Future of mobile computing

Posted by maniac_allstar on May 4, 2012 10:06 pm 0

Lately I've been debating whether to buy a new phone, or tablet. After two months of trying to decide what to get I have decided to go with a tablet. The iPad 2 specifially. I have eye'd it for a while and the new model with 32nm processor has made it even more enticing to me. My current phone is the Motorola Droid 3. The way I use it I would greatly apprecitae 4g lte...and Motoblur (I know Motorola doesn't call it that anymore but its the same thing) is really starting to irritate me. So slugish....

The Samsung Galaxy S3 benchmarks have come out on AnandTech. They are what made me think more about what I was going to do. I was ready to go out and buy a Galaxy Nexus off contract. But those benchmarks definitively changed my mind. Head over to AnandTech and look what scores a quad-core Cortex A9 got. Imagine the scores a quad-core Cortex A15 would get. My upgrade is ready in 11 months. When that comes around I think quad-core Cortex 28nm A15's SoC's with integrated lte basebands should be available. The power efficiency and speed of a platform like that will probably change mobile computing. Not in the sense of the original iPhone entering the market, but a change that improves the quality of our mobile technology. Data will be transferred, created, and processed both online and locally very fast with low power usage.

I have just talked about hardware so far, software really matters in the end user experience. Next to me on my desk is a unmodified Motorola Droid 3 and a Kindle Fire rooted with CM9 reloaded on it. The Kindle Fire is a significant amount faster than the Droid 3. They are both running very, very similiar hardware inside. The difference between the two (the user experience side of things)? The software.

The software makes the Kindle a joy to use. Ice Cream sandwich is amazing. Gingerbread Motoblur is not. At all.

Back to the hardware: A quad-core Cortex 28nm A15's SoC' with a integrated lte baseband combined with ICS (or its evolution Jellybean) phone will be fast, powerful, very usable, and power efficient. I put big emphasis on power efficiency here for a good reason. I personally use my phone like a desktop computer. Work, games, web browsing, video watching, music, etc. It is rather slow on some things, is a pain to use (the system just plain sucks sometimes) and dies after about 2-3 1/2 hours. If I went out and bought a Galaxy Nexus gone would be the sluggishness and unusability but I would still have to deal with running out of power. I'm not going to drop $650 for 2-3 1/2 hours of use when I can get the new A15 platforms in 11 months for a much more reasonable price. I am however going to drop $400 for a great tablet that just got even sweeter with it's 32nm processor.

I realize I may have come off seeming like I think the current generation phones suck. They don't. The Galaxy Nexus, One X, and upcoming Galaxy S3 are all good phones (I'm sure the S3 will be a good phone) They are all good phones for $300 and below. Not $650 when some game changing hardware is around the corner.

Well these are just my thoughts...more like a ramble haha. I'd like to hear what you guys think about the current hardware and software and how it will be in the near future (a year from now). Oh and if you happen to notice I would appreciate it if you guys pointed out any spelling or grammatical mistakes, I'm preparing for a English Exam.