Verizon's Challenge To the iPhone Confirmed

misnohmer writes "Verizon has just launched a new set of ads confirming the rumors of its upcoming iPhone competitor: 'Unlike previous Android phones, the Droid is rumored to be powered by the TI OMAP3430, the same core that the iPhone and Palm Pre use, and which significantly outperforms Qualcomm 528MHz ARM11-based Android phones that exist today. Droid will also be running v.2.0 of Android, with a significantly upgraded user interface. The Droid poses a different and more significant challenge to the iPhone than any other phone to date. The Palm Pre could have been that challenger, but it lacked the Verizon network, and users were unimpressed with the hardware. According to people who've handled the device, the Droid is the most sophisticated mobile device to hit the market to date from a hardware standpoint. When you combine that with the Verizon network, you've got something that is most definitely a challenger to the Jesus phone.'"

Comments

Advert for the verizon network?

[jpate]

The summary reads more like an advertisement for Verizon than anything else...

Re:Advert for the verizon network?

[cbope]

Exactly. Since when does a US carrier "add value" in any sense of the word? All the US carriers do is cripple the phone hardware (disabling tethering, MMS, etc) and lock-in their customers. Glad I live in Europe where I'm free to choose the phone hardware and service independently, and the phones are not crippled. And I pay a reasonable amount when roaming in other countries and calls rarely get dropped. Oh yeah... that's called service.

Re:Advert for the verizon network?

[TheRaven64]

Also, the Samsung Moment coming out in 2 weeks for Sprint has an 800MHz ARM-based CPU, where the one powering the Droid is apparently only 600MHz (I'm assuming that since the design is similar, the clock speed is a valid way to compare the performance of the CPUs; could be wrong on this).

Not exactly. The Moment, apparently, is going to have an ARM11 core, while the OMAP3 is a Cortex A8. The ARM11 core is an older design and gets slightly fewer instructions per clock (I think) as well as not supporting a number of the newer extensions to the architecture, like NEON (SIMD instructions) or Thumb-2 (16-bit instruction set for better cache usage).

Even that doesn't tell the whole story, because none of these chips are pure CPUs, they're systems-on-chip (SoCs) and so have a load of extra stuff. The OMAP3, for example, has an OpenGL ES 2.0 GPU core from PowerVR, a C64x DSP core from TI, and a few other specialist things. The C64x can handle things like MP3 playback in about 15mW, and can also be used for offloading various other things, like crypto functions. The GPU supports shaders, and so can be used for a wide variety of things. An OMAP3430 can decode 720p quite easily, because it has some hardware off the ARM core that's optimised for this. An 800MHz ARM11 almost certainly can't, but it may also be on a SoC that can.

Oh, and even within the same family you can't even compare clock-for-clock with ARM cores. The cheap licenses just let you stamp the core onto your die and connect it to your value-added cores, but the expensive ones let you tweak the design. The Snapdragon from Qualcomm is a Cortex A8, but they tweaked it quite a lot and it's a little bit faster than other people's versions per clock.

In short, comparing ARM SoCs based solely on clock speed is even more misleading than comparing x86 processors solely on clock speed.

Re:They don't care about challenging better phones

[TheRaven64]

Nitpicking, but they have 13% of the smartphone market, and under 2% of the total cellphone market. I'm not really sure what the distinction is these days, given that even cheap phones come with a 200MHz or faster ARM core and are capable of running arbitrary programs, but the people compiling these numbers like to divide the market up.

Re:The problem was never with their network

[Shatrat]

They would also disable Bluetooth file transfer so that people would have to pay for sending picture messages to get their pics off their phone wirelessly. All wireless companies in the U.S. are evil to some degree, but Verizon keeps them all in business by making them look customer-friendly in comparison.