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Motorola Reinvents the RAZR
zacharye writes with news that Motorola has reinvented their popular RAZR clam-shell phone as an Android smartphone. The new device is 4G LTE-capable and 7.1mm thick, and it contains "a 1.2GHz dual-core TI OMAP processor, a 4.3-inch qHD Super AMOLED display, 1GB of RAM, an 8-megapixel camera with 1080p HD video capture, an LED flash, an HDMI-out port, noise cancellation capabilities, 16GB of built-in storage and a 16GB microSD card pre-installed." iFixit did a teardown of the phone, finding that the construction necessary for such thinness will make repairs problematic.
How many people actually try to fix their own phones? Even on /. I have to imagine that the number is low.
Aren't they meant to be disposable? I thought you just threw them away when they became obsolete after six months.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Seems a bit of an overstatement, how about slapped the Razr brand on a modern smartphone which isn't a clamshell.
Simply put, yes.
My HTC Desire Z plays the 720p videos it records beautifully on a big TV. No reason why similar things can't be achieved with 1080p.
With "a 1.2GHz dual-core TI OMAP processor, 1GB of RAM, an 8-megapixel camera with 1080p HD video capture, 16GB of built-in storage and a 16GB microSD card pre-installed", off the top of my head I'd say "Dern tootin' it is powerful enough!"
It hasn't been that many years since that would have been a supercomputer filling a large room, doing really nice ray-traced imagery. It is a fairly respectable desktop machine even today, except for the small disk drive. (And multi-gigabyte disk drives haven't been around THAT long.)
A cluster of those puppies, with a big disk server attached, would probably be really nice for doing, uhhh, "stellar lifecycle modeling" on the cheap.
That was probably a Sony device and actually supplemented the battery's power by consuming your life-force.
Yes they are powerful enough.
Second, some people want to use their tv as a slide show projector.
Third, its an extra feature for those people out there who shop based on feature lists.
Fourth it creates a need for people to buy a mini HDMI to full size converter. Even if its just to experiment with and never use again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
As mentioned, yes, but additionally these things have "WebTop" which is some ARM-compiled distro of Ubuntu with firefox and maybe a few others running on that HDMI port. Looking at a ps listing on one of these you'll see "/usr/bin/Xorg" running.
the real at&t mix
Come on. Can't even one smartphone maker do a decent clamshell design? I've found the slide mechanism on slide-outs way too vulnerable to breakdowns, and the bar phones are even worse. When did the idea of a reliable case design that protects the important stuff go out of fashion?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of them
This probably would have been more informative yesterday when amazon was selling them for $111.11.
~Warning!~ The above is encrypted using rot676!
11/11/1918 was Armistice Day, and it occurred at 11:00. "Eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" and all that. But I'm not sure why that makes this objectionable. It's celebrating the end of the war if it's celebrating anything, which--last I knew--was a good thing.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
I don't think you can really compare a 4th gen TI OMAP processoer with a built in GPU and ARM instruction set to an Intel PIII with MMX/SSE instruction sets.
However, if we look at raw flops... The TI in a RAZR is capable of 4.8Gflops, a little less than 1/2 a P4 at 3.0Ghz and around 4x that of a 1Ghz PIII (don't have exact numbers on me, but the PIII was first processor to break 1Gflop barrier). And if you consider power requirements, heat signature, and cost per unit, the disparity is far greater. Back ins 2000, 1Gflop cost about $1000 in computing hardware. As we approach the year 2012, 1Gflop cost is nearing $1 of hardware (and huge savings in power usage). That is pretty amazing to me.
So yeah. Comparing a TI OMAP processor to a PII is retarded. Good thing it was only an anonymous coward...
Oh come on, let's be realistic here, the amount of lifeforce that Sony devices sucks is minimal. I use my PSP, three walkmen and a sony TV everyday just to keep my nails from growing.
You're blowing this way out of proportion.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
2012-12-12 is not binary-compliant.
Remembrance(TM) of your departed loved ones, brought to you by Mc Donalds. Coca-Cola with the United Fruit, Inc. presents Peace(TM) and Happiness(TM). Have a nice(TM) day, in association with Nike.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Still might fit in your pocket (or purse/backpack). Might make for nice bar chatter...
"Say... Is that a Beowulf Cluster in your pants or are you just happy to see me?"
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Big fat hairy deal. Sorry, but other than the iconic Razr this phone looks pretty standard fare.
I actually like the original Razr. It was a super-flat fold phone with a sturdy metal body and a awesome keypad. And am quite sure it would still have a market if they'd continue to produce it. There are quite a few cellphone classics out there that probably would never die out and allways have customers. Motorolas Razr and the Siemens M35 being two of those.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
> It is a fairly respectable desktop machine even today
I hope you do realize that you cannot compare it to a desktop computer just by looking at the specs. A desktop computer with the same performance as this phone would be pretty awful.
As for the hard drives, the first multi-gigabyte hard drives came somewhere before the mid nineties but it took a few years before they reached the consumer market. I bought my first multi-gig hard drive 1997 and that particular model had been around for at least a year when I bought it. It wasn't cheap but it was fully existent.
And to follow that post ... ARM announces its next-gen GPU, the snappily named Mali-T658.
The is the followup to the GPU that's used in the Galaxy S2, and is up to 10x the performance. The old chip supported 2 cores, this one supports 4, each core being twice the perf of the previous model, and as usual, can turn cores on or off depending on the power requirements.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15668347
The firm claims the new technology will offer battery-powered mobile handsets roughly the same graphics performance as Sony's Playstation 3 console,
but the bit I liked best: "At the moment many of the speech recognition applications that are out there are solely relying on the CPU," said Mr Davies. "Very few are taking advantage of the acceleration of the GPU - and that's clearly an area of growth for us."
Even WITH all the extensive DSP functions added into these ARM chips, I'll still put an Intel / AMD processor up against a similarly clocked ARM chip absolutely any day. That leaves the phone you're describing perhaps faster than my laptop from close to a decade ago, but that's about it... I'd put my money on a P4 to run circles around it (assuming a decent video card). Phones only FEEL fast because the software is so aggressively optimized for performance on low-end hardware. Port Android to x86, and watch it fly on whatever old hardware you've got lying around. And that's today... The early PDAs felt pretty snappy with ~36MHz ARM chips for the basic apps on decent OSes like EPOC/Symbian, too.
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