Computex 2013: Intel makes case for Atom in tablets and smartphones

Summary: After many false starts, Intel may finally be gaining momentum in mobile with several wins in tablets and hybrids announced this week at Computex, and new Silvermont processors and a global 4G LTE modem on the way.

Intel's Hermann Eul explains the company's strategy to break into smartphones and tablets at Computex.

One day after the launch of the fourth-generation Core processors, Intel held a separate event focused on its Atom processors for tablets and smartphones. The company didn’t break any news, but Dr. Hermann Eul, head of Intel’s mobile group, explained the company’s strategy to compete with ARM and why it may finally be gaining momentum in mobile.

Eul said that Intel’s strategy is to develop “leadership products” (from entry-level to high-performance), provide complete platforms, and deliver the scale for mobile markets. “You all know that Intel can create markets,” he said. The foundation of all of this, he said, is Intel’s architecture and process technology.

After years of false starts this strategy seems to be paying off with a steady increase in the number of Intel-based tablets and smartphones in the market. And it is paying off with positive reviews. Eul said that the current Atom single- and dual-cores are very competitive with the best dual-core ARM solutions. (ARM disputed this at its own press conference earlier this week.)

Intel is now shipping Clover Trail+, a dual-core processor that delivers twice the performance (three times the graphics capabilities), lower power and longer battery life than the previous generation. Lenovo’s K900 smartphone was the first device to use Clover Trail+ (the 2.0GHz Atom Z2580). The first device in the market to use Clover Trail is the with 2.0GHz Atom Z2580. Asus CEO Jerry Shen came onstage to talk about two new products, the MemoPad FHD 10 tablet and Fonepad Note FHD 6 phablet, which both use the 1.6GHz dual-core Atom Z2560 processor. Eul mentioned several other products using Atom--several of which were announced this week--including the Acer Iconia W3, Asus Transformer Book Trio, Lenovo IdeaPad Mix 10, Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 and ZTE smartphones.

Intel announced its next architecture, Silvermont, on 22nm with Tri-Gate transistors, a few weeks ago. Silvermont will be used in variety of platforms including Bay Trail for tablets and Merrifield for smartphones. It will deliver three times more peak performance or five times less power. The first Bay Trail tablets running Windows 8.1 or Android will be available by the end of the year. Eul said these will have twice the performance of the current platform, better graphics and about 8 hours of battery life. Intel demonstrated the performance of a Bay Trail tablet on video transcoding (2.5 times faster than Clover Trail) and playing a “full PC game,” Runic Games’s Torchlight 2.

On smartphones, Merrifield will deliver 50 percent better performance, longer battery life and more advanced imaging features than Intel’s current platform, Eul said. The first Merrifield smartphones will ship next year—expect lots of announcements at Mobile World Congress in February.

What’s really holding back Intel on smartphone isn’t performance, or even power; it is the lack of a global 4G LTE baseband. Intel is currently shipping a 3G baseband, the XMM 6262 and will begin shipping an LTE multimode baseband, the XMM 7160, in “coming weeks.” Eul said the chip will be smaller and use less power than competing solutions. The XMM 7160 will be used not only in smartphones, but also in tablets, 2-in-1s and standard clamshell Ultrabooks. The Galaxy Tab 3 10.1-inch tablet will use the 1.60GHz Atom Z2560 (Clover Trail+) and either the XMM 6262 or XMM 7160. Eul demonstrated both a Bay Trail tablet and an Ultrabook running on Far EasTone’s 4G LTE test network. Intel is also working on a single-chip solutions with integrated 3G and 4G modems, but it won’t comment on the timing.

Intel has yet to land a global hero phone, but its mobile business is clearly headed in the right direction. Altogether Intel’s mobile group expects to ship more than 400 million chips to customers this year, Eul said. What’s interesting is that Intel can also leverage all this mobile technology to “reinvent” PCs as well. A thin and light convertible with a Bay Trail quad-core, integrated global 4G LTE and Windows 8.1 at prices starting around $400 should be pretty compelling.

Your children are slaves to their smartphones

Today, my ZDNet colleague James Kendrick wrote a piece named "The Smartphonifcation of today's youth".

In it, he discusses why today's children are "the most advanced" of any generation before it, and how they will grow up with constant information at their fingertips, because they will have always known the ubiquitous smartphone and the trappings of other related mobile technologies such as tablets and high-speed wireless broadband.

(Image: CBS Interactive)

While James is correct that this generation of children has unprecedented access to technology, I think portraying them as the "most advanced" is looking at today's kids through rose-colored glasses.

Indeed, today's teenagers and pre-teens have smartphones and tablets, they have their choice of "social" networks and apps that plug into them, like Instagram, Vine, and Pinterest, they have texting, all forms of instant messaging, and their choice of search engines and intelligent agents such as Google Now and Siri to spoon feed them any information they want.

But more advanced? Give me a freaking break.

If anything, today's privileged teens (and I italicise privileged because not all teens who live in North America have smartphones with data plans, nor do most in many other countries) are far too reliant on their mobile technology, and most would have no idea what to do with themselves if they were to be parted from it.

Smartphones and tablets are a drug that they cannot easily be weaned off.

If you don't believe me, see what happens when you go on vacation to some spot that has little or no Wi-Fi or 3G/4G connectivity, or where it's so prohibitively expensive that parents who bring their teens along decide not to purchase that connectivity for them.

It's like witnessing a mass withdrawal scene out of a 1970s methadone clinic. Or watching one of those Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes when the Borg drones become severed from their communications link to the Collective.

I got to see all of this first-hand back in December 2012, when my wife and I went on a seven-night Caribbean cruise on the NCL Epic.

This massive vessel, which can accommodate over 4,000 passengers, had hundreds of families on board, many with teenage and pre-teen children, who brought their smartphones, hoping they would still be able to text and access their usual social networks and apps and whatnot.

The Epic, in fact, like most modern cruise ships, does have Wi-Fi and internet access, but it is so prohibitively expensive that most families chose not to pay for it.

So what did these kids do? Well, the ship did have entertainment options — it had a club for kids that includes their own disco and video-game arcade, a giant water park, as well as activities specifically geared for teens and pre-teens.

But more often than not, I found many teens and pre-teens lying around deck and looking bored out of their minds.

Frankly, if there wasn't an ample supply of consumable alcohol, and if they weren't engaged in other (ahem) activities in their respective cabins, most twenty-somethings would have also been bored out of their minds, because they have all the exact same trappings of today's teenagers and pre-teens, having grown up as the Barney the Dinosaur generation.

The Dora and Blues Clues generation that followed aren't fundamentally different in their basic ideologies of extreme self-love, self-worth, and self-entitlement.

I consider them to be more like Shia Barneyism.

Now, don't get me wrong; I'm in my mid-40s, but I also love my gadgets. I own far more smartphones and tablets and laptops and computers than the average person does, because I write about technology. I am a technologist. I drink technology like mother's milk.

And if you mess with Fred Rogers, Big Bird, Snuffy, and Cookie Monster, I will bust a cap in your ass.

But guess what: When I go on vacation, do you know what I like to do more than anything else? I like to veg out. Hand me an ice-cold bucket of Blue Moons or Presidentes, give me a hefty paperback book, and throw my big fat ass in a jacuzzi. Mix up with going to out eat. Repeat as necessary.

Now, interspersed between this beer drinking, eating, and reading (oh, yes, the reading) is this thing called basic human interaction. You know, talking to people. It's much cruder than say, TCP/IP or web services APIs, or texting, but it gets the job done.

Using tablets, mobile devices and video games as a source of parental relief is going to have many unintended and undesirable consequences.

Observing the behavior of others when they are on vacation is a particularly interesting sociological exercise, because I have found it is a very good indicator of what people are like when they are not on vacation, and how their real personalities tend to manifest themselves.

If anything, it amplifies their personality because they they attempt to assert themselves in unfamiliar environments.

All this being said, I cannot entirely blame this generation's over-dependence on technology strictly on themselves. The balance of this weighs on the parents.

Yup. You heard me. You. All the things that drive you crazy about your children are your fault.

By the way, I have no kids. This is out of personal choice, and because I know my kids would probably be the most spoiled brats to walk this earth, and I'd very likely be an absolute tyrant of a father knowing my own personality characteristics.

While I do a lot less of it than I used to when I worked at IBM, I still do my fair share of business travel, and a lot of that happens on airplanes. Many of the flights I take are three or four hours, sometimes as much as six if I'm visiting the Redmond mothership.

And there are always young children on these flights, and in airports during multi-hour layovers. And they are cranky. They misbehave. They frequently don't listen to their parents when told to calm down.

To placate them and to keep them from becoming entirely disruptive to other passengers and travellers, more often than not I have seen a parent use an iPad or another tablet or other mobile device as a substitute babysitter so the parent can get some sleep or time away from the child.

Now, I don't know if it's because this generation of kids is particularly hyperactive, or that we have more than our share of autism spectrum disorders due to unknown environmental factors, and/or the current generation of kids are just plain spoiled rotten, but I have to think that using tablet, mobile devices, and video games as a source of parental relief is going to have many unintended and undesirable consequences.

It's interesting when you see what kids do with tablets versus what adults do with them, particularly on planes. Kids like to play games. Parents and business travellers like to watch movies, browse the web, and read books.

Rarely have I seen a teenager or a pre-teen pick up a tablet on a plane and read a book. More often than not, the ones with the Kindles are college students.

So indeed, today's children are more "advanced", if we agree they are the first generation to embrace the Version 1.0 David Gelernter "Lifestream", which I believe is quickly turning our society into one dominated by attention-deficient nitwits.

I'm certainly not suggesting that we take smartphones and tablets away from our kids. If anything, the smartphone has given the modern parent a better communications and location mechanism than any generation of parents have had before, giving them increased peace of mind.

But we have to remember that smartphones and tablets and other forms of digital interaction are no replacement for real human interaction, as well as traditional forms of learning.

And if we continue to become "advanced" as Kendrick posits, all we will be is a bunch of unlearned and uncultured automatons that are socially backward in all manner of social interaction by comparison to their "inferior" technologically deprived forbears, who read avidly, who conversed face to face, and appreciated the simpler things in life.

Are today's children really more "advanced" with access to today's mobile technology, or is it also retarding their developmental and social skills? Talk back and let me know.

IDC: Smartphones will eventually surpass feature phone shipments in 2013

The mobile industry is on the verge of a major turning point, according to a new report from the International Data Corporation.

See also: Canalys forecasts one billion Android smartphone sales in 2017 and rapid growth for Windows Phone

Market intelligence company reported on Tuesday that global smartphone shipments are expected to reach approximately 958.8 million units.

It is a 32.7 percent increase from 722.5 million units in 2012.

More important, IDC analyst predicted that this will be the year that smartphones surpass feature phones in total cell phone shipments all over the world.

Specifically, analysts expect that smartphones will account for 52.2 percent of all mobile phone shipments by the end of 2013.

Ramon Llamas, a research manager at IDC mobile devices team, stressed the importance of this shift in the report goes so far as to describe 2013 as a "watershed year for smartphones."

If you look at the number of vendors that support both feature phones and smartphones, many of them have not only successfully transferred their product portfolios to select smartphones, but smartphones have become their primary value proposition going forward. In some cases, smartphones accounted for over 50% of their quarterly shipment volume. Going forward, we expect that the gap between smartphones and feature phones to grow ever wider.

IDC's report on Tuesday is similar with another published by IHS iSuppli last november. The forecast use NAND Flash memory concerned in particular, signaling a major SHIFT that will directly affect the supply chain partners as soon as this year.

However, Nielsen issued an industry survey in January 2013, positing that smartphones still have "room to grow" in several top emerging markets at least.

As for six months ago found Nielsen to feature phones, which researchers defined as "devices without touch screen, QWERTY keyboard and operating system" is far more dominant in India and Russia, covering 80 per cent and 51 per cent of mobile users, respectively.

Chart via IDC

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Best Android smartphones (June 2013 edition)

I looked at a couple of his books, not impressed.

I will use his book Javascript 1.5 by example as an example of his lack of attention to detail.

Chapter 3, "JavaScript in action", consists of describing objects, methods and properties and 3 examples of methods, alert(), confirm() and prompt (). Yes it is all over.

His definitions of
item is: simply put, an object is a thing, something. Just as things in the real world are objects (cars, dogs, dollar bills and so on), are considered things in the computer world as objects, too.

[2 lame paragraphs jumped]

Practices are things like object can do. In the real world have object methods. Cars move, dogs bark, dollar buying and so on. Alert () is a method of the window object, so the object can warn the user with a message box ...[useless additional paragraph]

Features: all items have properties. Cars have wheels and the dogs have fur. Things that the browser has Javascript, name, and version.

His methods example code:

=== END of CHAPTER 3 ===

My review.

"Simply an object is a thing, something." leaves the reader with nothing. An object not declared. If you don't know what an item is, you would now be able to answer the question, what is an object?

He did not explain what a method is, especially his "real world" approach such as "dollar buying". I think people do not buy dollars. If I had to explain the dollar as one object: the dollar has no methods and properties: dollars. value, dollar. $ date, serialNumber.

It his sample code??? This is terrible. Blind leading the blind.

Message for example, alert(), confirm() and prompt () is exactly the same except the passed value [text phrase].

Alert is OK

confirm and prompt is used to retrieve user input.

confirm, user clicks from a selection of buttons.

quick pick what the user types in the shortcut text field.

What is missing is the setting of a variable value. Confirm() and prompt () is never stand alone. There is always a variable assignment.

each choice = confirm ("which do you choose?");

var name = prompt ("What is your name?", "Please enter your name here.");

==================

In his technical blog that he claims often inaccurate "facts" or Miss detail.

Recent examples:
[Silvermont] provides three times more performance for five times less power than the current generation Atom nucleus.

This is how I say it correctly: it is expected that an Atom is running at maximum clock speed will exceed Z2560 by about 300%.

An Atom that runs at a lower clock rate, makes a performance level equal to Z2560, will use 500% less power.

What Adrian Kingsley-Hughes said 3 X performance and 5 X less power and there should be a or 3 X performance or 5 X less power.

In the post similar to this one "best Android tablets"

When listing the processor of the tablets had some processors is stated as:

1.4 GHz Exynos quad core processor
NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor
Dual-Core Processor ARM Cortex A15

My take on the detail. When you compare these tablets processors equal cannot be compared with the above lack of detail. This is SoC chips, which have a GPU as well.

Dual-Core Processor ARM Cortex A15 should:
Samsung Exynos 5250, dual-core 1.70 GHz Cortex A15 CPU and a quad-core Mali GPU T604

NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor should:
NVIDIA Tegra 3, a 1.3 GHz Cortex-A9 quad-core processor
and a twelve-core 416 MHz Nvidia GeForce ULP GPUS

1.4 GHz Exynos quad core processor should:
Samsung Exynos 4412, 1.4 GHz quad-core Cortex-A9 and Mali-400MP GPU

I also would have included benchmarks.

The devil is in the details.

Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini: Are smaller screen smartphones in demand?

Samsung announced the Galaxy S4 Mini with a 4.3-inch display. Its big brother — the S4 — sports a 5-inch display, but many people still find such devices too big for daily use.

(Image: Samsung)

The current trend in smartphones is to go big, with many new high-end models sporting 4.7-inch to 5.5-inch displays. That's fine if you are data-centric and have big hands and pockets. However, there are still many people who want a smaller phone.

Samsung officially announced the Galaxy S4 Mini and it will be interesting to see if this smaller brother enjoys the S4's level of success.

I can understand the desire for a smaller display device. I remember a time when people thought the limit for smartphones was going to be 4.3 inches. I am satisfied with my 4.7-inch HTC One and 4.5-inch Lumia 920, but the 5.5-inch Note II is definitely not that convenient to carry around for communications and doesn't go with me everywhere as the smaller devices do.

With the popularity and rise in 7- to 8-inch tablets, we may soon see a trend of people going back to these smaller display devices paired with small tablets. There are rumors of an HTC One Mini and a device with the HTC One build quality — and a 4-inch display could be a very attractive offering.

The Galaxy S4 Mini is not an S4 and has many reduced specifications, including the display quality, camera resolution, battery size, internal storage, and processor speed.

The Galaxy S4 Mini has very limited internal storage (5GB available); since Android doesn't let you install applications to the microSD card, you will be limited by how many applications you can have on the device. The S4 Mini also has a dual-core processor and — given that Android performance is related to processor speed — it is unlikely that you will see the kind of responsiveness you can find on optimized Windows Phone devices.

People may be willing to accept some reduction in performance with their desired smaller display, but I wonder where that lower limit is. I wrote about low-cost Lumia smartphones a couple days ago and how they offer more to the consumer than older generation iPhones and low-cost Android devices. The display of the Lumia 521 is 4 inches and the 82x series on carriers is 4.3 inches. If you want a smaller display device, I recommend you look at one of these Lumia devices.

Matthew Miller started using a Pilot 1000 in 1997 and has been writing news, reviews, and opinion pieces ever since.