TechWire

Author - Moses

Tag Heuer connected smart watch

The leading Swiss luxury watch maker Tag Heuer has recently entered the smart watch market. Few days back Tag Heuer has unveiled its first Android Wear device called Connected for 1500$. This device is inspired by their leading mechanical watch brand “Carrera”, and this Connected wearable device has a 1.5inch round LTPS LCD screen with 360 X 360 resolution (240PPI). It’s powered by a 1.6GHz dual core Intel processor which is normally operates at 500MHz, 1GB RAM and 4GB internal storage. This connected device has a 400mAh battery, Tag Heuer says this battery can hold up to 25 hours or normal usage. Unlike other wearable devices This Tag Connected watch comes with 46mm diameter grade 2 titanium watch face and the company has included seven wrist band colors plus it is IP67 certified for water resistance.

Tag Heuer connected 2

Tag Heuer offered another amazing option for the buyers. As a watch maker Tag Heuer knows normally a smart watch will outdate within two years so they have decided trade your smart watch with a mechanical TAG Heuer Carrera watch if you are willing to pay extra 1500$ for them. So if you are a Tag fan, first you can test the smart watch if you don’t like it you can trade it with your favorite Carrera watch.

Tag Heuer connected 1

Huawei launches Mate 8 with Kirin 950

International Data Corporation (IDC) recently stated that Samsung, Apple and Huawei are the top three mobile vendors for the year 2015. Samsung owns 21.4%, Apple 13.9% and Huawei 8.7% respectively. The important thing to note is that these three vendors build their own system on a chip (CPU) for their smartphones.

Few days back Huawei has conducted an event at Beijing, China for their newest processor launch for upcoming flagship smartphone Huawei Mate 8. This newest processor called Kirin 950 has eight cores with big.LITTLE setup, four high performance Cortex A72 cores running at 2.3GHz and four Cortex A53 energy efficient cores running at 1.8GHz, plus it has a small co-processor called i5 which is in always sensing mode. Kirin 950 has a Mali T880MP4 GPU, according to Huawei this GPU has twice the performance compared to previous generation Kirin 930’s GPU. This chips supports cat. 6 LTE.

huawei-kirin-950 chip

Huawei thought about performance and energy efficiency more thoroughly. For that Huawei has built this chip using 16nm manufacturing process and they have conformed this new chip will be 40% more powerful and 60% less power hungry plus that i5 sensing processor will consume only 6.5mA compared to the previous generation which consumed 90mA of power. So if the device have 3500mAh of battery then you can have 10 hours of normal use with this processor.huawei-kirin-950 antutu 83000

Before I start this benchmarking performance category I would like to say Samsung’s Exynos 7520 (powers Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6) system on a chip was the world leader before Kirin 950 which gives jaw–dropping 4970 points in multi core and 1486 single core points in Geekgench and in Antutu. It reaches 65000 points. But this Huawei chip reaches 6096 multi core points and 1909 point single core points in Geekbench while in Antutu it reaches up to 83000 points.

Is Facebook losing its popularity among teenagers?

Piper Jaffray semiannual survey of American teens has conducted a new survey about what are the popular social networks between teens and found out the new social media trend is Instagram. This research company Piper Jaffray release surveys twice a year and they are doing this for the last 15 years continuously. For this last survey they have contacted 9400 teens ages between 13 to 19 and 56% of them are males. As you can see in this chart Instagram had a substantial growth between year 2012 to 2015 with 33% share, and Twitter took the second place with 20% and third place went to Snapchat with 19% share. It is important to note that Facebook took only 15% in 2015 but back in 2012 they had 42% share among teenagers.

Piper Jaffray semi annual survey 2015

I know it’s really hard to come to a conclusion with this single survey, some other survey companies like Pew Research and Forrester Research came out with different results. According to Pew Research 41% of the teens between 13 to 17 are using Facebook and 20% for them are use Instagram and 11% of them are Snapchat. Last summer Forrester has conducted a survey with 4517 teenagers (aged between 12 to 17), according to them Facebook dominates the Social media.

iPhone 6S, 6S Plus chipgate – Samsung chip vs TSMC

Most of you know Apple has recently launched their flagship smartphone iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus, and It features the Apple’s latest smartphone chip inside called Apple A9. Normally Apple lets the other manufacturers to manufacture their SoC’s, for e.g. in 2013 Samsung manufactured Apple’s A7 for iPhone 5S and in 2014 TSMC manufactured Apple’s A8 chip for iPhone 6. However in 2015 Apple has decided to use both manufacturers to manufacture their latest A9 chip to minimize their dependency on one manufacturer. By this time Samsung has already started manufacturing 14nm chips for their own smartphones so they decided manufacture this Apple A9 under 14nm, on the other hand TSMC has made the Apple’s A9 chip under 16nm.

In general terms smaller the nm better the performance and more efficient right? Yes, so Samsung should perform better right? Yes, but unfortunately Samsung’s chip doesn’t perform as expected. Few days after the release of this iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, geeks and bloggers have started test these two variants and found out that Samsung Chip based phone has less battery life and heats more. After this incident Apple has officially stated that those two model have minor differences but it will effect only 2-3% of the battery life. However, results show big differences between these two models.

Samsung-vs-TSMC-iPhone-6S chipgate (1)

As you can see in this picture, ARS Technica website did some tests using (two iPhone 6S models) some benchmark tools. According to them if you use more CPU intensive apps TSMC version iPhone will give you 28% more battery life than the Samsung version. and at the same time Forbes writer Ewan Spence mentioned “Third party tests by AnTuTu, GeekBench, and MyDrivers showed that under high loads that demanded ultimate performance, the TSMC-powered iPhone was offering up to two hours more battery life than the similarly set up Samsung-powered iPhones.”

If you are planning to buy a new iPhone, and if this problem is a concern, then you can check the model by installing Lirum Device Info Lite – System Monitor. If it’s N71AP (6s) or N66AP (6s Plus), then your phone has the Samsung chip or if it’s N71MAP (6s) or N66MAP (6s Plus), then it’s a TSMC powered iPhone.

Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 edge

Back in 2012 Samsung overtook “Nokia” the mobile leader for 14 years. And Samsung announced best profits in that year too. Since 2008 Samsung has allocated a lot of money for mobile research and development. From that year they have gained mobile share, quarter by quarter and year by year till 2012.  Yep,  since 2012 to the present year Samsung is not doing well. For that there are so many reasons behind it. Some say their Android Touchwiz is too complicated and laggy, so much bloatware, (so much replica phones it’s my personal thought) etc etc. But I think Samsung has understood the consumer needs and problems and recently they have promised they will remove every unwanted software and that they will polish the OS for better user experience.

Samsung mobile market share

Few days back Samsung has announced their flagship Android phone Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge at Mobile World Congress. It’s a totally redesigned phone, Samsung has finally got rid of manufacturing most of the mobile parts from plastic and they have started manufacturing with glass and the metal. So here is the spec walk through for both Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge just scroll down to see.

 

Samsung galaxy S6 features a 5.1 inch Super AMOLED screen with 2560 X 1440 (577PPI) resolution. According to Gsmarena it has little over 70% screen to body ratio, only 7mm in thickness, Corning Gorilla Glass 4 on both sides which protects the phone from scratching, 32GB, 64GB, 128GB internal storage ( no SD card slot this time), 3GB RAM for better multitasking, comes with latest Android OS Lollipop 5.02, 16 Megapixel rear camera and 5 Megapixel front camera and 2550mAh battery.

 

As you can see those specs are really up-to date and can fight against other vendors, but let me talk about the SoC which powered the S6 and S6 Edge. This is the place where Samsung is way ahead when comparing to others. Since the release of the Galaxy S2, Galaxy devices are powered by Samsung’s own SoC called Exynos. Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge are powered by Exynos 7420 which is a octa core processor with big.LITTLE concept, it has 4 X A57 64bit cores at 2.1GHz and 4 X A53 efficient 64bit cores running at 1.5GHz. The important thing about this SoC is that it’s manufactured under 14nm fabrication process. Just for your reference the lower the nm number means it has more processing power and it’s more efficient. For e.g. the world’s leading SoC manufacturer’s Snapdragon 810 64bit SoC is fabricated under 20nm process. As you can see, Samsung clearly has the edge for the processing power and efficiently. Another thing I should mention about this SoC are the GPU and RAM. It’s powered by ARM Mali-T760 MP8 ( eight GPU cores running at 772MHz which is a really powerful GPU it can run anything you throw at it) and 1552MHz LPDDR4 RAM.

Exynos 7420 Antutu 5.6.1

Let’s move on to Galaxy S6 Edge, this flagship device have double side curved display. Samsung has specially designed their TouchWiz Android software to take advantage on those curved edge. I personally love that design, specially with both side curved  and not the single curved Galaxy Note Edge design. I watched the MKBHD’s (Youtube tech gadget reviewer) Galaxy S6 Edge first impression video, and he mentioned that those curved edges are nice and the Lollipop material designed app’s swipe from the cover feature works beautifully. Other than that this phone has really similar features to S6. Same processor, same RAM and the same 16 Megapixel camera. Only the battery is a bit bigger, where the S6 Edge has a 2600mAh capacity battery.

Now we can clearly see Samsung moving in-to big change. They really want to catch back on their mobile market share and they want to fight back with the other big vendors like Apple and  Xiaomi phones.

The zero bezel Sharp Aquos Crystal

Back in the days I used to own a Sony Ericsson K700i, since those days I hate the big bezels and thick front glasses. I always tell my friends that I love to have slim bezels and big screens but they always laughed at me. However thanks to Android finally we started to see new innovations and the new screen technologies from vendors. When the Samsung Galaxy S4 came out it had slimmer bezels than the Galaxy S3, when the LG G3 came out it had a Slimmer bezels than the G2, but here is something interesting, few days back Sharp has launched an Android phone which is almost zero bezels. Yes it’s called the Sharp Aquos Crystal and Sharp Aquos Crystal X.

Sharp Crystal Phone

The Sharp Crystal smartphone has a 5inch 720P display, it measures 131mm X 67mm X 10mm and 140g in weight, inside it is powered by Snapdragon 400 clocked at 1.2GHz, 2040mAh battery, internal storage 8GB (SD slot included and it supports upto 128GB) and 1.5GB of RAM. Out of the box it runs Android 4.4.2 Kitkat and it has Harman Kardon audio. According to the Softbank press release this amazing phone will be available for US consumers through Sprint on 29th august.

The Aquos Crystal X the flagship version currently is only available for Japanese consumers. It has a 5.5inch 1080p display, it measures 139mm X 73mm X 11mm. Under the hood it has a Snapdragon 801 SoC, 2GB RAM, 32GB internal storage and 2610mAh battery.

Sharp Aquos Crystal

Image credits phonearena.com news.livedoor.com

The Samsung Galaxy Alpha and its 20nm Exynos 5430 SoC

Finally the rumored Samsung Galaxy Alpha is available for sale. The Galaxy Alpha is the first Samsung metal phone which features a 4.7inch 720p super AMOLED display, 12 megapixel camera, 2K video recording and 2GB RAM. Nowadays smartphones come with a 3000mAh to 2500mAh battery but this phone has only 1860mAh battery. Yes it’s a pretty small battery compared to the midrange specs it has, but Samsung claims it doesn’t need a bigger battery because it’s powered by their latest SoC called Exynos 5430.

The Exynos 5430 is the first Samsung 20nm SoC and Samsung claims it’s 25% more power efficient than its predecessor

Samsung Exynos 5430 is a big.LITTLE octa core processor which is manufactured under 20nm technology which means it has four big Cortex A15 cores clocked at 1.8GHz and four small Cortex A7 cores clocked at 1.3GHz. The Exynos 5430 is the first Samsung 20nm SoC and Samsung claims it’s 25% more power efficient than its predecessor Exynos 5420 which was manufactured under 28nm. Anandtech mentioned the use of the 20nm process a “significant leap forward” compared to the previous generation.

Samsung Exynos

Exynos 5430 has a Mali-T628 MP6 (six GPU cores) which is the same GPU Exynos 5420 (at 533MHz) had but now it’s clocked at 600MHz. This SoC has a dedicated H.265 hardware decoder and a dedicated Cortex A5 core to handle audio and voice recognition tasks. Samsung Galaxy Alpha smartphone is still new so neither battery benchmarks nor battery reviews are out there yet.  When they are available we can determine exactly how this new processor works with less power.

Images Via [www.androidauthority.com]

Android L : Four new features that you need to know

A month ago at the annual Google I/O, Google announced a major update for their mobile operating system called Android L (most probably Google might call it Lollipop and Android 5.0 at the final release). Since 2008 Google tend to update their Android OS annually with a project in focus, in 2012 Google introduced “Project Butter” for Android Jellybean which pushed the OS to run at 60fps. In 2013 Google introduced “Project Svelte” for Android Kitkat which made the OS to run at low specs phones even with 512MB RAM. But this year Google came out with several updates at once for their latest OS Android L. Here I’m going to point out four major features in Android L, so let’s start one by one.

 Material design

Google introduced Material design, it’s visual language in Android L. Material design facilitates a unified visual experience for users which lets them know how Android OS UI behaves. Google is calling this update as the biggest update ever made since 2008. Material design features a new theme, new animation capabilities, 3D views and it has real-time shadows.

 ART runtime

ART the new runtime was introduced in Android 4.4 as an option which can be turned on and off in developer tools. However in Android L, Google replaced Dalvik with ART and sets ART as the default runtime. Comparing to the older version Dalvik, ART has many improvements. According to the Android police blog, the new runtime is 20% faster in CPU floating operations, 10% increase of speed in RAM operations, improved garbage collection and increase in battery life. Checkout the chart below.

ART Runtime performance

 Project Volta

Android L OS’s second biggest project is “Project Volta”, this project is mainly focused on battery saving. When Google was doing some testing suddenly they found out that a device needs 2 minutes of battery power to wake up a device. Ars technica did some testing on Android L’s battery life, according to them Android L is 36% more efficient than the older version Android 4.4.4.

Project Volta

 Notifications

In Android L Google did some big changes for notifications and the status bar, now you can have notifications on the lock screen and you can prioritize them too. A new notification feature called “head’s up” which Displays notifications as a floating popup so you can accept or ignore calls, see notifications while you are playing games or doing something important without leaving the current screen.

(Image Credits : android.com, androidpolice.com)