game Boy, and next to it, the Sony Walkman.

Together, both of these gadgets were nearly all you could wish to have back in the day. And if you did have both, many times you’d see yourself having to choose which one to take, since listening to music made sense while going somewhere to run an errand, while your portable console made sense when you had to wait a long while for just about anything; carrying both of them wasn’t even an option since depending on which year we’re talking about, the Game Boy was actually bigger than your pocket. And you needed the other one for your wallet, of course. Switching to a portable CD-Player wasn’t an option either, unless you wanted to carry a bag with you or put it around your waist. With the adoption of the cellphone, the number of devices to carry rose to three.

My point here, however, is very simple: we’ve always known were to draw the line between what was a dedicated gaming device, and what wasn’t. With the advances in technology, you could put your music into your portable gaming handheld (PSP), or you could load it on your featurephone and carry just two devices.

Even when the original iPhone was released, the line separating a portable gaming console and a mobile phone, no matter how smart, was still quite thick and clear. When the iPhone 3G and the App Store took the world by storm starting in the summer of 2008, the line began to get thinner, since the iPhone became a portable gaming console by itself, through its own merits: touch and sensor based gaming taken to a whole new level, backed up by a platform that allowed you to search for, rate, comment, download and play games from anywhere you had 3G coverage, all in one device. Cartridges discarded, and MP3 players rendered unnecessary if you carried a smartphone.

Still, even though the portable game console market and the mobile gaming market began to co-exist like never before (there were a lot of games available for phones before the current smartphone revolution; remember Snake?), we’ve always seen Nintendo’s DS and Sony’s PSP targeted for a different kind of games, perhaps more “hardcore” games, even though mobile gaming is already showing signs of wanting to become more hardcore.

The recently introduced Sony Next Generation Portable or NGP

Last week, however, saw the introduction of Sony’s new portable gaming console. Codenamed NGP for Next Generation Portable, this device has started to make me think about the future of all handheld devices, and where we’re headed to.

The NGP sports a five inch capacitive OLED touchscreen, with a 960×544 pixel resolution. You heard right, a five inch touchscreen capacitive display. Now, it’s not unheard of for portable consoles to have touchscreens; in fact, the Nintendo DS introduced them to the general audience with its resistive touchscreen display. But with a big capacitive touchscreen, Sony’s NGP will be targeting the same gaming experience exclusive to smartphone players, plus adding physical buttons and dual-analog joysticks. A touchscreen however, is only half of the equation, since touch-based input controls have always been backed up by the sensors inside smartphones; namely, the accelerometer, digital compass, gyroscope and GPS as of 2010’s standards. Sony already has experience in this subject with its Wii counterpart, PlayStation Move, and most importantly, with the PS3’s Sixaxis and DualShock 3 controllers, which featured rotational orientation and translational acceleration since 2006 (DualShock 3 was released in 2008) which are capable of providing an experience similar to the accelerometer, digital compass and gyro coupled in the iPhone 4. If you think about, for Sony adding this last bit of technology wasn’t even half of the effort it could’ve been if it hadn’t researched this technology before.

With this kind of input, and this kind of display, you could pretty much say that was Sony has done is carefully study what has made mobile gaming so interactive and innovative the last couple of years (touchscreens & motion-based controls), attempted to fix the hardcore gamer’s concerns about them (physical buttons and analog sticks), and packaged them all in one single device, the NGP.

But wait, there’s more. The device does not have one, but two touch-sensitive areas! When you hold the device with both hands, your fingers will go around the back of the device, where they’ll find themselves in a perfect position to perform gestures on the second touch-based input of the device. Think it can’t get any better? Think again. The device will feature a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 based CPU. And this is not pure speculation, you can read it by yourself in Sony’s site; it will have four dedicated cores for games as application processors. And if that wasn’t enough, it will feature an Imagination Technologies graphics chip, the PowerVR SGX543MP4, which integrates… well, four more cores, dedicated exclusively to graphics.

The Sony NGP has a touch-sensitive area at the back

As astounding as it seems, we’re not here today to talk about technology, but about what its impact is going to be. And the most troubling spec I read about (and I know I’m overlooking the device’s front and back cameras),  was its 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity.

We can have the same inputs, the same games, the same technology, the same performance, the same content distribution model (app stores), the same concepts behind our Operating Systems (NGP will feature a similar OS experience to current smartphone platforms). But when a mainstream portable console gets 3G connectivity, the line is not thin anymore, it has been erased.

For Sony, the NGP signals not only a new PlayStation Portable generation, nor a leap in technology, but new services, too. Together with its unannounced but more than seen Android-based PlayStation Phone, Sony will provide a new service which will blend smartphones with portable consoles, tying both like we’ve never seen before.

Now, I’m not saying it’s wrong, I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, and I’m not saying I don’t like it. In fact, I do. What Sony is attempting is to bridge the gap separating smartphones and portable consoles defining the relationship they should have, and in the meantime, putting the portable console above the smartphone, at least technically. For how long? If we’ve learnt something from the recent past, is that smartphone technology advances incredibly fast, and even though 2009 was supposed to be the year of the Cortex-A8 based phones, it was not until 2010 when it became mainstream in the smartphone top-tier. Will 2011 be the year of Cortex-A9 based devices? It looks like it, because we’re only starting the year and we need more than one hand to count all the multi-core based devices being announced before next winter. A quad-core smartphone to show Sony the NGP’s crown will be short? Wait a couple of days and see if nVidia answers that question. (Note: We do not know who the NGP’s CPU chipmaker is)

Official shot of the Sony NGP

If everything goes fine, Sony will release the NGP this holiday season, although we don’t know if they’ll be able to make it outside of Japan. Moreover, no one’s said the NGP will be a success. It certainly looks like it, because the device most people believe it’ll have to compete against, the Nintendo 3DS, doesn’t seem designed for hardcore gamers, and it certainly won’t ship with a service allowing smartphones and portable consoles to interact with each other. In the end, what we have is a separation that doesn’t exist anymore; sure, there are still small differences, like the near-absence of physical controls in smartphones, but now we know portable game consoles and smartphones are in the same league, and which line separates them from now onwards, might end up being left for the end-user to decide.

Aaah yes, the 1990s. Those where the years when life was as simple as it could get: go to school, pray for the clock to hit 2 o´clock in the evening, go home, have lunch, and game. At that time, all I knew was how to fire up our old Intel 486DX4 powered computer, wait for the MS-DOS prompt, and start a game. And for a long, long time, it used to be this one.

In truth, no one should be surprised about this news. Mobile gaming is actually very similar in constraints to old PC games from the mid and early 90s. At the end of the decade games became more “hardcore”, which is commonly believed to not be compatible with how people look at games inside their phones.

So why are they similar? Very simple. Many DOS games used to rely on basic and simple controls; namely, the up, down, left and right arrow keys. Oh, and the Escape key to exit. The “WASD” keys had not been invented yet, and if you don’t believe me, ask old-school Doom players, who used the arrow keys to move, the Control key to shoot, the space bar to open doors, and the numbers above the keyboard to choose a weapon. No, in most cases the mouse wasn’t the default option, and I believe the mouse wheel wasn’t even mainstream at that time; it was invented in 1995.

The basic problem most (if not all) mobile game developers crash into while designing any game is quite simple: controls. Controls connect the player with the game world, they’re the means through which the player tells the game what it wants it to do so, having good controls is essential to make the player comfortable while playing. And yes, touchscreens are innovative, and provide a freedom never known before when coupled with the device’s sensors, like the accelerometer, because unlike the Wii, the PS3 or the 360’s controls, the feeling of having the game react to your movements from your own hands is more direct, more engaging.

However, in desktop & mobile gaming devices (DSi, PSP, etc) we’re all used to the complicated controls of nowadays: key combinations, shortcuts, gamepads, macros, mouse controls, etc. It’s just not easy to conceive a game with these controls translated into a modern smartphone keeping them easy and comfortable to play with. Take for example Duke Nukem 3D for iPhone, which looks good and should prove to be a good mobile gaming experience, but with a huge effort, unless you get used to its controls pretty quickly. And that’s one of the old DOS classics I’m talking about!

The overly complicated UI of Duke Nukem 3D for iPhone

However, my point remains: games in the DOS era had to be simple, and use simple controls, which is why I believe we should see a lot more games from that era join the fray.

Today’s news comes from an old-time classic. Remedy Entertainment is a finnish game developer founded back in 1995. Within a year, their first game, Death Rally, was ready and got published by one of the most important publishers in the history of videogames: Apogee. It would go on to sell more than 90,000 copies, becoming a classic among gamers. Death Rally was also blessed with the presence of one of Apogee’s signature characters, Duke Nukem, and was critically acclaimed upon release. It remained within many gamers’ memories next to a similarly inspired title released a year later, Carmageddon.

The core concept was simple, yet addictive. You begin as a street racer, with 495$ dollars and a Vagabond (VW Beetle). You start racing with other AI competitors, and the races are split into three categories: easy, medium and hard. For every round of the game, a race (only one track) of each category takes place, and if you’re not quick in the menu, you’re left out until the next round. Racing gets you money to repair your car, buy weapons, ammo, tyres and even a faster car to compete in the higher categories, where of course, the money’s better and the AI is faster and less forgiving. You’d think that the game ends when you get into the hard category and win a few races, but it doesn’t. As it turns out, there are points awarded for every round, and the higher the race category, the more points you get. To win the game, you must first be at the top of the table, which means you have to recover all the points you’ve lost against the leader since the first round of the game. Then, eventually, you race the game’s boss.

Death, blood and screaming sounds were part of the original Death Rally

If it sounds hard, you’ve got no idea. PC Games used to be more demanding at that time. Casual players had not been, well, “discovered” at that time.

Death Rally’s legacy has lived on since 1996, and I’m quite sure many gamers thought about it when Reckless Racing was finally released for iOS and Android devices last year. For whichever reasons, it’s taken Remedy Entertainment until now to actually bring Death Rally to our smartphones:

This is just a teaser, of course. We still have to wait until March, but if the game adds multiplayer support through Bluetooth for on-the-spot pick-up games, it’ll surely leave its mark in the hall of fame in mobile gaming. For now, we can see at least six cars in the same shot, which is up from the original’s 4.

What I can’t wait for is to see how they’ve fitted six cars’ stats into the 3.5″ screen of the iPhone. If you ask me though, I bet they’ve gone with semi-transparent bars on the screen’s edges. About the game itself, In the video the pace looks good, but my doubts are centered on the camera, which is a bit close for my taste, but I guess they were just cropping the game’s UI to focus on the gameplay.

Regardless of their camera perspective and distance choices, I’d really like to know about the process they took to bring the game to a mobile platform. And it’ll certainly be interesting to see how they’ve solved the game’s controls because just tilting the device to turn the car won’t cut it. If they’re really striving to keep what made the original game special, then accelerating will be just as important as breaking in order to not damage your car, so we at least need a break button. And of course, we can’t forget about buttons for the guns and the mines, which will be essential to destroy our foes.

Official footage of Death Rally for iPhone & iPad

In the end, all we can do is wait. Revisiting old PC games could prove to be a source of inspiration for mobile game developers in the near term, and I’m sure many people would love to see some of their favorite games adapted and brought to the palm of their hands. However, regardless of who develops them I believe they shouldn’t use old brands or classic games as excuse for a high price point, since I also believe there’s a certain threshold fans and specially potential app store buyers may not be willing to cross, no matter how good the game is.

Writing a post like this is hard, it always is. Don’t let anyone convince you of the opposite. And if you ask me why, the answer is quite simple: when you admire something so much, when you admire the people and the effort it took to make something you truly admire become a reality, you tell yourself you’ve got to do something about it; you’ve got to honor them, honor their work. And then, when you put your mind to it, you just think: what if I blow it all? What if, instead of making everyone see what I’m excited about, I convince them of the contrary, that’s it’s something actually normal? That’s something that’s been hunting me of lately. But then, when you try to see other people’s work on what you love, you tell yourself, that it’s got to be you, and only you.

So, we begin at Apple’s “Latest Creation” event a year ago, in January 2010. We’d lived through December thinking about a device given a thousand codenames: HTC Passion, HTC Dragon, and Nexus One; a device that was handed on to Google employees, that got leaked, and that days before this event, got officially announced. Then, we get our second surprise: Apple announced an event. And at that event, the iPad became a reality.

However, far from just settling down the tech media’s expectations, and calming everyone, the iPad added true fuel to the fire, when Steve pronounced these words: “iPad is powered, by our own custom silicon. […] We’ve got a chip called the A4, which is the most advanced chip we’ve ever done, that powers the iPad. It’s got the processor, the graphics, the I/O, the memory controller; everything in this one chip. And it screams.”

Note to Android fans: do not run. If you don’t know it already, there’s a big surprise for you.

You can imagine, that with those words, a curiosity I had not ever felt before started chewing me. What!? Apple doing their own chip? Apple has its own System-on-a-Chip? What is it? Is it still ARM-based? Is it an ARM Cortex-A8? Has Apple licensed the Cortex-A8 and made their own design? Is it just a plain Cortex-A8 at a smaller node process, with the Apple stamp running at 1 Ghz? What is it?

Of course, taking into account the iPad, many more questions arised: what’s the iPad’s screen resolution? How much memory does it have? Did Apple upgrade the graphics chip for the iPad? Though we quickly found out the iPad had a standard 4:3 1024×768 resolution, the remaining questions, were not answered so fast. Nothing was known about the Apple A4 chip after the unveiling event. Nothing.

A look into the past

So let’s start from the beginning. Apple had announced the original iPhone three years earlier, at a similar event, which, like pretty much every year, makes Apple the focus of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas even when Apple’s not even there. The original iPhone was powered by the cutting edge of its time, an ARM11 core. Specifically, the SoC was the Samsung S5L8900, which had a Samsung 32-bit RISC ARM processing core, the ARM1176JZ(FS)-S v1.0 at its heart. About six months later, it shipped in the United States.

Its successor was announced at 2008’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple’s most important Developer event. The ARM core was exactly the same, and the SoC was very similar, with the same 128 MB of RAM, but the core had different blocks attached to it: the iPhone 3G added 3G radios and Assisted GPS (A-GPS). The SoC was still being manufactured at a 90 nm process.

The third generation iPhone, the 3GS, left the ARM11 technology in the past and switched to a more powerful Samsung S5PC100 SoC, whose core was ARM Cortex-A8 based. Thus, the 3GS introduced, for the first time, a new hardware platform in the iPhone ecosystem. The 3GS also updated the graphics platform, and doubled the amount of memory. With the jump from ARM11 to the Cortex-A8 platform, many more hardware architecture improvements blessed the 3GS, and it was also the first iPhone built using a 65 nm process.

Now, up to this point, all iPhones had something in common: Samsung. All iPhones used Samsung SoCs, and what’s more, all chips were actually manufactured by Samsung; it’s not the same to be a chip maker than to be a chip foundry; Qualcomm and TI are chipmakers, but the don’t have foundries to physically make them; they partner with foundries like TSMC to actually make them and ship them to device manufacturers (OEMs).

You can now understand the shock of having Steve say that the iPad was powered by their own custom silicon, the A4 Chip.

The shadowed company

As it turns out, the A4 stands for “fourth-generation chip”. The A1 powered the original iPhone, the A2 powered the iPhone 3G, and the A3 the last iPhone that had been announced up to that point, the 3GS.

The Apple A4 in an iPad's motherboard. Image courtesy of iFixit.

Speculation on the iPad’s A4 chip began very soon. Because the iPad wouldn’t ship until April, unless a device leaked, there was no way of comparing the device’s motherboard and chip markings to know who the manufacturer was and to actually scan the silicon. This would eventually happen with the i4 a while before its release. But because there was no actual hardware at that time, all we had were a handful of different theories.

Some believed it was just another Samsung core or SoC with a bigger Apple badge on it and a new name, others said it was a full dual-core processor (ARM Cortex-A9 based, like Tegra 2); but the most incipient rumor was around Apple’s acquisition of PA Semi back in 2008. A semiconductor company, Apple had considered PA Semi to improve the chips for its Powerbook line back in the day (eventually, Apple would choose Intel), and when an ARM representative said that Apple had a full license, the one that allows you to tamper with the chip’s design while maintaining the ARMv7 architecture that defines a Cortex-A8, the most obvious solution is to give the ARM license to PA Semi and release your own SoC. This fired even more questions, because Apple was know designing its own silicon with its own division. There were even rumors saying that Apple was going to buy ARM Holdings, Inc., which would’ve killed the wonderful tech war we currently live in.

Of course, no one’s to blame. Knowing Apple had a license and its own semiconductor division, it was very easy to reach to this conclusion. The PA Semi chip rumor had a very important foothold: graphics. The 3GS left behind its predecessor’s PowerVR MBR graphics core and upped the game with a PowerVR SGX, specifically, the SGX 535. This was a big leap in graphics performance, and it also gave iOS (iPhone OS at that time) developers the chance to use OpenGL ES 2.0, which created a gap in the App Store between the two previous iPhones and the 3GS. Now, the screen resolution of all the iPhones and iPod touches sold at that point was 480×320 pixels, whereas the iPad featured a much higher resolution display. The issue here was not simply display resolution, because Android devices had hit 854×480 resolutions the previous holiday season, so 1024×768 pixels did not feel like a great leap forward for smartphone GPUs. The issue we all had with the SGX 535’s performance was different: the more pixels you need to draw, the more performance you need, and the iPad was shown playing iPhone games at 2X resolution! Did the PowerVR SGX 535 have so much performance? We all believed it didn’t. The idea of PA Semi getting a full ARM license meant Apple had access to ARM’s own GPU design, Mali. If the A4 was indeed built by PA Semi, common conception was that it wasn’t anything extra-ordinary. By extra-ordinary I mean that it wasn’t a fully customized core like Qualcomm’s SnapDragon. If that were the case, the answer to “why would Apple need 1500 PA Semi engineers to just put ARM blocks together?” was DRM; Apple supposedly wanted to prevent users from loading illegal content, and it wanted to have that kind of protection at a hardware level.

Nevertheless, something true came out of all this: the A4 was based on ARM architecture.

The true story

Meet Intrinsity. Or better still, meet EVSX. In 1997, this small semiconductor company, founded by ex-employees of Exponential Technologies, changed its name to Intrinsity, while on the process of designing their own Digital Signal Processor, or DSP; one of those many small specialized cores that form a smartphone SoC. Upon finishing it, in 2002, they found out they had a problem: they were not known. Their core was fast, insanely fast, but no one wanted to bet on a semiconductor startup. Thus, Intrinsity found itself successfully making chips for other (bigger) semiconductor companies like ATI and AMCC. Their first breakthrough came when ARM decided to partner with them to make a special version of the Cortex-R4. The end result? The FastCore ARM Cortex-R4, also known as Cortex-R4X. Once again, Intrinsity’s engineers had fulfilled their job: the Cortex-R4X was faster and more efficient than ARM’s version. However, ARM did not see a scalable future in Intrinsity’s technology, and believed that they could not make the ARM Cortex-A8 faster than its original design. In September 2008, Samsung went up against ARM, and asked Intrinsity to develop a custom version of the Cortex-A8; a Cortex-A8 perfected with Intrinsity’s technology. It was codenamed Hummingbird.

So what did Intrinsity do with the Cortex-A8 design? Over the first 5 years of Intrinsity (1997-2002), they used their DSP project to develop their own technology around an innovative but yet untapped form of CPU design: a form of dynamic logic, called domino logic.

Dynamic logic, in general, has only one purpose: speed up circuits. The main principle behind it is simple: remove the parts of the CPU chip’s internal circuit layout that are slow. This is achieved by making the combinatorial parts of the chip dependent on the clock in order to obtain an output. You see, a combinational circuit does not need a clock signal; it’s used, for example, to perform functions that are fixed and do not need to store memory, such as math operations (add, substract, multiply, divide, increase, decrease, etc.). Sequential circuit blocks, on the other hand, nearly always require a clock signal, and they’reused when an operation requires some sort of memory.  Making the chip’s combinational logic blocks depend on a clock signal then, seems wrong, strange, and if anything, a disadvantage, because the circuits depend on the clock. But it has a goal: switching to much faster transistors (switches between small and big circuit blocks) you cannot use so much with the standard (static) logic.

Plus, the use of dynamic logic means you can make extensive use of advanced power-saving techniques that are natural in sequential circuits, specifically, clock gating. With clock gating, we can make a circuit block’s clock to effectively stop, which disables the whole block’s functionality, drastically reducing the block’s power consumption. This ties-in perfectly with our use of a clock in combinational circuits, because now we can “stop” them, whereas before, they were always consuming the same amount power; used or not used.

However, dynamic logic is not perfect, it has its downsides. Such a chip is a lot harder to “debug”; in other words, it’s harder to detect during tests with real silicon if there are mistakes in the chip’s circuit layout. This is because the chip cannot be stopped; in other words, you cannot “pause” the chip to check its current state, to check the values of its internal registers step by step, like software developers do while debugging their programs. Also, because the chip depends a lot more in the clock signal to run, it actually requires a high clock speed to work efficiently. You heard right, it needs to have a high clock speed, because if it doesn’t run fast enough, the circuits will leak their electric charge, rendering the chip’s logic useless.

Don’t be fooled though, because that’s not hard enough. There’s even more reasons why dynamic logic, despite being so much faster and potentially efficient than static logic, has not been adopted before like Intrinsity has. Internally, logic elements called “gates” which are part of any circuit may incorrectly cause another gate, specifically one which depends on their output, to lose its charge and thus, malfunction. This is solved by using domino logic which, ironically, introduces a slow component as a solution, a gate. (For the techies: the whole idea is to use as many PMOS or NMOS transistors as possible, because PFET transistors such as the ones used to implement an inverter gate, are slow) This has consequences, because we cannot make use of this particular gate if it’s not for this specific purpose so, in order to improve the design, Intrinsity needs to “transform” the original design to avoid using this gate wherever it decides to speed up the chip’s circuit layout. This means standard tools used in chip design cannot be used to design a chip like this one; in fact, many semiconductor companies who wish to use domino logic prefer to make the design modifications nearly by hand!

In those first five years, Intrinsity found a way to improve and design fast and power-efficient chips using domino logic, developing their own tools in the process, and the resulting technology was christened as “Fast14”. In truth, what Samsung had actually asked Intrinsity for, was to develop a FastCore version of the ARM Cortex-A8 chip, which was publicly announced to be production-ready in July 2009. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the Apple A4.

Apple A4 inside the i4

Common conception is that Apple could’ve been behind Samsung to partner with Intrinsity to develop a faster ARM Cortex-A8 for the iPad back in 2008. But regardless of who had the idea of approaching Intrinsity, what we know for sure is that the same CPU core powered both Apple and Samsung’s most important mobile products of 2010: the iPad, the iPhone 4, the Galaxy Tab, the Galaxy S family of devices, and the Google Nexus S. And here comes the real shocker: we know this because Apple bought Intrinsity.

It was known in April 2010, when reports said Apple had spent money buying mobile ad services provider Quattro Wireless, online music service LaLa, and Intrinsity. How much money Apple paid for it the semiconductor company is up for debate (50$ or 121$ million), but one thing is quite clear: the technology developed by Intrinsity is now only available to Apple. No one else will be able to use the experience gathered by Intrinsity on applying dynamic logic to ARM designs at this level. For know, we know Samsung can use the chip in its devices, and they might even be able to sell it to other manufacturers, because the Android-powered chinese iPhone 4 knockoff Meizou M9 uses the Hummingbird SoC, but what’s important is tomorrow, not today. Intrinsity finished their work on the custom Cortex-A8 (a process known as hardening) in July 2009, and it’s possible Samsung asked Intrinsity to do the same with the Cortex-A9 design; in fact, it’s possible Intrinsity was still working on this new design when Apple bought them. Samsung announced their dual-core processor, codenamed Orion, late last year but, who’s behind it? Did Apple allow Intrinsity to finish it for Samsung? Are Apple and Samsung sharing another applications processor? Or did Apple take Intrinsity’s dual-core design away from Samsung and force them to look for another solution? In time, we hope to find out.

Apple’s A4 and Samsung’s Hummingbird share the same applications processor core, so the interfaces with the rest of the SoC too, are the same. In practice, both SoCs are built using Samsung’s 45 nm process foundry, and both are coupled with 512 MB of RAM in actual devices. However, there’s a limit to what they have in common. Apple continued their two-year GPU platform cycle and kept the PowerVR SGX 535 for the A4, whereas Samsung chose to put some more kick in their Hummingbird platform: a PowerVR SGX 540. Apple, like with all the previous iPhones, downclocked the i4, to about 800Mhz, down from the iPad’s 1Ghz; Samsung, on the contrary, kept the 1Ghz clock in their tablet and smartphones. Thus, Samsung kept the performance crown, but Apple gained something else: battery life. PA Semi is supposed to have worked on the A4 at a SoC block level, improving its battery life. Plus, Apple was not happy if it did not add something to the iPhone 4 that did not make the device a game changer, so they added a gyroscope, an industry first, to the A4.

The closing

Enough is enough, I think. I hope to have proved my point: The A4/Hummingbird core is an exceptional piece of silicon, which took a huge amount of time, passion and talent in order to come to market. What intrigues me more though, is the fact that sometimes I just take it for granted when I unlock it in my hand. With luck, maybe one of the ten thousand times you’ll unlock it throughout its life, you won’t.

So here we are. In a world filled with dual-core CPU devices, where smartphones are becoming so “smart”, that  they can actually provide a netbook experience. It’s actually very easy now to start commending LG, Motorola and nVidia for their efforts, for what they’re about to bring into this world. But what about before? Who was the bleeding edge before these three partnered to destroy whatever was thought as “high-end” before?

Of course, how could we forget? It was the Samsung Galaxy S class of smartphones. Ain’t I right? No, I’m not. It was actually this device.

Google Nexus S

Yes, right now you’re about to jump at me, and say “but that’s actually a Galaxy S device!!”. Well, it’s not. That’s the Nexus S. And whatever the similarities in hardware (we’ll discuss that later), it’s not a part of the Galaxy S family. It’s part of the Nexus family.

Like its predecessor, Google denied its existence. Rumors where floating around the Internet about “Google leaving HTC behind for Samsung”, and partnering with them for their second attempt at their own device, which was christened “Nexus Two” by us, the press.

Actually, rumors about the Nexus Two began just days after the Nexus One’s release. Some thought it was a Nexus One with a hard keyboard, and others thought it was a Motorola Droid on steroids (faster CPU) re-branded as the Nexus Two. We were told, in the end, that plans for a Nexus One with a hard-keyboard for the enterprise were real, but they were called out. Then we got our biggest blow; Google was shutting down its online store. Later, the Nexus One would follow, becoming only available to Android Market registered developers.

The Nexus One, turned into a Developer Phone

Speculation said Google had failed with its attempt at bringing their smartphone experience directly to consumers; that manufacturers were mad at Google for competing directly with them (the NX1 was the first GigaHertz-class Android smartphone, and was the only phone sporting the latest release of Android at that time), plus, carriers were furious for being used as just “dumb pipes” (well, that’s actually what all carriers are afraid of, to be honest). Nevertheless, you get the picture: no one thought there’d be a second Nexus device. But there was.

Google announced Android 2.2, Froyo, at their most important developer event, Google I/O, last May. By then, we already knew Froyo’s successor would be called Gingerbread, and we were even shown parts of its UI in the second day’s keynote demos (I, for one, was there, but didn’t even realize the voice recognition UI looked dramatically different, not even after having Froyo in my own device). Throughout the summer, the press kept speculating about Gingerbread’s features, and about its release date. In the last days of October, we were shown a video of a giant Gingerbread statue being placed at Google’s campus; a tradition which signaled that a new Android release was finished.

The clock started ticking, of course. A timeframe for Gingerbread’s release was expected: two weeks, three weeks, a month at most. No one thought I’d take nearly two months before both Gingerbread and the Nexus S would became real.

Perhaps the most disappointing part of this announcement, was the fact that it was a simple entry in the Android Developers Blog, a Gingerbread introduction video, an updated Google Phone site for the Nexus S, and no show.

Yes, I admit it, I love the “show”. And no matter what you think, it’s not about bringing us to the same level as Apple. Don’t kid yourself: that’s impossible. Apple is Apple, and if we want Android to be a lot more than just “the other option that’s not Apple”, then we have to start by believing it ourselves. We have to start making choices to make that true, to make Android more than “the other modern OS”. And no, the show is not about pointing at what we do different than Apple; what Vic did at last year’s I/O was wrong, because for me the show is all about making people feel that your product took an effort. That’s one of the reasons why Apple products sell: they tell you, the consumer, that what you’re holding in your hands is special: it took hundreds of hours out of people’s lives to bring it to you; to make it real; to make it more than just a render or a product prototype. And that’s what I miss. If Google sells a device under its Nexus brand, they should make the whole world know it’s a different product: a Nexus device.

And boy, is the Nexus S special. It carries the best hardware you could buy in 2010: the best combination of CPU/GPU, the highest amount of RAM (I think, leaving aside only the HTC Desire HD), a 4″ SuperAMOLED screen (second only to Apple’s “Retina Display”), a gyroscope, and an NFC sensor. And if that wasn’t enough, it was blessed like its predecessor: it introduced a brand new Android release. Only this time, unlike the Nexus One, Gingerbread had the entire mobile tech world “in pause” waiting for it.

A marriage. I know it’s a used line, but the Nexus S, like its predecessor, enjoys the touch of having been nurtured by Google. And by this I mean the core component of every computing device: drivers. That’s the key difference between all Android devices and Google’s open source copy of Android: the drivers; the software which unites the hardware components of a device, to the software which commands it. By having the same company that designs the Operating System tailor, or at least “guide” the manufacturer about how the device’s drivers should exactly work, you get a device that gets more out of its hardware, even if there’s another class of phones, called “the Galaxy S family”, with the same CPU/GPU and RAM combination.

But in the end, we’re left with what a lot of people predicted: a lost phone, a forgotten warrior, eclipsed by 2011’s hardware. Google hasn’t disclosed sales of the Nexus S, but before its launch, many speculated that Gingerbread’s delay was due to Google/Samsung execs deciding to leave Hummingbird, the codename for both the Galaxy S devices and the NXS’ System-on-a-Chip aside, and jump directly to Orion, Samsung’s own dual-core processor platform. This would’ve made the Nexus S cause a controversy only similar (if not significantly greater) than its predecessor: it would’ve been the first of its class Android device, combining a new level of hardware with a new level of software, making all of the (at that time) predicted CES dual-core announcements look useless; after all, why would you buy an LG Optimus 2X, an Atrix 4G or a Droid Bionic when you have the Nexus S, which comes carrier-unlocked, is (allegedly) already on the market, is the first to receive and update to the latest Android release, has Google’s stamp on it, ships with perfected drivers and has the kick of being the first to have two application processors inside?

Official image of the Google Nexus S promoting EA's Need for Speed : Shift

History though, reminds us that even then, the NXS wouldn’t have been the huge bestseller we believe, for one reason: people want to see devices at a store before buying them, and most importantly, they need to see ads, or they won’t feel they’re serious products. People are not like you and me, who love knowing everything we can about what it takes to bring one of these devices to market, no matter how small the detail is, and what’s even more shocking, we’re capable of buying this phone without even seeing it working once! That’s why the NX1 failed; not because it was unlocked or had a huge price, but because people needed to “feel” a device before actually investing on it.

So then, here we are, at the end of this huge post, thinking only one thing: what’ve we learnt? Nothing. If anything, the Nexus S is a symbol, a symbol of what Google thinks is the right way to actually build an Android device. And if history plays it right, we’ll have our third Nexus device by the end of this year, hopefully from Motorola this time, sporting the latest Android release and a dual-core processor, probably an nVidia Tegra 2 (or 3?). The NXS will not be forgotten, because it’s the flagship device for Android software, not for its hardware. And hopefully, because this time it’s being sold through retail stores, we’ll actually see more people waving their phones with the latest Android release than ever before.

The new Motorola Mobility logo

You did not believe nVidia was going to take all the glory, right? Tell me, you did not honestly believe I’d forgotten about the inventor of the mobile phone. Because even if I did, even if I had forgotten Motorola’s place in our hearts, no one in the tech world could possibly skip giving Motorola some well-deserved time after its performance at this year’s CES.

We kick-start with the “Mobility” suffix. If you haven’t heard, Motorola split up into two distinct companies: Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions. The reason is, Motorola as we knew it was not just another handset manufacturer, it was also a provider for wireless network equipment, and in 2008, the decision was made to split up the company, allowing the smartphones division to better concentrate in what it used to do well: build successful devices. By “used” I mean way back in 2008, when Motorola was perceived as stuck behind the RAZR without being able to bring innovation to the table. As you know, it all changed after Motorola married Google’s mobile operating system and delivered the successful Droid.

I’d like to believe that 2010 was not such a good year as 2009 for Motorola. Why? Well, even though they delivered the Droid X and showed HTC they’re not the only ones capable of making a smartphone with a monster of a screen (Dell’s Streak destroys both, though), they did not cause such a big impact like the original Droid. I don’t know how sales have gone, neither of the X, the Droid 2, the Droid 2 R2-D2 Edition, the Devour, the Droid Pro or all the other smartphones Moto sells in South America and in the Far East, but I still think they made less noise, specially after Samsung ate both HTC & Motorola for dinner becoming the Android manufacturer with most sales in 2010.

Enter 2011.

The Motorola Atrix 4G

When CES 2011 hit, Motorola took the world, and the tech industry with it, by surprise. They announced the Motorola Atrix 4G in partnership with AT&T; a device with astonishing specifications. It came with an nVidia Tegra 2 dual-core processor, a 4 inch quarter-HD display (960×540), 5MP Camera, HD Video Recording, Front-facing camera, HDMI output, Fingerprint sensor (not kidding), 1930 mAh battery (again, not kidding), Froyo (I know, it should be Gingerbread), and a whooping full GigaByte of RAM! A phone with more RAM than many of the old desktop computers we can still find everyday! Unbelievable. Still, this wasn’t enough for Motorola, nVidia and AT&T, who wanted to showcase the power of this new generation of smartphones (third generation if we’re talking about Android), and they went a step further:

Yup. It’s not a metaphor. You’d think the Atrix is metaphorically as powerful as a netbook, and even if it is, it’s actually real. What the ad implies is true. Motorola will sell a webtop, a netbook-sized case which comes with keyboard, trackpad, screen, battery and a dock for your Motorola Atrix 4G. You plug-in the Atrix 4G, you start the WebTop app, and voila! The future where smartphones start replacing classic computers (netbooks, laptops & desktops), begins today:

Motorola also took a cue from Samsung and their strategy of “build a smartphone, tweak it, and release it in many carriers” and announced the Droid Bionic for Verizon, which is very similar to the Atrix 4G, but with some differences; for starters there’s no WebTop and you get the “standard” 512 MegaBytes of RAM. The Droid Bionic has a larger screen (4.3″) and 8MP camera.

Now, under normal circumstances, you’d think that this is enough, right? The Atrix 4G and the Droid Bionic have both jumped to the pinnacle of the high-end smartphones hardware-wise, and they’ll also have access to nVidia’s Tegra Zone, so users of these devices are bound to be the first to really discover Android gaming. But the best is always left for the ending. This is the device that, I truly believe, can make Motorola’s 2011 the best year in its history, the Motorola Xoom tablet.

Motorola Xoom, the first tablet with Android 3.0

The Xoom was announced in partnership with Google, nVidia and Verizon. It will be the first tablet to ship with Android 3.0, also known as “Honeycomb”, which is a special release of the mobile OS targetted specifically for tablets. There will be no Android 3.0 for smartphones; instead, the next major release for smartphones will be “Ice Cream sandwich” (yet again, not kidding).

So why is the Xoom so special? Is it the specs? Dual-core nVidia Tegra 2, full GigaByte of RAM, 10.1-inch capacitive touchscreen display with a 1280×800 (16:10) resolution, 32GB built-in memory, 5MP camera, HD Video Recording, 2MP Front-Facing Camera, 10 hours of video playback, USB 2.0, HDMI output, Stereo speakers, upgradeable to Verizon 4G (LTE),… No, it’s not the specs.

They’re incredible, they really are. But it takes more than just specs to make a big hit in the market. The original Droid did not have a 1GHz CPU, but it sold more units than the later-released Nexus One, which did. It has possibly even sold more units than its successor, the Droid 2.

The opportunity here, is in the software. It’ll be the first tablet to ship with Honeycomb, possibly as soon as next month, and with Verizon’s marketing support, it’ll be a huge seller. It’ll be the first real tablet to challenge the iPad in every way, being light years ahead of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, and being the first one to possibly open a new market for developers: the tablet app market, a market of apps designed for real Android tablets.

Bottomline. The last time Motorola debuted a device with a new version of Android in Verizon, it became a hit, for all three of them (Google, Moto & Big Red). I expect no less from the Xoom and Honeycomb, and what makes me feel sure is that even though that there are a few Honeycomb tablets announced, including the LG G-Slate which was also shown at CES, is that the Xoom looks like a winner. LG, Asus, Dell and all the other tablet manufacturers might’ve not gained consumers’ trust like Motorola has in its home ground. In the rest of the world though, it’s another story.

Clearly LG, which announced the first dual-core smartphone in the world, the LG Optimus 2X, plus its Honeycomb tablet, the G-Slate, deserves some attention. However, it’s not a CES winner because the Atrix 4G & the Droid Bionic go the extra mile against the Optimus 2X, and because I believe the Xoom will prove to be more popular than the G-Slate.

Carry on, Moto. You’ve got our blessing.

The proudness nVidia must be feeling right now, as CES 2011 has wrapped up, must be boundless. Rewind just a year ago: nVidia announced their second System-on-a-Chip (SoC) platform for embedded devices, the Tegra 2 chip. Previously, it’s predecessor had only been used in one mildly successful product, Redmond’s own “iPod killer” attempt: the Zune HD (Kins don’t count for this mater).

Leaving aside whether the Zune HD was good or not, nVidia believed, just under a year ago, that they’d missed the point with their first product, the original Tegra However, they told themselves they wouldn’t allow the same to happen with their best product yet, the Tegra 2. After a much-anticipated presentation, and a lot of acclaim at last year’s CES, nothing else was known about Tegra 2 being used in a commercial product. The only thing we knew about it was that it was ready, and that’s it. The most powerful smartphone processor ever made available, was left inside nVidia’s shelves.

Fast forward to this year’s CES, and nVidia’s hit the table very hard. No one, absolutely no one came to the party showcasing dual core processors in a working device; not Qualcomm, not Samsung, not Freescale, not Marvell, not Apple (I know, that was a joke).

It’s true, though; Qualcomm did show dual-core prototypes behind the scenes, but they weren’t ready to show it in a product. I guess that’ll have to wait for MWC next month. Texas Instruments (TI) is not on the list because they later admitted being the makers of the chip behind RIM’s BlackBerry Playbook, which sports a dual-core smartphone processor.

Even more intriguing is that even after spending one year picking up dust on a shelf, NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 looks like the  most powerful combination of CPU+GPU you will be able to find for now. I’m waiting for the usual candidates to see if they can dethrone Tegra 2’s current status.  Qualcomm has its dual core SnapDragon with its revised Adreno GPU, while Samsung, TI and Apple will develop their own dual-core CPU and add Imagination Technologies’ latest PowerVR SGX Series5XT graphics processor.  Until then, Tegra 2 is powering tomorrow’s vision of many people, and nVidia hasn’t stopped at just pushing hardware beyond what’s conceived as possible with a mobile phone; they’re also building a gaming infrastructure by pulling in game developers and making them push their chip until the very end, with the promise of an exclusive app that’ll showcase and sell all of their hard work: nVidia Tegra Zone.

In short, nVidia’s done well. Last year, they were virtually stuck with this monster they could not put into consumer’s hands. Probably, a lot of it had to do with them chosing the wrong platform: Windows Mobile. Then, they shifted their focus to another green monster: Android. And from what we’ve seen, to say “the future looks promising”, would be an unprecedented understatement in the history of technology press.

But, as always, the fight moves on. nVidia claims it has nearly finished Tegra 2’s successor, the Tegra 3 chip. Whatever that means from the technology & performance standpoints, nVidia’s rivals have a lot of work to do. Apple might not feel the pressure of having the best hardware chip combination like they had until the Nexus S, but certainly, they’ll have to upgrade to dual-core processors as well. As for the rest of big Android chipmakers, they’re already feeling Tegra 2’s heat. Not only do they need to get all the lost ground back, they also face a unique challenge, which is that Google might’ve chosen Tegra 2 as the base reference for Android 3.0, the Android release targeted exclusively for tablet devices.

The race, goes on.

Verizon CDMA iPhone 4

And, here we, go. Finally, after years and years, what begun with a “No, thanks” statement, finished with a “Today we’re partnering with a giant of the industry, and that’s Apple.”.

As you’ll recall, Apple went to Verizon while they were looking for a carrier to bring their first smartphone to market. At that time, carriers and not manufacturers controlled each and every detail of the devices sold. Even though the full control is still not in hands of every manufacturer, it took the industry a big entrance by Apple to realize things had to change.

And of course, it had to be Apple, a company who does bot abide to anyone’s philosophy but it’s own, to start the fire. Apple started knocking at Cingular’s door for a contract, spent months waiting for a final answer, turned to Verizon, and got rejected. In the end, Cingular (which turned into AT&T), came around, and the deal meant the iPhone was exclusive to the largest UMTS carrier in America.

What follows, is the story we all know. AT&T’s network began to struggle slowly, up to the point where the iPhone became renowned for its “dropped call syndrome”. I still remember, less than a year ago, when an AT&T executive promised the solution would arrive the following summer. At that time, AT&T had already made a huge investment to upgrade its network, but it barely made any difference. That statement meant that only one thing could change: the iPhone. And it did, with its now famous antenna.

Throughout the iPhone’s solitary walk among AT&T’s towers, rumors kept on surfacing about the panacea for the device’s network problems: Big Red’s network. The problem was, we all thought that Verizon’s relationship with Apple was not good, mostly due to all the thrashing between AT&T & Verizon’s ads. However, today we found out the truth: both Verizon and Apple have been working together since 2008 to bring the iPhone into Big Red’s hands.

The struggle, was mostly technical. You see, two of the most important carriers in America (Verizon & Sprint), use CDMA as their wireless technology. This comes as a strike, knowing that most of the world, including AT&T and T-Mobile, rely on the UMTS standard. This meant that the Verizon iPhone required not only a special antenna, it also required a different radio chip. What’s more; one of the advantages of building an iPhone for AT&T is that by making the device penta-band, Apple only had to build one model to fit the world’s UMTS networks. Furthermore, the Verizon iPhone would not be able to call & transfer 3G data at the same time, due to technology constraints. Something used against Verizon by Apple in their AT&T ads.

But everything has a solution, of course. The current wave of 4G technologies means you can have a CDMA phone that can make calls and transfer data at the same time, by relying on the traditional CDMA (Ev-Do) technology for voice and on the new 4G (LTE in Verizon’s case) for data. In fact, a CDMA device launched last summer just a few days before the iPhone 4 achieved this feat: the Sprint HTC Evo 4G.

In the end, the new Verizon iPhone 4 does not rely on LTE for simultaneous voice and data transfer. But then again, it doesn’t need to. By just putting an iPhone 4 inside Verizon’s network, Apple has made sure millions of customers will flock from all national carriers into Big Red’s massive network. Whether the largest wireless carrier of America will be able to cope with the increased network demand without falling on is knees, remains yet to be seen.

Once again, Apple stole CES, without even being there.

Official image of Infinity Blade for iOS

Apparently, everyone has jumped to the conclusion that the world of mobile gaming is awesome, and that only good things can come from now onwards. But everything’s not rainbow-colored in the real world.

You see, at the end of 2010, two things happened. Two different companies, who have grown to become one of the most respected names in the gaming industry, led by two different geniuses, released their own vision of what a real mobile game is, and what it should be able to do. Had these games been released, instead, by any other ISV without such a big name or impact, those titles would have just been left in the dust as “pretty to look at, but nothing much to game with”. Unfortunately it isn’t the case, and now the whole world can sit down and imagine what kind of things can be achieved inside your mobile phone.

John Carmack at QuakeCon, courtesy of Kotaku

Both stories began this last summer, first, John Carmack showed a simplified version of id Tech 5 running Rage at QuakeCon, and later, at this year’s Apple September Special Event, Epic Games showcased and released the Epic Citadel demo (which, by the way, has been shown running on a Tegra 2 powered Android phone at CES), a game running above the Unreal Engine 3. Both developers teased games that were too good looking to be possible; they achieved graphics that would’ve let us stunned just a couple of years ago, with just an iPhone! Okay, I know, the iPhone 4 is one of the most powerful devices currently available. But still, my point remains. What was even more unbelievable though, is that both developers kept their promises, and released their games a couple of months ago.

I’m not going to enter the fray of which game is better, which game has been more successful, which technology is better, or who’s the better game developer; they’re both massive technical achievements, and they’ll possibly be looked at in the future as “the games that changed what a phone could do”. But what I’d simply like to state is that for many game developers, it’s going to get a bit harder from now on.

You see, the key “call to arms” of mobile game development has been the fact that, in many ways, it’s been a way back in time, a time where developers were known as “bedroom coders”, because they’d use the shelter of their homes to build games after work or after school, and release them on their own. That’s how many of the big guys started, including id Software, and that’s something mobile game development brought us back. For good.

Official image of Rage for iOS

It’s what’s been fueling many of the overnight millionaire stories we’ve heard about the App Store, and it’s what keeps filling in the Android Market, the App Store, the Palm App Catalog, etc. of new and innovative games. It’s people making games because they want to, at a time when mostly everyone else is sleeping, watching TV, or trying to get laid. There’s nothing to lose, there’s no fear of losing an investment, there’s just pure commitment, commitment to make a vision come true. What’s even more rewarding about this story though, is that at this time, many of those stories have allowed these people to change their boring jobs and start making games for a living, and keep pushing innovation, keep pushing their dreams, making them come true, in your phone.

Now look; I’m not against id, Epic, EA, or any major developer/publisher for entering the mobile gaming space with both feet. We can all benefit from them, even if the gaming industry cannot fully commit its money, technology and know-how in risky and innovative projects. What I’m here to say, is that like the PC in the past, the days of massive amounts of small and independent game developers, serving new and fresh games directly to their consumers, is slowly coming to an end. There’ll always be independent developers, but not like there are now.

So, if you’re out there, and you’re thinking of making your own fully fledged mobile game, do it now. There’s a lot of stuff left by the big guys to do, and there’s still time to break into the market. And if, on the contrary, you’re a game consumer, enjoy the amounts of freelance and independent games you can find in your app store today; before you notice, they’ll be a thing of the past.