New technologies . Who actually creates every new thing ?

In the mobile phone industry , new technologies are developed , standardized and become commercially available all the time . Bigger screens , faster processors etc . Who actually develops each new thing is sometimes more complicated that just looking at who brought it to market first .

Everything new , has some important steps that it has to go through before it actually reaches the market .

First of all there must be a company having the required technology , resources , money , time and of course personnel to be able to research , develop and then make something new available . 

Almost all other requirements except money are translated to... money since each one of them either requires  money to get , or costs money , like time . 

Each new technology or product must also have a potential audience , a market where it can be sold in quantities large enough to cover it's overall cost and of course make some more money for the company that created it . 

So far everything seems and is rather simple , but it gets more complicated further down the road . 

The actual phone makers are in some cases at least just the buyer of new technologies of any kind .

This means that when for example HTC build the original Desire , they had to rely on Samsung to provide them with the AMOLED screens in order to actually build the phone . HTC was the one using the technology , and Samsung was the one that spent the money needed to create them , build them and then sell them to HTC . Apple is another example . When iPhone 4 was first presented to the world it was rightfully praised for it's high density screen . Apple had to find a company that could actually design and build this screen , and without one , Apple's willing to use a screen of this kind would mean absolutely nothing .

What makes things more complicated is when a phone maker requires something new in order to differentiate it self from the others , knows exactly what he wants and just needs someone to make it .

Finding a company that can do just that is not so simple . 

The actual phone maker has to be able to absorb enough quantities of the new product , and make use of it in mobile phones , in order to be able to pay the price of it's development to the company that will actually make the product . 

There are also cases of companies that have created some new technology with one of the above mentioned ways , and their product is something that phone makes do want , but the company is unable to create it in quantities large enough to satisfy the phone maker/makers needs . 

When the 3rd iPad was developed , the screen's manufacturing had to be outsourced to Samsung , not because Samsung had anything to do with it's design and development but merely because they were the only ones that could actually produce it . 

In the same way Qualcomm closed a deal with Samsung to manufacture their components , because TSMC was not able to produce them in quantities large enough for Qualcomm to cater all it's clients . Qualcomm actually went to one of it's competitors and paid him to also manufacture it's own products . 

(Exynos SoC's are creations of Samsung Semiconductors and not Samsung Mobile )

Some companies in some cases are forced to keep developing newer technologies with their own resources and money , even without having not even one potential customer , simply because in some technology areas you must always keep developing something new to stay competitive .

This is one of the reason's Texas Instruments is trying to expand beyond mobile phones with their OMAP platform , because it's ongoing development was not met with the orders needed to justify the cost . 

Yes , this is not the end of course , not even by far , since there are of course some companies that build mobile phones that actually develop their own new technologies in some areas . 

Samsung is a prime example of this , since they design , develop build and then use their own screens , and SoC's , and are even tryimg to design their own Radio IC's . At the same time they also choose solutions from other companies like NVidia and Qualcomm , either because their own production capabilities are not enough to cover their own needs or simply because their own products are more expensive than the market segment on which some mobile phones are designed to fit .

At the time Samsung was making the Galaxy S II , their manufacturing capabilities were not big enough to yield enough units in order to use them in more products . Their first two tablets based on Android 3.x Honeycomb had to be based on Nvidia's Tegra 2 SoC (also because Google hadn't made the source code available to be used on different hardware ) and some mid range tablets after that were based on Texas Instruments solutions for this reason and because the Exynos 4210 and 4212 cost more money to make .

Samsung at the same time proved an exception in another field , when they invested even more money in new facilities able to make AMOLED panels , in order not to sell them to someone but to be able to use them in more of their own products and to be able to meet the higher demand for their existing and future ones . 

Finally , nothing of this makes the work of the phone maker any easier . Regardless of who actually builds everything , it's the phone maker that has to take each component , fit them all together and create the final product as a mobile phone or a tablet . Choosing the right components , depending on their performance , cost or even ease of integration is no easy task . The design of the final product also requires a lot of development with everything tailored to the needs of every device , and all of that takes even more time , resources and money .

This is the reason why in most cases , each new technology is used in a final product a long time after it has become available from the company that created it . This time gap is getting smaller nowdays , but only at the cost of more money on the phone makers side and sadly in some cases at the cost of the final product's quality .

There are numerous examples that fit to one of there categories and this is probably not the place to deal with each one of them . 

The next time each one of us buys one new product and our decision is based on this product's potentially new feature that we like , we should wonder who is actually responsible for it's creation , or to put it more correctly , if the company that sells the final product is the only one that we have to thank for it .

Are 1080p screens really useful on a mobile phone?

Multimedia features is something that all of us have come to consider as a default feature of our phones and in the smartphone era it has become even more essential . My consideration this time is if they have become more essential than needed .

After playing around with a device having a 1080p / 5" screen for a few days now I have come to realize that this screen resolution is not actually useful in most every day usage scenarios . The pixel density is extreme I know , and staring at the screen is something that everyone will probably do when he sees a screen of this kind for the first time . On the other hand , trying to see an individual pixel has become really pointless .

The fact of the matter is that we all use devices everyday with pixel densities much smaller than most 720p screens let alone a 1080p one , on our mobile phones .

Surely enough , in our TV sets , regardless of their size , the 1080p resolution may result in small pixel density especially above 40 inches , but you almost never look at a TV from a distance close enough to actually notice that .

However , most mainstream Notebooks , Laptops and even Netbooks computers come with screens of lower resolution that in most cases top out at 1366x768 pixels . On a 15,6" screen this also results in a pixel density  much lower than the one the Galaxy S II had with it's 800x480 , 4.3" screen a year ago .

The above 300ppi densities offered by all 720p screens on mobile phones and even the much lower density of a 1280x800 tablet on 10" are also better than in most computers designed for every day use .

There are of course Laptops with screen resolutions that go even higher than 1920x1200 pixels and they do provide a much better viewing experience , however , they are still not meant for most users at least when judged by their price . On the Computer world , increased resolutions actually mean that more and more information and graphics can feet on the screen at any given time . A web page will presents more of it's vertical content on a screen with 1200 pixels in height than in one with just 768 .

This does not hold true in most cases when it comes to mobile phones , or at least Android ones .

In most cases , each icon and graphical element has the same size on a 1080p screen with the ones on a 720p or even a WVGA one . It's only their quality that changes , and even though the difference between them exists , in some cases at leats it's not that important .

The HTC One X for example has an marvelous 720p screen that really produces high quality graphics . 

It's only when you put it side by side with a phone having a 1080p screen that you can actually see the difference , and although it's there , it's hardly so important .

Text size is one aspect where the inscreased density can really make a difference , however it bumps into another problem which is the actuall size of the screen . Fitting more lines of text on a 720p screen than on a WVGA is good , as long as the text remains large enough to read it comfortably from a normal distance .

When you try to do the same on a 1080p screen , you end up with letters so small that the reading distance becomes very small , too small to actually hold your phone so close to your eyes . This has as a result to actually make the text size bigger than you can , just to make it easy to read . When you do that , the screen becomes useless for this usage scenario , since it just requires more resources and power to actually draw more pixels to create the same text on the same size (the individual pixels are still there and have to be drawn ) .

Moving on to the multimedia features that a screen like that can display . 

I can not argue that viewing an image on a 1080p screen at 5" is a great experience . That is if the image itself has the quality and size needed to provide the information to the screen . At this point at least , the camera modules that are inside mobile phones produce images that are actually seen worse on a 1080p screen since it reveals more detail than a 720p or a WVGA one . 

You can always transfer and view images taken with a compact camera or a DSLR one , however I seriously doubt that this is practical for most people including me . And this brings us back to the TV example and comparison . Part of actually enjoying the view of an image or a video is the size of the displayed content . It's the reason everyone wants even bigger TV sets and the reason this TV's exist .

Since in their case the pixel density drops dramatically as I mentioned before , we should actually prefer viewing the images we capture with our phones , compacts or even DSLR's on our phone and not out TV or computer screen but we don't . Size is an improtant factor when most people view multimedia files and is one of the reasons that most mobile phones have cameras with 8 or more Mpixels of effective resolution since they produce larger images .

I personally think that it all comes down to the impression created to the human brain and not the human eye by the increased density on mobile phone screens . Since the human eye is almost completely incapable of seeing individual pixels at a density above roughly 300ppi , only the perception created on our brain is the reason that we want those screens .

This is where my question (or questions? )comes in to complete this article . Given as fact that screens of this resolution can not come down to 3.5" for the next year or so , and getting them means that you have to carry around a device with a 5" screen does it really worth it ? Since just a year ago most people found the Galaxy Note a device too big to use and carry with them , how much things have changed in this year that has gone by? 

They also require computing power that in it's turn require more energy and all this results in lower stand-by times when you actually use the capabilities offered by screens like that , does it also worth using our phones less and less between each charge cycle ? Viewing a 1080p movie on a mobile phone that actually has this kind of a screen is something that is nothing short of amazing , but does it remain the same when it means that viewing a complete movie will drain more than half of your battery? Of course you can alwyas argue that you can do exactly that at your home with your charger next to you , but then again , why not see the same movie on your 32 / 37 / 40 / 42 / 47 or even larger TV set?

APQ8064

I was lucky enough to play around with a device using this Qualcomm SoC for the past few days and discovered many interesting things .Naturally not everything is perfect with this solution as with most others .

First of all I suppose there is the performance issue . Well , the phone even at this very early stage of it's development is fast , very fast , extremely fast .... almost always . 

Four Krait cores are better than two in most cases and when you push the phone a little harder you see that they can really make a difference .

Sadly though , aside from some benchmarks that can really stress them or even just force them to work all together , in most other usage cases , the phone simply will not use all of it's cores at the same time .

browsing heavy web pages is certainly one way to go , but in this case most of the job is done by the also amazing Adreno 320 GPU .

There is hardly any way to make the phone slow down and actually try to perform a task , no matter how hard you try . With that being said , some quite interesting things popped up after searching a little harder .

Krait cores are really different than the A-9's used in most other phones but at the same time , in some cases their performance is not that much better . When comparing their benchmark results with other solutions running more or less at the same speed , you realize that most of the performance advantage comes from their number , being four of them and not from the different architecture .

Their floating point performance seems to be better , but very slightly and it's only in different aspects like integer and memory performance that they really stand out from everything else available .

Comparing each core individually and at the same clock speed with an out-of-the-box ARM A-9 shows that  the difference is not so huge .

However , since the SoC contains four of them , the actual performance is that matters and there the APQ8064 is really amazing .

While benchmarking is something that just shows you numbers and does not represent real life performance , it gives you an idea about what each phone is capable of , when all of it's potential is properly used .

I seriously doubt however that a game or an application of any kind will push this specific SoC to it's limits any time soon , because optimizing in such a high level is something that no-one is willing to do for a Qualcomm solution .

The only application I could find that could scratch the surface of it's potential processing power was the video creating one that comes with Android itself . creating 1080p videos is a task that completes much faster that in any other mobile phone , although this could also mean that the application is highly optimized on this specific phone .

Now let's move to the really interesting part . The phone in hand has a 1080p screen , yes a 1080p one .

This means that when the GPU draws anything on it , from just the interface to a game or a benchmark , it has to create quite more pixels than most other GPUs in most other phones .

The Adreno 320 is really amazing simply because it manages to do exactly that without trying . Scrolling through the UI , browsing web pages , even running benchmarks like NenaMark 2 will not slow it down even for a second . 

Drawing many thumbnails in the gallery applications is the only way to see the phone actually working but this can very well be a NAND memory speed issue and not a computational one .

Noothing else in the Android market comes even close to providing this kind of graphical performance when we talk for screens of this size at least , although the results of the Nexus 10 tablet will probably be better , but at this case everything is done inside a tablet and not a mobile phone , and it provides much more space for heat dissipation .

This brings us to the only real problem with this SoC , a problem that is much more serious than in any other mobile phone using anything else .

The APQ8064 produces excessive amounts of heat . Really , the phone becomes so hot that someone not familiar with the technical aspects of such things , may actually believe that the phone will be fried and stop working .

This huge heat production means two things that are both quite important . First of all , heat is generated from energy , power consumption to be more exact . The APQ8064 draws a LOT of power when pushed to it's limit and aside from the fact that you can actually feel it in your hand , there is also the battery indicator that drops faster than in a laptop working at full load . 

The second one is that the phone has to throttle down it's overall performance to try and compensate , which results in dramatic loss of performance . 

Dramatic is exactly the right expression , since after using the phone for no more than 10 minutes to perform most every day tasks , the performance drop is such that stops being any different from any other solution .

Most of the heat is generated from the GPU and not the CPU cores since they rarely if ever work all together at maximum speed when not running a benchmark for this task .

drawing 1920x1080 pixels just to show a text message received is something or to scroll through the phone book is a task that requires some processing to be made on the GPU , with the sheer number of pixels being enough to stress it .

Granted this is also a design issue of this specific device , and Qualcomm is not the only one to blame here .

However , since thin mobile phones is what the market wants , and designing thin , lightweight phones is not an option but a necessity , I suppose that this problem is one that will have to be addressed from Qualcomm too . 

Just two Krait cores inside the HTC One S were enough to heat the phone to an extreme level when atively used during a hot summer day , and since the phone at hand now was operated at a quite colder period of the year .

I can only imagine what will happen when someone uses it to take successive photos during the summer . Actually this is a funny thing , since the phone refuses to even open the camera application when it becomes hot and even closes it automatically if it gets hot while shooting photos . This can really be annoying when you are somewhere using it for browsing facebook for example and you just want to take a picture and upload it . 

So I guess that managing to fit more and more CPU's and more powerfull graphics inside a mobile SoC is not just a task of actually fitting them in there . There is also the important matter of making it work in us many usage scenarios as possible . And this is where the APQ8064 or even the MSM8960 falls short of the competition . It's almost impossible to create a thin lightweight device that can also dissipate the heat generated from this two powerful SoC's and this makes using their potential power even harder .

Designing a game for example that could make use of the power inside the APQ8064 and producing great graphics on a 1080p screen is not just a developer's task , it's also an engineering one since actually using any phone based on it at full throttle for an extended period of time is impossible . There is also the matter of the excessive battery consumption , that makes it even more complicated . I hardly think that anyone will be willing to buy a phone that can play games comparable to a gaming console but will have to find a charger after playing such a game for more than an hour since no matter how powerfull phones get , they are still required for communications of any kind along with everything else 

GPU's Now in the past and in the close future

For more than two years now , Android supports hardware acceleration for the UI and of course application execution . GPU's inside mobile phones have started to evolve since then (and some makers started even sooner than that ...) and by now we have SoCs that their graphics performance is at least as amazing as their processing power .

Unlike the world of PC's though , where Microsoft's operating system is the one that primarily dictates the way a GPU is used , on the Android world each SoC maker is using it's own architecture and design which also means that the programming part is different in most occasions .

All GPU's available in the last couple of years have been more than capable of driving the screens on each phone more than decently and most of them even could render heave web pages without any problems (well , the ARM A-8 had some problems , but the GPU was not to be blamed for that ) and some of them were even more powerfull than needed for their time .

The SGX540 found inside Samsung's Hummingbird SoC used on the first Galaxy S for example was never actually used to it's maximum potentials since neither the operating system or the games available at that time were optimised for it's capabilities .

This has always been and will probably be for the near future the biggest drawback of the Android OS itself . The freedom it provides on the SoC and hardware selection in generals makes things quite complicated .
Designing a game for example that can make use of all the CPU and GPU capabilities of a certain SoC is no easy task but is something that is possible and actually what happens in Aplle's case .
On the Android world , this notion means that eaxh developer or company having many developers has to either create a game designed to make use of the standrard capabilities provided my all GPU's available , or optimize it even further for each one of them . The second task is almost impossible since it increases the developong time and the developing costs quite a lot , making the selling of the final application difficult since the price will be quite high for a mobile game .
At the same time , each phone maker optimizes and changes certain aspects of the operating system to feet the needs of each device which means that optimizing a game for a SoC used inside an HTC phone does not mean that the performance will be the same on the same SoC used inside an LG phone .
This means that testing and optimizing has to be done for each specific device at a time , and on top of that , each newer firmware upgrade on the same device can also have impacts on the way the hardware behaves .

One very good example of this situation is the way different SoC's produce different results in benchmarks measuring graphics performance . The mainstream benchmarks are designed to test the generic capabilities of all GPU's and produce results based on just those . In most cases this means that all GPU's are almost the same which is far from true .

Nvidia for example has been known to make GPUs that generally do not perform well on most benchmarks , simply because their architecture comes from the world of PC's and is only adapted to meet the needs of mobile devices in power consumption , size and heat generated .
Nvidia however has been very keen on supporting developers creating games and applications that makes use of exactly the right components that can make full use of each GPU available on their SoCs .
This has created games for example that although other GPU's can also run without problems in theory , fail to do so in real life .
On top of that they are putting restrictions on how each phone makers can alter key programming aspects of their GPUs trying to ensure even greater levels of compatibility between different devices .

Qualcomm and Samsung are not so supportive of the developer community and both of them actually hide some key aspects of their solutions for some time after their announcement to gain a market edge or even for ever like Samsung does with the propriertary Mali-400MP used in all exynos SoCs available untill now .

Gaming is not always the goal each phone makes wants to achieve when designing a new mobile phone and chooses the SoC it will run on . Samsung for example in Galaxy S III 's case only needed a GPU that could be coupled easily with their ARM design of four cores and at the same time could be able to drive the 720p screen well enough for a high end phone . Producing good frame rates on the UI itself and also decoding and encoding 1080p video with high quality and bitrates was something that the Galaxy S II had already shown that the Mali-400MP could easily do .
So the choice is a logical one given as a fact that the Galaxy S III was designed to be an all in one every day use high end device . Performance wise when tested and compared with other solutions , the Mali-400MP proves to be strange to say the least . On some benchmarks fails short from solutions from Nvidia and Qualcomm while on others manages to come close to the SGX543MP used inside the iPhone 4s .
This differentiation is of course created by the not so standard architecture used on the Mali-400MP which brings us back to the fact that it's not the power available , it's the way you use it .
Since drivers for ARM's Mali GPUs are not publicly available and will propably not be for their newer designs too , creating games and applications that can take advantage of all the available capabilities is not easy and probably not possible at all .
This great contradiction compared to the policy followed by Nvidia is the main reason low level compatibility will never be achieved .

Qualcomm is also a story of it's own . The company has at times created both newer different deisgns of GPUs and updtated and improved ones of designs already available .
The Adreno 225 is an improved version of the earlier Adreno 220 and at least on this case , Qualcomm was very happy to provide most of the details on the improvements made along with some open source drivers . This however was done in order to highlight some of the features that no one had ever made use on the Adreno 220 and to change the way some others were used to make developers life a little easier .
Sadly , not long after the release of the GPU to manufacturers and the optimize made by some developers for it's features , Qualcomm released the already announced Adreno 320 that is probably the best available GPU at this time , but no one knows exactly how this is achieved .
Phone makes have the most analyzed description of it's abilities since they need it to create devices based on it , developers have a less informed version and most other people have to rely on the basic features that are just known to the public .
Since some aspects like the operating frequency can be changed by each phone maker or be scaled according to the needs of each application , a scaling scheme that the manufacturer will not share with developers usually , things get even more complicated .

Finally , some manufacturing issues of each specific device can always affect performance regardless of the SoC and GPU used . Nvidia's Tegra 3 for example has a power throttling scheme that vastly varies it's performance depending on the temperature of the SoC itself , and the way each phone maker deals with this heat dissipation issue will also affect the final performance .

And to top all that , things change once again when the same SoC's are put inside a tablet instead of a mobile phone . The larger battery capacity means that in most cases , the SoC's can be tweaked to yield greater performance at a cost of increased power consumption that can be justified on a tablet and is partially hidden  by the bigger battery. Heat dissipation is a much easier task given the much larger size available for techniques that can not be used inside a mobile phone .
Newer even better GPU's like the Mali T604 used on the Exynos 5250 SoC produces even greater amounts of heat and consume even more power making it's use inside a mobile phone a task that for the time being is not easily achievable .

Benchmarking a phone is just a way to be satisfied for the phone each one chose to buy and at know that at least in theory it is capable of making "great things"
Actually making use of it in real life and every day use is usually hard or even impossible and when achieved actually reveals another great issue , the fact that the batteries used on mobile phones are smaller than we think .

Better late than ever....

I have never used the Galaxy Nexus as my primary device since it was first announced (or before that....) mostly because I am a tech freak and never liked the fact that it was inferior to the Galaxy S II hardware wise . I always felt that the SGX-540 even at a higher clock rate than the one used on the first Galaxy S , was not enough to adequately drive the 1280x720 screen .
I must admit that some times I become a victim of the trend that makes people want devices that can do things that most of the time they will probably not use . With that being said , I could not imagine myself using a phone that would drop frames when trying to play a 1080p video file .
Apart from that , the only drawback I could find on the Galaxy Nexus was the poor video codec support ( I am a fan of watching episodes from my favorite series on my phone ) and the absence of native support for text input on my native language .

All of that changed when I updated the phone with the Jelly bean update . Everything was improved except the poor video codec support . "Project Butter " vastly improved the fluidity of the menu transitions to the point that I enjoy scrolling through menus and pages and the update finally brought native support for the Greek language text input . These two improvements made me willing to use a different device to watch videos , which by my standards means a lot since I usually hate carrying more than one phone or even making sure that an extra device is charged even when I am at home .

Switching from my Galaxy S III made the AMOLED screen of the Galaxy Nexus at least bearable since let's face it , this screen was never the device's strong point .

I realized that stock Android may have some things missing compared to Nature UX and Touchwiz from Samsung and even when compared to the UI of phones made by Sony Ericsson and now just Sony but at the same time is more nicely designed as an overall UI and actually works without any problems .

I guess this is the advantage of using a "pure" Android device , the fact that everything is optimized to work on your device exactly as they should be and on top of that some applications are designed way better than the ones found on Samsung , HTC devices etc.

As always , since I am a hardware friendly guy I cannot refrain from commenting on the job done in hardware optimization once again . I find it amazing that Google's engineers squeezed out every last drop of performance especially from the SGX540 GPU . Scrolling is smooth almost everywhere and you notice some droped frames only when you try to scoll a large heavy web page .
Although clocked quite high for an SGX540 , this GPU was not particularly fast by no means .
The OMAP 4460 SoC offers dedicated hardware for video encoding and decoding so the fact that the Galaxy Nexus can record at least decent 1080p videos is also welcomed .

On the other hand the scaling range for the two ARM  A-9 cores is limited and the lowest possible frequency is the 350 MHz one which is 150MHz more than the second highest sleep clock I've seen on Samsung's SoCs . There is also no seperate clock and power schemes for each core and they always scale up and down together at the same frequency . This may improve the responsiveness of the device , it also consumes greater amounts of power for no reason .

The jumb to the APQ8064 on the Nexus 4 will probably bring quite an improvement at least in stand-by times since Qualcomm's scaling and powering schemes are a lot better .


Finally , despite the huge changes made across the OS and all the added features , sadly the camera can not be upgraded as a hardware piece and the 5Mpixel unit is well... useless .
After using the Galaxy S III , the One X and one iPhone 4s , I also got the habbit of taking pictures of various things around me without any particular reason .
With the Galaxy Nexus I stopped after one day , when I got the time to review the pictures I had captured .

war of the SoC makers...

Texas Instrument made a choice not long ago to make their OMAP platforms available to markets outside the Mobile phone one , simply because that could give them the money needed to keep developing new designs and most importantly since at most other markets , products like those have longer life circles , ones that can return the original investment made on their design and production .

SoC designing is starting to become an expensive "Game" not just because the technology used is pushing the limits even further every time which costs money by itself but also because each new design usually stays on the top segment for just a while .
Most SoC's require two different things to return the investment made in their design and production . High volumes in the order made and some time on the market . High volumes mean that more than one manufacturers have to choose your solution for their phones and that they also must sell many devices based on it . Long time on the market can be achieved more easily since each platform can move down to cheaper devices as time passes and they stop being considered high end solutions .
A combination of both those requirements can not be easuly achieved and at least Texas Instruments was never particularly successful at that .

Qualcomm on the other hand has the advantage of controlling the North American market (not always by playing fair but that is another matter completely ) , Samsung is pushing everyone else even further with each new design since they always seem to make the best SoC's available on their launch , and Nvidia is determined to stay on this market regardless of the money they have to spend in the meantime .

Analynizing even further this notion is interesting .

Samsung can easilly cover the costs of the development by just using each new SoC on their own devices since they can achieve very large volumes , and at the same time , they also have Apple as a customer to bring the extra cash needed to always improve their production technology and facilities .
At the same time , they always choose to end the production of each SoC shortly after the device based on the next one is released and choose Qualcomm's solutions to power the new mid range devices since their own last year's high end ones cost more to keep in production than making a large order to Qualcomm (which by the way is now also a customer to Samsung's foundries )

This is how Samsung was able to complete first the development of the next generation SoC's that are based on the Cortex A-15 core along of course with newer GPU's and peripherals .
Sadly for most end users me included , this was not made on time so they could use the Exynos 5250 on the Galaxy S III but there is always the next Galaxy device to wait ....

As it was expected , even a dual core configuration of A-15's is faster than any available A-9 design , even the ones using four cores . At the same time , Qualcomm's Krait core was never designed to compete with the A-15 , but to become available sooner by leaving out some of it's features and after all Qualcomm intends to use it for more than another year as a high end and gradually a mid range solution .
Samsung was able to kick-start the 5250's production by securing Google as a client both for the new chromebook and the new Nexus Tablet and that is by no means a small victory for a SoC maker .

In the coming months , Samsung will have their production volumes of the 5250 sold to Google , and by the time Nvidia announces the next Tegra SoC based on the A-15 they will already have a significant advantage .
Cortex A-15 however are not without their drawbacks .
At the manufacturing processes available now , both at 32nm by Samsung and 28nm by TSMC (in Nvidia's case...)  each core is quire big in size . This means that creating a SoC containing more than two of them along with a capable GPU and other peripherals , in a reasonable size is almost impossible and certainly outside the space available inside a mobile phone .
The new architecture does provide exceptional performance per clock and overall , it also requires more power than an A-9 to operate . Since mostly marketing reasons require each SoC based on the A-15 to come with a GPU that is at least 1.5 times more powerfull than the ones used on SoC's based on the A-9 , the power consumption is increased even further .
Apple's creation of the A5x to be able to drive the third generation's Ipad high resolution screen showed everyone that capable GPU's require both space and energy and they also produce significant amounts of heat .
That last one is the reason that for the time being , A-15 based designs will be used inside tablets ,. since the space provided there for heat dissipation is much larger that any mobile phone .
Some technology leaps forward will have to be made in order to properly fit a 5250 inside a mobile phone and this is probably what Samsung is trying to do right now .

Nvidia is also facing the same problems , since they also have to pair the A-15 with an even more capapble GPU , which is by no mean an easy task . After all , most of the power consumed by the Tegra 3 and the heat generated was from the GPU and not the 4 A-9 cores that most of the time were not running at maximum speed all at once . Being able to deliver their solution on the market later than Samsung , will give them the time needed to figure out how to solve most of these problems and this is probably the only advantage of being late at a highly competitive market . At the same time , they are making efforts to combined the Network technology they aquired from Icera on the same chip with their Tegra solutions , but that will probably happen on some later version of their next Tegra SoC the same way that Qualcomm can not fit the network part along with four Krait cores and everything else inside the same chip .

Qualcomm and Nvidia are at different stages of creating SoC's containing the Network stack along with everything else . Actually Qualcomm has achieved this goal many years ago , but they do face the same space problems with each new Core design as everyone else . Nvidia is willing to spend the money needed for achieving this and at the meanwhile sell the Tegra chips as stand alone SoC's and cover the losses made if their products are not selected by many phone makers . Actually the Tegra 3 SoC managed to find it's way to just as many devices as the Tegra 2 did , which should at least make it not a damaging product for the company money-wise .
Samsung on the other hand has the advantage of high volumes and is actually designing devices based on Nvidia's and Qualcomm's solutions at the same time in order to fully cover their needs for different devices and price segments . They too are designing their own network parts but for the time being they are unable to produce them at large volumes . Besides that , the techical know-how they have by using Intel's XGold solutions on most european phones that are not based on a Qualcomm SoC , along with the one they have gained by using Qualcomm's solutions means that for the time being they can keep using them and invest smaller amounts of time and money on their own designs .
They are however known to want to be free from other companies where ever they can , so they will probably end up using their own network components at some point in the near future .


This battlefield is filled with companies that have both the money and the clients to secure their involvement on this market . Texas Instruments on the other hand , could not get the orders needed to both keep developing new SoC's at the same pace with the other ones let alone the money needed to start designing and producing their own network components for UMTS and LTE networks .
This company was a key player on this market long before Nvidia and Samsung even started producing their own chips of any kind (for mobile phones that is ) . At the same time they have given us many products that were ahead of their time and most of us have at some point used a phone based on an OMAP SoC .
Along with NXP that started as a branch of Phillips they were from the first companies that provided the mobile phone market with 32-bit ARM designs and DSP's capable of delivering multimedia content .
Sadly the modern day high end technology market has no room for nostalgic feelings and Texas Instruments will probably never be able to gain the edge it once had on this market .

Next nexus is coming , let's look at the past ...

Well , software is not and never was my strong point or even a thing of great interest . Since we are near the announcement of the next Nexus phone ( that got a little delayed ) i was thinking about how we got here , or at least my view of this trip from the nexus one up to the next one that we all should see in the coming days .

One interesting fact was and still is that Google always needed a device to test and develop Android on too .
HTC's G1 was obviously the first commercially available device but was probably not the first one that got to run Android at it's developing stages . At that time Google only needed a testbed , a device that could actually run the OS and just needed it at quantities large enough to help them develop the OS envolving as many people as possible . Each version that came to market at that time was just handed over to the manufacturers that were just a few at that time , and those manufacturers were just building devices capable of running the OS . In most cases the User Interface was left intact mostly because the phone makers were not willing to spend the money needed to customize it , optimize it and finally offer their own unique device that would stand out from the competition . This was done because Android had a very small , tiny market share at that time , and investing money on it was something that most makers were not exactly willing to do .

Things then started to change , the OS got some popularity , created and supported mostly by Google itself that recognized this and also knew that they had to do something about it . This brought the era of devices that were at least in part differentiated by their makers , with HTC betting first at it's success and transfering some of the design and UI elements they already had created for their windows mobile phones .
Things started to change quickly , this approach from HTC started to attract other manufacturers and suddenly Android started to be this immensely diverse OS that we have today .
Google had to also renew the hardware they used to develop the OS since G1 was starting to show it's age and at the same time they also knew that in order to keep the balance between the phone makers that changed the UI at their own will , they also had to offer a device to the consumers that would show them how they intended the OS to look like on the first place .

With HTC being the biggest Android supporter at that time , and with companied like Sony Ericsson refusing to build the device for some reason , Google turned to them once again to create the first Nexus phone .
Google at that time was in no way able to support the device globally , or even sell it outside North America , since their retail business model was very weak . This meant that the Nexus One quantities would be small and HTC had to find a way to cover that loss . Combined with the fact that HTC offered Google with a choice of a device that was already at the development stage , is what brought as both the Nexus One and the HTC desire , with the second one aiming primarily at those markets that Google was not going to be present .
Even though the Nexus One can not be described as a commercial success , it did serve it's purpose and provided Google both with a test bed for developing the OS even further and with a benchmark device that the phone makers should try to keep up with at least with their high end devices .

When the time came for the second Necus device to appear on the market , things were a lot different and Google was aiming at being able to sell the device in at least a few other countries . This presented an even bigger problem since Google had absolutely no idea and no experience in providing supoort for consumer devices at that time . This meant that the manufacturer that would create the device would also have to support it in those markets that Google could not .
Samsung then came to the forefront , which by now was already on track to be Android's biggest phone maker and even back then was also able to provide Google with a high end device .
Samsung offered Google the hardware that Samsung was already using on their Galaxy S phone , for many different reasons . First of all Samsung was already familiar with it and had most of it's problems worked out by then . They were also making it at quantities large enough to be able to just provide Google with the small amounts they needed without having to find a way to cover the rest of the development costs .
At the same time , Samsung was already creating the successor to the Galaxy S smartphone , and since the announcement of the next Nexus phone was going to happen some time before the next galaxy phone became puclic , Samsung was not willing to give Google their technological edge .
Google obviously agreed to this because at that time , no one else was capable of providing something even remotely as good as the first Galaxy and because Samsung was willing to make the hardware changes that Google wanted . Nexus S got a curved display and an NFC chip for the first time , and also Samsung was able to provide Google with many different variations of the device to tailor different markets .

As it was expected , the new Nexus phone became more popular that the first one , and Samsung also stepped in and supported the device in as many markets as possible , by even using it's own supply chain for the phone .
Google once again got it's testbed device and this time also made the device the benchmark for other phone makers in both software and hardware .

The co-operation with Samsung turned out to be a very successful one , and Samsung only grew bigger at the sime time with their own devices . The second Galaxy phone hit the market some time after the Nexus S and turned out to be an even bigger success that the Galaxy S , while being an amazingly advanced device at the same time .
With all that in mind , and with most other phone makers just trying to catch up both with Google and Samsung in different aspects with each one , Samsung remained the only obvious choice as the maker of the third Nexus phone .
Google also needed some hardware differentiation from the Galaxy S II and once again Sameasung was not willing to give Google their top notch hardware . Instead they settled with providing Google with the first HD AMOLED screen , long before something like that would become available on a Samsung phone globally . They do however combined it with hardware that was arguably less powerfull than the one of Galaxy S II but was still very competitive at that time .
The Galaxy Nexus then saw the light of day , for the first time combining not only Samsung's hardware but also it's naming policy on the phone's name .
Samsung once again supported the device with all means possible , and along with a major OS release from Google the phone managed to become an even bigger success and actually competed with other phones on many markets .

At this point however things started to change . Samsung was becoming a giant , one that all other phone makers could not follow in the Android market field or even outside of it . Google at the same time needed and still needs all other phone makers to keep providing the diversity that Android has and is part of it's success ( and creates some of it's biggest drawbacks at the same time ) and for the first time , giving Samsung another chance to create a successful device was something that the other makers were not actually happy about happening .

So as we all know by now , LG is the maker of the next Nexus phone , which is simply called Nexus 4 because , well , because LG does not have a strong line-up name to use along with the nexus logo like Samsung did .
In all fairness , given Samsung's strategy of using their own hardware where ever they can , and since the Exynos 5250 is not yet ready to be used in a phone , LG was propably the only logical choice . After all , the Optimus G on which the Nexus 4 is based was already almost finalized and close to production .

In the real world , no company can actually afford to design , develop and manufacture a device from scratch just for Google since all of that require resources and money that the Nexus line sales will not pay back .
This is a problem for Google mostly since it means that they always have to choose a device that is already available like they did with the Nexus S or one that is already developed and just change it enough like they did with the Nexus One and now with the Nexus 4 .
Samsung's vast resources and production capabilities were able to deliver the Galaxy Nexus designed almost from scratch but that happened at a time that Samsung still needed the extra "boost" in the Brand's name that it would create and simply because they wanted the partnership that will last for years since they are now the manufacturer of the Nexus 10 which for the time being and the months to come is and will be the most technologically advanced tablet available on the market .

Google now has a decent line-up of nexus devices that has two mobile phones for as long the Galaxy Nexus stays on the market along with the new Galaxy 4 , and two different tablets that aim at exactly the right market segments . A 7 inch one made affordable for everyone , that runs on decent and capable hardware for almost any task , and a 10 inch one that is trully a flagship device for those that either need the bigger screen or just want to be on the edge of the technology .
This is probably Google's biggest victory and one that should not be underestimated . At the time of their announcement , both the Nexus 4 and the Nexus 10 are not just the newest devices from Google itself , they are also based on the best available hardware and overall technology at this time .