What's Behind LG's Sweet New Phone?

by Anand Lal Shimpi on 7/13/2009 12:00 AM EST
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  • cfaalm - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 - link

    It looks like the front of a car radio.
  • WillyThePimp - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link

    Why It's unfortunate not to have a Moorestown SoC on it? Is Moorestown a much better and higher performing platform compared to the well-known and richly developed OMAP3? Does hold its power consumption an advantage to Omap36xx? What you say? Dual Core and HT? Those features drain a NetBook batteries in 4 hours!

    I mean, it kind of seems like a biased commentary, since it's been tested that the Cortex A8 render webpages at 80% speed of the Atom with only 60% of the frequency despite Cortex more-than-primitive FPU. (Ask any GCC contributor)

    If the industry actually wanted ATOMS for cellphones, I'm sure Intel would have delivered them centuries ago.

    (I don't consider myself as a troll, please refrain)
  • IntelUser2000 - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 - link

    WillyThePimp:

    My Viliv S5's Atom 1.33GHz Z520 based MID has 4 hours minimum battery life and 5 hours video from 100 to 20% drain using a 22.9WHr battery. Atom isn't that far off, and pure performance wise, the Atom is about 40% faster than Cortex A8.
  • T2k - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 - link

    "My Viliv S5's Atom 1.33GHz Z520 based MID has 4 hours minimum battery life and 5 hours video from 100 to 20% drain using a 22.9WHr battery."

    Yes and that, my friend, is exactly what he was saying: utterly pathetic for a phone, completely useless.
  • faxon - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link

    video removed by the user lol, might want to find a mirror
  • CZroe - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link

    "This video has been removed by the user."

    Anyone have a copy? ;)
  • ssj4Gogeta - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyOlByIIRck">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyOlByIIRck
  • FuturEyes - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link

    Check out the similarity for yourself http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQa9nP4yyms">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQa9nP4yyms
  • FuturEyes - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link

    Doesn't any one notice the similarity this phone has to the Nvidia Terga platform? It look just like their demo. I would place my bet that this is based on the Terga not ARM.
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link

    Tegra is simply NVIDIA's name for its SoC that includes an ARM core. All the Tegra products are ARM11 based (albeit multi-core versions).

    It could very well be Tegra and the GPU could be powering much of the GUI.

    Take care,
    Anand
  • doncerdo - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link

    Anand why is it that you compare Moorestown with ARM? Even more important, why is it you can affirm that Moorestown is faster than ARM? Aren't you comparing apples with oranges? Last I knew ARM was many times "faster" based on MIPS and Moorestown faster according to specs.

    Besides last time I heard x86 instruction set was actually pretty inneficient, that's why people thought RISC was destined to kill x86 CISC chips. With making CPUs smaller and making them superscalar and out of order, the x86 instruction set issue wasn't wasn't much of a problem. So isn't Moorestown closer in the way it behaves to the old clunky CISC chips of old?

    Talking about the UI based on marketing materials is also a pretty novice mistake. Finally flash interface on phones...hmmm if you look outside the iPhone universe you'd see many feature phones use them.

    Given you know so much about CPUs in general and knowing that you know about this industry more than anyone, while you make some of the best tech articles on the planet, I was actuallly kind of surprised by this blog entry.
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link

    Have a read through my Atom architecture piece and compare it to the Cortex A8 coverage in my recent iPhone 3GS review to see where Moorestown's strengths come from:

    http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3276">http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3276

    x86 is a penalty at such small chip sizes, but Moorestown will/does have the performance advantage. Where Intel has difficulty competing is in power requirements - ARM is still the victor there and that's what fundamentally matters in these smartphones. Moorestown isn't small/low power enough to fit into something like the iPhone, you'll only see it in larger devices.

    Take care,
    Anand
  • IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link

    No Anand is right. According to specintbase(not threaded) benchmark on the Atom presentation...

    Atom 1.1Ghz is 50% faster than Cortex A8 at 1GHz. Hyperthreading can extend that by additional 38%.

    According to ARM, the Cortex A8 delivers 2.0 DMIPS/MHz, making it 2000 DMIPS at 1GHz: http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM_Cortex-A8.htm...">http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM_Cortex-A8.htm...

    Atom can achieve 4000 DMIPS at 1.6GHz, which equals to 2500 DMIPS/MHz.

    With Moorestown, performance will go up again.
  • IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link

    Ok let's see this RISC vs. x86 argument again. It's the additional transistors required on x86 for decoders that gives the x86 the "disadvantage".

    On the Pentium III core with 0.25um process technology, the 3-wide instruction decoder took 9.2mm2. Even considering each process generation(0.25 to 0.18 to 0.13 and so on) reduction only results to a 70% of the original size(0.7x), the 3-wide decoder would take 1.5mm2 at 45nm on the Atom.

    The core on the Atom is approximately 9mm2, meaning the decoder portion probably takes 10% of the core(assuming 2-issue takes 1mm2).

    That 10%, can easily be mitigated by better design and process technology. Even if they are equal, Atom will be only disadvantaged by 10%, or in other words, within competitive margins.
  • andrewaggb - Thursday, July 16, 2009 - link

    RISC vs x86 has been visited lots of times. In theory RISC is much cleaner, prettier, more consistent, easier to design/scale/debug etc. But the trend for years has been to keep adding new instructions, mmx, sse1-4 etc, and powerpc has been doing that as well. This blurs the line bit. And CISC has merits too. It's a trade off, more complex cpu with CISC but smaller programs or bigger programs with a simpler cpu with RISC? With clock speeds being artificially limited for power/heat reasons and cache making up the majority of the cpu die I'm not sure if the merits of RISC really matter. And for all it's merits, designs like Itanium still struggle to show why they are better than a good x86 design.

  • deputc26 - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link

    Could this be a tegra based device? The fast graphical UI would be possible on it no?
  • dabbigj - Monday, July 13, 2009 - link

    I had my hands on it during while shooting a commercial, i really liked the interface and it is quick although not as quick as in the video. The earliest phone was from january and the latest one was made in may and the january one was constanly bluescreening.

    All in all i thought it was nice and i really like the profile of the phone and the interface although it was a bit confusing during the first few minutes.
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link

    Drop me an email and tell me more :)

    Take care,
    Anand
  • T2k - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 - link

    You should contact SE and request a Satio (IIRC it was formerly known as Idou) for a shootout - SE is working on a few big thing for the last quarter and 1Q2010 including this Satio and a high-end Android-based unit.

    http://www.sonyericsson.com/cws/products/mobilepho...">http://www.sonyericsson.com/cws/product...ephones/...
  • anandtech02148 - Monday, July 13, 2009 - link

    with every month we hear and see a new smartphone coming out and the year long waits until it pass by the 3 american cellular cartel's approval. it feels as though the cellular are the new Microsoft whom can barely provide decent 3G. Gotta give it to the hardware makers for trying to be innovative in the US market. with that said, i like the Htc Hero's ability to render adobe Flash.
  • T2k - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 - link

    Say thank you to the criminal called former FCC boss Kevin Martin, altair boy of Cheney, ex-right hand of "DICK" - he's truly a PoS character, a totally unscrupulous corrupt scumbag.
    His predecessor Power wasn't much better either but Martin went over the edge and completely destroyed the FCC - he should be charged for numerous federal crimes.
    It's our completely corrupt, rotten, crooked market system, nothing else - these 2-yr contracts are RIDICULOUS, complete nonsense.
    Also it is simply illegal to block me, the owner of the phone, to use another SIM card.
    If I don't pay my bills they got the early termination fee, that's it. Phones should not be locked at all, period.
  • psonice - Monday, July 13, 2009 - link

    It looks good, but it also looks like a promotional mock-up rather than a real phone. I very strongly suspect that the UI won't run quite so fast, and it won't look quite so good too. And my faith in samsung actually making a decent 3d UI that doesn't venture into gimmicky or get in the way now and then is pretty low.

    Still, if they get it to work reasonably smoothly and get the basic apps right, it should be a good phone.

    It does look VERY long though.. I'm guessing the screen will be almost as long as the iphone's case, plus there will be the strips on each side. For me, that puts it a bit past phone size, more like a small communications based tablet. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'd even go for something a bit bigger if it's powerful and portable enough.

    This reminds me of the old palm T3 PDA design though - why don't more companies copy that? It had a 3.5" screen that was part-covered by the bottom of the case, and the case slid open to show the whole thing (making it small (roughly iphone sized) when closed and really tall like the samsung when open). The benefit was simple: big screen, big buttons at the bottom, small device.
  • Rolphus - Monday, July 13, 2009 - link

    I don't believe that's a realtime example of the UI. Looking at the Wall-E clip, I'd say the whole thing has been sped up by a factor of 2 or so.

    I'm also staggered by how many little details are harvested from the iPhone. I guess if you're going to copy a UI, you might as well copy a good one.
  • T2k - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 - link

    I'm always amused when Americans really think iPhone brought anything else than responsive UI to the table... you gotta take a walk down memory lane and check out all the EU and Asian phones from the past decade.
  • Affectionate-Bed-980 - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 - link

    Word, and this is why I have a problem with Anand reviewing cell phones unless he fully understands the market. It's very hard for a lot of Americans to grasp the entire cell phone market with so many international phones. It's one thing to understand CPU architecture and be able to compare with ARM devices and x86 chips, but it's another to understand the market itself and what's out there. Let Engadget and Gizmodo take care of these things.
  • max347 - Monday, July 13, 2009 - link

    Actually looking for phones right now. It seems I can't find anything with wifi/3.5mm/WM6 that isnt the size of a baby's fist.
  • T2k - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 - link

    As others said watch out ofr the hardware if you go with WM6 - I';e had MANY WM phones, beginning with v5 and my current X1 hands down wins in every feature or task thanks to its fastest-ever hardware onboard (it's still the reigning fastest WM phone king on the market I believe, latest HTCs simply match it) and Sony's lever X-panel system (by now I literally stopped using anything other than panels.)

    It is NOT, however, without hiccups - unfortunately WM is inherently a crappy OS, regardless of MS' efforts -, "did it register my click or not" moments but they are greatly exaggerated in WM6 reviews and they are especially ameliorated by SonyEricsson's brutal hardware in this world phone (all bands and flavors of GSM and 3G/HSDPA/HSUPA supported but here, in this Corporate States of America you won't get too much use of it on AT&T's utterly pathetic, previous-gen speeds they dare to call "3G"...)
    Did I mention it has even higher screen resolution - 800x480!!! - than your widescreen NTSC DVDs? It's sweeeeeet...
    Comes with a 4GB microSD but I got a 16GB Class 6 microSD card under $70...
    I'm running WM6.5 - a free upgrade for X1s, slated for Fall release - and it's a quite a lot faster than WM6.1, it makes sense to wait.
    There are EXCELLENT panels available, PointUI's Home 2 is THE BEST multi-page home screen, period.

    Ah, another good news: Skyfire (WM5-6 browser) is available for download and it comes with FULL FLASH SUPPORT built-in!
    Latest Opera Mobile betas are also shaping up very well.

    If you say no to WM6 I would say you should probably go with the Pre - it's brand new but already a very-well rounded package and it will just get better (or Palm will die, period.)
    Of course, it's only good if you don't travel abroad a lot, otherwise you better wait for its GSM incarnation -another thing slated for Fall release.

    Now if you want ALL systems - VZ/Sprint + full GSM/HSM/HSDPA support - in a very potent package then (people will kick me to death here for this) I would suggest to take a look at RIM's Blackberry Storm. Yes, the Storm - I just bought one for someone else and I'm highly impressed: it used to be a slow buggy PoS touchscreen smartphone and with the last two sw/system upgrades it's completely transformed into a highly competent, touchscreen , multisystem world phone with thousands of apps already available.
    Do your homework: Amazon has its own promo selling the Storm for $49 (w/ 2-ys VZ contract, of course)!

    Since iPhone is not even a multitasking phone, let alone its closed nature I would not recommend unless your only purpose is to listen to music - you can do it on any aforementioned phone, without even using the retarded iTunes syncing crap -, watch stupid YT videos and not be able to tether it to your laptop nor send pictures to other cell phones.
  • crispbp04 - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link

    You want the Touch HD. Get it imported from australia (the telstra T8285).

    The BEST phone on the market. I loaded a custom windows mobile 6.5 rom (Dutty's on xda-developers)

    All my iphone friends have phone envy.

    It has wifi, 3.5mm headphone jack, 3.8" 800x480 HD screen!! (iphone is 3.5)

    Its a nice phone stock but if you load a custom rom on it, it is godly
  • T2k - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 - link

    It's an Xperia clone - HTC is the contracted mfr behind SE's X1 - without the X-Panels or Xeria's elegant look and solid casing.
    If you want the best WM phone you ought to buy the Xperia, trust me. :)
  • Ryanman - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link

    Trust me when I say that getting a WM6 phone will be one of the worst decisions of your life. I dealt with a WM6 phone for more than a year. It could do NOTHING quickly or correctly. Texting was slow and buggy, the phone buttons were too sensitive and hung up on me whenever I put a phone to my face, and installing things was a chore. You'll be stuck with solitaire and a chugging UI the entire time you're saddled with that terrible software.
    You have the Pre, the G1, and the iPhone. Pick based on what carrier you have and never look back.
  • medi01 - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 - link

    Bullshit.
    With WM6 you are free to choose software (or even write your own), in this case Mr Apple cannot decide that you don't need Opera browser, etc.
  • damianrobertjones - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link

    We've used many, many phones here, ranging from Qtek, HTC, samsung and pretty much all have done what they've done with little problems. We also have two Blackberries and one iPhone here

    I use a Samsung Omnia for texting each day and that poses no problems at all. Installing a chore? Hardly... Games, Route66, small apps, no problems at all.

    Are you basing your comments on one device? Many devices? Which models? DId you know that the samsung and various HTC models now, more or less, lock the screen when you initiate a call?

    Oh well.
  • The0ne - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link

    "I dealt with a WM6 phone for more than a year."

    It thinks it was one phone he had issues with.
  • CSMR - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link

    Sensitive phone buttons have nothing to do with the OS.
    I don't know why you found texting buggy, what can go wrong with texting? I have used WM6 and WM6.1. Not slow; this will depend on the hardware. The core OS is very stable, although the UI software that operators add can be.
    MS has been slow to respond to competitors, but the WM+Exchange combination is still a particularly strong one.

    To max347:
    Unfortunately HTC used to use a proprietary connector for audio but is going with 5.5mm now. The Touch HD is large, has a 3.5mm jack and WM6.1 so should fit the bill for you. A nice device in general.
  • fic2 - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 - link

    Don't know about WM6 texting, but I have a Samsung phone that has buggy texting. One example is that if I receive a text from person1 but don't reply, then try to send a text to person2 through the contacts list it sends it to person1. Usually I get a response from person1 saying "WTF are you talking about". So far I don't think I have sent a text to person1 talking bad about person1 - I hope.

    There are 3-4 other bugs I have found in the phone (alarm and vibrate don't work when charging, vibrate doesn't always work when I get a call, etc), but who do you report bugs to? This is also an old phone (A920) so I doubt they would bother to fix them.
  • ap90033 - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 - link

    Yeah I have a touch diamond and it rocks. I put Windows Mobile 6.5 and it makes it even better.
  • Griswold - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link

    What he said.

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