First Quad-Core Android Tablet Reviewed

adeelarshad82 writes "The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime happens to the first Quad-Core Android Tablet, which also makes it the fastest and most powerful tablet. The secret ingredient is Nvidia's five-core Tegra 3 chipset, including four cores which work together at up to 1.4GHz each and a 'companion core' which runs alone. When tested on the Antutu system benchmark, the Prime scored a breathtaking 10,619, which is roughly double the score of even fast devices like the HTC Jetstream. Benchmark results for Sunspider and Browsermark browsing scored at 17ms and 98324, respectively, which also happened to be amongst the best. The tablet weighs 1.3 pounds and measures 10.4 by 7.1 inches, but it's very slim at 0.3 inches."

Comments

The original Tranformer is great

[symbolset]

By all accounts they sold 1.6 million of 'em, which isn't bad for a few months on a new product - about $2B the first half year. To have the next gen come so soon after is quite awesome. The original one will continue to sell on a long tail for some time, since it's great and has the best port mix of all Android tablets.

I've got one, and it rocks. Updates come quick and I'm really looking forward to ICS. All the apps I bought for my phone just automagically are available on the tablet and work great. Other tablet platforms might have a "limited apps" issue, but apparently Android was well designed to scale to different resolutions since version 1.6 oh, so long ago. If you get one, try "Corby." Google Talk is also nice - it lets me video chat with the kids when I'm away from home on business. Kindle is essential - I just downloaded "At Napoleon's Side in Russia", the journal of Armand De Caulaincourt of the Napoleonic siege of Moscow that many years later disheartened the Nazi invaders as told here. I'm gaining a new respect for the strength of the Russian people's character, which isn't a benefit I expected from a geek toy. The miniHDMI port is handy for giving presentations in conference rooms because the included Polaris Office handles Powerpoints nicely, and for reference docs there's PDF. It does Flash, which is nice when I want to research what the Internet is for.

The launch of the Transformer Prime solves my biggest problem with the Transformer: holding on to the damned thing. Apparently my wife and kids (and grandson) are fond of these apps and want to use my tablet all day. Now I can hand it down to them and get me the Prime. Sweet.

Re:The original Tranformer is great

[rtb61]

Have you dropped it yet? Do you use it on the move? Do you miss the lack of a DVD drive or HDisk in the dock able keyboard. If your use is mainly stationary would not sya a 12 icnh or 13.3 inch screen be better?

Perfect is still a long way off in tablet/smartbooks.

Re:The original Tranformer is great

[symbolset]

It's got a crack in the corner because I dropped it while dodging a nickel rocket and the rocket blasted it. Apparently the Gorilla glass isn't proof against rocket exhaust. I can live with that little crack as it doesn't impact anything and frankly that was my fault. Yes, I've dropped my Transformer a dozen times, and it's daily handled by kids in the 2-9 year old range without supervision. God only knows what they do with it. It seems to be durable enough for my purposes.

I've ripped a number of DVDs, and downloaded some HD videos and played them on it. It's quite capable - it plays nearly every thing I feed it. Even Dell's .wmv's I've been using it to skill up on their latest gear.

I bought the HDMI cable so if a bigger display suits me better I can have my desktop monitor 23", my bedroom 47", or the the family room 55" without any degradation in quality. I'm coming nearsighted, so this happens a lot. My kids totally dig HD YouTube Zelda videos on the bigscreen, which is improving our bonding.

Perfect is an unachievable goal, but these things are "good enough" and then some.

Re:The original Tranformer is great

[Fri13]

Lack of DVD or HDD are even in todays laptops more or less legacy thing.
Search earlier slashdot article about DVD needs by laptop owners and you find out that most people have used it only few times.
HDD is not good idea at all for small laptops what can be hold on lap or table or when walking. As there is bigger risk to drop it. But on bigger laptops like 15-19" versions, you want a table for those so HDD is "safe".

But, I would take a 15" tablet, with 2cm thickness so it could have huge battery on it. And demand would be it has a hybrid display with very accurate pen (not a small stylus) and when pen is in use on screen, touch does nothing.
And by my opinion I would definetely take it with Android instead Windows 8.

 

Re:The original Tranformer is great

[AmiMoJo]

One major advantage of the Transformer and many other high end Android tablets is the 1280x800 screen resolution. I stopped using my old Thinkpad because the 1024x768 screen just wasn't very comfortable for viewing web pages or even PDF documents. I wouldn't get a tablet with anything less than 1280x800 now, although my current 13" laptop is a Panasonic Let's Note with 1400xSomethingOrOther screen and a weight of less than 1Kg (including optical drive!)

Re:The original Tranformer is great

[johnkoer]

Looking at the specs, does the 1GB RAM limitation have a negative impact on performance? I have also heard complaints on the responsiveness of the UI at times, is that still an issue?

Re:The original Tranformer is great

[ozmanjusri]

I have also heard complaints on the responsiveness of the UI at times, is that still an issue?

Only to people who've never used one, and don't want anyone else to use one.

Re:The original Tranformer is great

[symbolset]

Slang term. One of the larger bottle rockets. The body of the rocket is about the same diameter as a nickel.

Re:The original Tranformer is great

[tlhIngan]

I have also heard complaints on the responsiveness of the UI at times, is that still an issue?

Only to people who've never used one, and don't want anyone else to use one.

It depends. If you don't mind slight pauses in the UI, then it's fine. If you want silky-smooth "teh snappy", then you'll find it annoying.

About the biggest complaint I have with Android tablets, at least the ones I've played with in the stores is they seem to stutter a lot. I take the Galaxy tab, and after unlocking it, it's got screens to the left and right. Swipe left or right, and you can see it drop frames in the animation and be a bit herky-jerky.

Does it kill the device? Not really, but given it's specs and that lesser devices have gotten the swipe thing down pat, it seems disappointing. It's like we're back in the 486 days of computing where we saw graphics that tore and were jerky and were amazed at how "fluid" it all is.

Or, it's like only getting 10fps out of the device. Android doesn't appear to put the UI as a high priority - so the "apparent responsiveness" is down. (It may very well be faster than something that makes the UI snappier at the expense of throughput, though).

Re:The original Tranformer is great

[Andy Dodd]

Simple answer: Power consumption.

To achieve the best battery life, most devices are sold with CPU frequency governors that are biased towards keeping the clock speed low unless you REALLY need it. A tiny bit of lag on unlock is a classic example of this.

Battery life gains the big news here

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care how fast it can run angry birds. I just care about the improved battery life this core provides!

Tegra

[Anonymous Coward]

The weighted companion core will never threaten to stab you and in fact cannot speak.

How is the battery?

Re:Tegra

[symbolset]

The battery rocks. It's like "don't worry about it" kind of good. 16 hour flight? No problem.

Re:Tegra

[tsa]

So you say it's... better than the iPad? But that's impossible!

Re:Tegra

[symbolset]

Only with the keyboard, which has an extra battery (frankly for mass to balance the tablet-as-screen). The Transfomrer Prime's commited lifecycle is exactly that of the iPad 2. Completely an accident, I'm sure.

Re:Tegra

[AmiMoJo]

That is quite impressive when you consider that the Transformer has extra peripherals to run such as the SD card. The screen is also higher resolution (more graphics load), it multitasks, performs better and costs less.

There is nothing magical about Apple hardware.

Re:Tegra

[halltk1983]

According to TFA, it's the same as the iPad, when it's on max brightness, which is brighter than the iPad 2, while playing a movie. If you turn down the brightness, and set it to lower consumption, they state you easily get over 10 hours, during video playback, which is better than the iPad 2.

Re:Tegra

[jaigg]

Apple didn't invent anything, they took existing ideas and marketed them better than anyone else had. They may have improved some of these things but they didn't invent a single one of them. There were smart phones and touch screens before the Iphone, there were tablets before the Ipad, MP3 players before the Ipod. Apple is a great marketing company but their electronics are purposely weak and closed so they can release new ones bi annually. They are marketing geniuses, I just can't stress that enough but their technology is weak, old, past it's prime, obsolete say it however you want but Apple makes inferior products with spectacular marketing campaigns.

Touch lag

[DarkDust]

From the article:

You won't see the blinding speed when you're poking around the main UI or some of Google's apps, as they're occasionally nonresponsive, although screen transitions are a bit more fluid than on other Android tablets.

I wonder when this will finally be solved. Previously, the lag was blamed on poor hardware. With this beast, that excuse really does not hold at all anymore.

Re:Touch lag

[Telvin_3d]

I guess 4 cores isn't enough to open menus smoothly. You think at some point they will let the hardware and software engineers talk to each other? Perhaps even get their hands on the product before it ships?

Re:Touch lag

[Totenglocke]

Sorry, but I don't believe this. I've had multiple Android phones over the last couple of years and never experienced any lag except when I was installing an app in the background and trying to do something else. Then again, the reviewer bashes the tablet because it allows tablet owners to download any Android apps and not just tablet specific apps, so he's clearly an idiot or a troll.

Re:Touch lag

[daffy951]

Guess you're not as picky as many others then: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=6914 and http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=20278

Re:Touch lag

[AuMatar]

Multi-core isn't going to help basic UI issues, those will all be running on a single core. The problem is Android isn't really written to be efficient. XML based UIs running in Java (with garbage collection occurring who knows when), a codebase that's frequently convoluted and an architecture that sometimes looks like someone took the Gang of Four book and tried to use every pattern at once. I mean seriously, why does setting a selection on a text view require a selection class rather than a start and end index in the widget?

If you want to fix it, you need a complete overhaul of the framework and quite likely rewrite chunks of it in C or C++.

Re:Touch lag

[Mr Thinly Sliced]

Yeah sadly it's a general latency problem with Android that doesn't seem to get mentioned.

I write audio software and it's the poor red headed stepchild of IOS in comparison:

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3434

Re:Touch lag

[Fri13]

I have ZTE Blade what I would say is slowest and cheapest (about 120 dollars without contract) Android phone on the market.

ARM6 254-600Mhz
512 RAM
512 NAND Flash
800 x 600px Super bright LCD
And I have MicroSD Class 4 in it.

I have had Android 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 (current 2.3.7) on it and coming is 4.0 for it (there is almost everything working)

The 2.1 had very little laggy home screen. What was fixed with ADW launcher.
But a 2.2 fixed everything and phone was smooth and without lags in use.
And a 2.3 was not different (thanks CM7. 2.1 and 2.2 were officials for now).

But the problems of ARM6 600Mhz processing speed are visible when using heavy CPU demanded apps.
Like when starting a such application, it might take 1-2 seconds instead instantly like how normal Android apps starts.
Webpages scrolls smoothly, haven't come up with any what would laggy, thanks to non-existing Flash for the ARM6 architecture.
The phone is as well fine when using it as hotspot and traffic is to HSDPA network a full 7.2Mbits. It does get little warm in long run because WLAN chip (12h) but nothing serious.

But yes, I am little jelous for other Android phone owners like Samsung Galaxy S II. As I would like to have bigger screen, bigger battery (SII with 3500mAh battery is.... dream) and little more responsive phone when starting those heavy applications. As I want to use Autodesk applications or some very intensive 3D modeling applications what demand a better GPU.

I bought a cheap Android phone and didn't expect a much. But it was very huge supprise when noticing how perfectly it runs.
So, I got hungry and I want more. Maybe in a year I bougth a something cheaper from 200-300 dollar range what offers more speed and features what are today available in highend phones.

 

Re:Touch lag

[Anonymous Coward]

From user experience POW, losing a few hundred cycles every 1000 cycles would usualy be quite acceptable, but the problem with many GC's is that they tend to use few hundred million cycles every ten billion cycles which is quite noticeable even though it's in fact a smaller proportion of the total time.

Re:Touch lag

[AmiMoJo]

No, the reason Android isn't as fluid as iOS is that it multi-tasks. When you run an iOS app stuff like screen transitions get absolute priority over everything else. The app is basically frozen while the screen transitions in order to make it look slick. Android apps are not tied to the UI in the same way so sometimes if you have a lot going on or if the OS needs to free up some RAM the transition effects might suffer a bit.

Having said that they are really smooth on my Galaxy S. I don't have them all turned on because they waste time, much like the pointless window minimise/maximise animations in Windows or MacOS. Personally I prefer to have multi-tasking and more features at the expense of a slightly less slick GUI. iOS has the advantage of being design for a very limited number of specific models and thus can optimise for them, while Android has to be more generic. Again I personally prefer to have that freedom to chose devices from any vendor rather than being locked in to Apple.

The Android API is nice and the GUI stuff scales nicely, plus Java apps are not tied to any particular CPU architecture so will automatically make use of new features such as the Neon instructions on ARM7 or SSE if Intel ever get x86 based tablets/phones shipping. iOS uses managed code too, which has similar overheads in terms of garbage collection and JIT compilation as Google's JVM implementation. You can also write native Android apps if you want to.

Re:Touch lag

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is Android isn't really written to be efficient.

Little bit of an exaguration there. Yes, they knowingly traded some efficiency for portability, which includes architecture independence as well as screen resolution/density independence, combined with easy for development. Easily a superior trade at the expense of a few cycles during initial screen load. In other words, you extremely exaggerate the significance here.

As for GC'ing, again you've exaggerated. For the most part programmers have relatively good control of when GC'ing occurs. Furthermore, for static layouts, its trivial to anticipate and the associated load is not worth mentioning even on hardware 1/4 the performance of this device.

a codebase that's frequently convoluted and an architecture that sometimes looks like someone took the Gang of Four book and tried to use every pattern at once. I mean seriously, why does setting a selection on a text view require a selection class rather than a start and end index in the widget?

Sadly, you are spot on here. The code base a total piece of shit. It looks like someone had never written a GUI before and only knew theory of design patterns. Things which should be extremely simple require gobs of vastly over complicated and verbose code. Its a stupid fest. It wonderfully shows that contrary to common myth, Google does employ very inexperience coders and designers. And when combined with the worst of Java, its a really horrible coding experience which leave only but the most naive or inexperienced cursing at the needless over engineering, unjustified complexity, and tiresome verbosity.

As a coder I ran into some UI design (I wrote it) which I couldn't believe was so horrible on the eyes, hard to read, hard to maintain, and yet did so very, very little. It was roughly 17 pages of code. Just out of curiosity, I decided to write it in wxPython. I thought that was relatively fair since Java coders love to compare with Java and frequently push it as superior to Python. The wxPython UI was two pages. The thing is, that massive difference really isn't about Java vs Python (or not the discerning factor), its that wxPython is well written and the Android UI API is about as horribly written as you can possibly make it. Bluntly, most of the UI GUIs in Android are either a complete piece of shit or an all out abomination.

Add to this is the fact that Android UI's are inherently ASYNCHRONOUS. That means you can accidentally push a button multiple times and, for example, have five new windows spawned before the first one renders. Its pretty easy to do in a moving vehicle. And if you don't like this inherent behavior, you have to add a bunch more code to see if the window already exists or not - which absolutely no sample code shows or even hints at the requirement.

I love Android and it has some really cool features, but much of the APIs are absolutely horrible, horrible, horrible and without a doubt show they've been written by people who likely have never even use a computer UI before. And if they have used computer UI's before, then its a strong argument they are retarded.

Re:Touch lag

[Rockoon]

..I'm pretty sure that adding another API layer isnt going to improve latency.

Re:Touch lag

[the linux geek]

iPhone OS applications are written in Objective-C and compiled directly to native code. It also has pointers and all the other trappings of a real language and execution environment.

Re:Touch lag

[ozmanjusri]

The UI might not be efficient,

The UI is fine, don't be misled by this "laggy" FUD.

I have one of the Tegra 2 Transformers, while my phone is the original Huawei Ideos. Both are completely usable devices, despite the Huawei being massively underpowered on paper.

The Asus Transformer is silky smooth in normal use, easily as slick as the iPads I use at work. I'm sure it's possible for a determined professional to create edge-cases where it can bog down, but in for us mere mortals, that just won't happen.

Re:Touch lag

[hpoul]

I have used the original iphone and iphone 3gs for years and then switched to nexus one and finally nexus s - i love android and develop for it, but there is still definitively some touch lag - you experience it most when scrolling or panning/zooming images - i'm not sure if this lag is a hardware (touch pannel) or software issue - but there is a lag - maybe just 50ms, it's noticable, that it's not there on the iphone- since the first version - it has always been there on the google devices i've played with - it's just very subtle, and it gets better .. and its "good enough" but it's not just imagination :-)

Re:Touch lag

[lehphyro]

You really shouldn't be using C or C++ for user facing applications, unless you're doing Battlefield or something like that. You better be worrying about features than memory management and such.

Re:Touch lag

[Mr Thinly Sliced]

The Android that phone builders download and customise is based on Alsa in the kernel - but Android doesn't define access to ALSA in any way (and the phone manufacturers could use something completely different.)

The audio "layers" (and it really is that) are quite complex, with OpenSL along with the defined Java sound APIs as the only userspace methods to play sound.

Unfortunately due to the way the layers are defined (multiple mixers for various devices, incoming call interrupt etc) it's not "Alsa" available in userspace and you can't rely on that being there.

So to answer your question:

(yes) Jack could be compiled on Android - but the use of Alsa is not necessarily reliable and/or available on all devices.

(no) Using native Alsa might not solve the audio latency problems - since that's a function of audio buffer size and throughput.

Don't ask me why, but Google define 45ms as low latency....... Meanwhile, in Apple Land, both the iPhone and iPad are happily realtime audio scheduling around 4-5ms...

Re:Touch lag

[quickgold192]

they are really smooth on my Galaxy S

On my Galaxy S, the instant search has yet to register all my keystrokes at a normal typing speed. I have to press the first letter, wait 3-5 seconds for the search to load up, and then continue typing.

I know you were addressing transitions specifically, but the instant search feature is something that's supposed to add to the fluidity, not detract from it. And 1 GHz should be plenty to capture my keystrokes (on a hardware keypad.)

Re:Touch lag

[0123456]

this thing runs at 1.4ghz. Losing a few hundred cycles to garbage collection shouldn't hurt anything.

'A few hundred cycles'?

Java routinely locks up the system for several seconds garbage collecting on a multi-core, multi-gigahertz x86 CPU. When we write performance-sensitive software in Java we typically spend far more time making the garbage collection not screw it up than we spend dealing with memory management in C++; there are very few reasons to call new or delete directly in modern C++ code.

Most things about Java are better than C++, but memory management isn't one of them.

Re:Touch lag

[AmiMoJo]

Strange, are you on the latest firmware? When I use instant search sometimes there is a delay of about 0.5 seconds before the text I am typing appears in the box, after which it is instant. If I type during that 0.5 seconds the characters are buffered and not lost.

Maybe you are using a 3rd party keyboard or something? Keep in mind that since Android multitasks you do need to pay attention to what random apps you install as some of them will sit in the background chewing up RAM and CPU. With great power comes great responsibility and all that.

Re:Touch lag

[AmiMoJo]

Android has full hardware acceleration via OpenGL ES, the same as the iPhone. Obviously not all phones are equal but a high end one like the Galaxy S has more graphics power than an iPhone 4.

Re:Touch lag

[AuMatar]

NDK allows you to write apps core logic in C++ and link to Java via JNI. But the JNI has a high cost, and your UI will be written in Java because the framework only has hooks for Java. The NDK is really there for games and multiplatform apps to port to Android. A tiny percentage of apps use it.

Re:Touch lag

[ozmanjusri]

You might not notice, but just about every reviews, and lots of consumers, do.

Have YOU ever actually used one?

Many people have many reasons for saying things in online forums and reviews. The truth is just one of those reasons, and often not a very important one.

Re:Touch lag

[mjwx]

When you run an iOS app stuff like screen transitions get absolute priority over everything else. The app is basically frozen while the screen transitions in order to make it look slick.

This.

Application loading is actually slower on IOS then Android but most people dont notice it because of all the eye candy in the way.

I have a Desire Z (running Cyanogen Mod 7) and I carry an Iphone 3GS (4.3.5 IIRC) for work. Even something as simple as opening the SMS application takes longer on IOS, of course the lack of tranistion animation on the Android phone makes it look longer, but that sub-second delay is less then the screen transition animation time on the Iphone. Putting them side by side, the Android opens the SMS application to a usable state before the Iphone.

Other end of the spectrum

[evilviper]

I'd like to ask why things are so bad at the other end of the spectrum... Why do we need to buy these high-end devices just to guarantee we'll have a tolerable user experience?

Specifically, why do inexpensive Android Tablets and Phones have such horrendous touch-screens?

I can name names. My big surprise was my recent purchase of a Samsung Transform Ultra... Which, at $230 didn't seem like a cheapo device compared to the many $99 android phones. Yet the touch screen was so horrible and glitchy that it was IMPOSSIBLE to use Swype to type anything but the shortest words. Assuming that couldn't possibly be a "feature" of a brand-name, mass-market android phone, I exchanged it for another, which had exactly the same problem. Plenty of forums with people complaining about the same thing, and saying Samsung hasn't offered any help.

The same is true of cheap tablets I've used. The touch-screens may be glitchy, or they may be painfully unresponsive and dog-slow. With a few these are adjustable via tunables in /sys, but sadly, most are not.

Why do so many devices, where the touch-screen is the primary and usually SOLE method of INPUT, fail so miserably in providing just a usable touch-screen?

That's really what these pricey tablets have going for them... The cheap knock-offs cut one-too-many corners, and there's nothing in-between high end devices, and low-end junk.

Re:Other end of the spectrum

[Osty]

Specifically, why do inexpensive Android Tablets and Phones have such horrendous touch-screens?

It's not the screens that are the problem. It's the OS. Android was historically developed without any GPU acceleration requirements, and the OS up through Honeycomb still does most UI drawing on the CPU instead. The lagginess people recognize as "bad touch input" is actually bad drawing, and doesn't exist so much in other OSes that use GPU acceleration for UI elements. For example, Windows Phone 7 renders all UI via the GPU and is generally considered to be much more responsive and smoother than Android despite only supporting single-core CPUs. Ice Cream Sandwich fixes this, but also has hardware requirements that mean very few existing devices will be supported. This is an unfortunate but natural consequence of an open platform with little or no hardware control. The OS developers can't assume things like a GPU will be present, so they have to write for lowest common denominator or consciously exclude devices.

(Note that I'm only talking about OS/launcher behavior. Within apps themselves, developers can make things somewhat better or much, much worse depending on how they handle UI elements.)

Re:Other end of the spectrum

[jo_ham]

Pretty much because the difference between the bad ones and the good ones is all in the display assembly - it makes up the bulk of the cost. A decent screen and touch interface etc is going to set you back - and then it becomes "an expensive tablet".

There's a reason that the iPad and other Android tablets of similar quality to it are as expensive as they are - if someone could make an equivalent tablet for a lot less (ie, down in the $200 range) they would have done it already. When you go cheap, you've got no choice but to compromise on the screen - the rest of the pieces aren't really adding all that much to the cost.

Re:Other end of the spectrum

[SirJorgelOfBorgel]

Ice Cream Sandwich fixes this, but also has hardware requirements that mean very few existing devices will be supported

Google has stated that pretty much every device that can run Gingerbread (50% of all Android devices out there run Gingerbread) can run Ice Cream Sandwich.

Re:Other end of the spectrum

[AuMatar]

As someone who's written some touch intensive apps for Android- there really was bad touch input. On some phones I was seeing 9 months ago, the touch input driver could spike to 60-70% CPU (measured by running top through an adb shell) while doing continual touch events. Not all phones were like that (I don't even think a majority were), but a significant number of models used that driver.

Re:Other end of the spectrum

[evilviper]

Pretty much because the difference between the bad ones and the good ones is all in the display assembly - it makes up the bulk of the cost. A decent screen and touch interface etc is going to set you back - and then it becomes "an expensive tablet".

Hang on. My problem with your analysis is that you're combining two things that are entirely separate... The INPUT and the OUTPUT.

I realize that (eg. AMOLED) displays are expensive. No problem, though... I'm perfectly willing to settle for a lower-res LCD display based on older tech. The Samsung Transform Ultra I mentioned is a perfect example, with a nasty LCD screen-door effect (compared to my Droid) but which I quickly learned to tolerate...

But high-res screen or no, what drives me insane is flaky touch-screen INPUT (not output), and I find it hard to believe that going from a horrible, glitchy capacitive touch screen, to a RELIABLE capacitive touch screen, costs a significant fraction of a phone or tablet's sale price. In many cases, as I said, I'd be willing to bet it might only require a software change.

Furthermore, I'm not sure your statement is actually accurate. All sources I could find point to an iPhone 4's Retina display at about $30:

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2010/tc20100627_763714.htm

http://www.bgr.com/2011/10/06/apple-maintains-big-margins-on-iphone-4s-according-to-ubm-analysis/

Re:Other end of the spectrum

[Fri13]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVleFJuNuQI

That is basicly work what CM developers did under a week from Android 4.0 source release.
ZTE Blade has ARM6 600Mhz, 512 RAM, 512 NAND Flash.
The Android 4.0 SDK was not available for ARM6 but for least ARM7. So they needed to compile it as well (one developer compiled it with netbook in 31 hours).

Since then, GPU drivers has been added and OpenGL is coming shape so smoother UI can be excepted. Still needs optimizing but most features are there.

If almost slowest currenty available Android phone can run ICS, then definetely most of the mid-range androids can.

Re:Other end of the spectrum

[AmiMoJo]

Android was historically developed without any GPU acceleration requirements, and the OS up through Honeycomb still does most UI drawing on the CPU instead.

Absolute rubbish. Android's UI is rendered with OpenGL ES and thus fully hardware accelerated. It has been since day one, it is just that most cheap phones have slow GPUs with old drivers and little graphics RAM. OpenGL ES support is mandatory for Android devices, but of course low end chipsets use software rendering to make up for lack of hardware support. Even if the hardware supports basic operations like blitting images older chips don't support DMA so the CPU has to manually copy the image into graphics RAM first.

Bad touch input is usually down to the update rate of the touch controller (the cheap ones only manage about 12 updates per second) and phones lagging because they have crappy manufacturer supplied UI mods. You can see this easily by comparing older HTC phones running the stock firmware and Cyanogen. The stock firmware has the HTC Sense UI that slows everything down and make the touch screen unresponsive, but load up Cyanogen and set the UI to use 16 bit textures for lists and menus (to conserve graphics RAM) and it will fly along.

People seem to expect iPhone like performance from Android devices cost 1/5th as much. My Galaxy S with all effects turned on is just as slick as an iPhone, more so in fact because it supports live wallpapers.

Re:Other end of the spectrum

[jo_ham]

Look at the cost breakdown of HP's fire-sold tablet, according to them the display assembly was the biggest portion. Note we're talking about tablets here, so the price of the screens goes up *considerably* over phone-size displays. Large high quality displays (and large high quality touch interfaces) cost money.

http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/Pages/HP-TouchPad-Carries-$318-Bill-of-Materials.aspx

Here the claim is that the 9.7" display in the Touchpad is $70 alone (not including the touch interface, which is $63.50). So, if you put one of those in one of these theoretically cheap tablets that you want to buy for $230, then right off the bat you're down to $160 for everything else combined (including your profit margin), or down to $96.50 if you include the touch interface too.

According to HP's breakdown the touch driver chip is $11.75.

I know everyone automatically jumps on the "whatever Apple's price is, that's obviously with a gigantic markup" bandwagon, but in the case of tablets, they really are quite expensive to make at this time if you want a good one (be it Android or iOS). The best pricing I've seen is (ironically enough given the subject of the article) a Transformer which you could get for $100 less than the equivalent iPad. That still puts it in the $400 region.

Re:Other end of the spectrum

[Zadaz]

I'm pretty sure that's exactly what the parent was talking about. "Screen" isn't an output device on tablets, it's an IO device.

The devices with the best touch screen behavior have a fair amount of hardware support to work smoothly and reliably across the complete surface. Massaging the noisy crap that comes off these sensors into information as reliable as an optical mouse's movement is a significant accomplishment.

why

[perryizgr8]

i ran the browser mark test on chrome running on my core i3 laptop. 380000. on a dual core at 2.26ghz. this new tablet thing has 5 (five?!?!) cores at 1.4ghz and it gets only 98000?? is this because arm sucks or because android sucks?

Re:why

[Anonymous Coward]

For at least the past 5 years, processing performance in almost all envelopes has been limited by power consumption and/or heat (which are two sides of the same coin).

Your i3 has a 35W TDP, this CPU looks like perhaps 2-4W TDP. So yours is 3.9x the speed while using 8.8x the power. Targeting a lower performance tends to allow for better efficiency, and so does having more cores/threads to do the work. This is largely because structures in a core that improve single threaded performance have diminishing returns for the amount of power they consume (caches, out of order execution instruction windows, buffers, wide superscalar execution, etc). So you can't necessarily say the Tegra 3 is a better device than the i3, but neither can you say the i3 is better (you really need to compare the same power or performance).

Re:why

[ferongr]

The reason is ARM.

TFS and the shitty FA mention "17ms Sunspider time" (and that's impossible), while the Anandtech figure is a more believable 1695ms. Anand's review also measuers linpack performance at 47.2 MFLOPS. Compare that to the 508ms and 162MFLOP result (lower is better) of a 2004 single-core AMD Sempron 3100+ running at 1.9GHz. And this 2004 CPU is very slow compared to anything modern.

Currently, ARM is very slow for general computing, and don't listen to what x86 doomsayers parrot everyday.

Re:why

[Solandri]

A laptop i3 will burn close to 30 Watts while running a benchmark. The Tegra 3 peaks at about 2 Watts. So in performance per Watt, the Tegra 3 is about 4x as efficient as your i3.

Or put another way, if you hooked up the Tegra 3 and the i3 to same-size batteries and calculated pi until the battery died, the Tegra 3 would calculate 4x as many digits as the i3. Now which one do you want on your battery-powered phone/tablet?

Re:Summary?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I think it happens to be objectively true for now. Are there any other tablets for sale right now that use a Tegra 3 or any faster or more powerful CPU? The only tablet on the market that even comes close is the HTC Jetstream's Qualcomm Snapdragon at 1.5 GHz, but even the summary says that the Tegra 3 beats it on benchmarks.

Re:What you don't see

[symbolset]

10 hours, near enough. 14 with the keyboard/dock/extended battery. In actual use charging once a week. Nice try though.

End of desktop processors?

[kakaburra]

Cell phone, tablet processors are becoming more powerful by the day, much faster than the desktop processors. Will there be a day when tablet processors are as fast as the desktop ones and we would just be hooking phone/tablet to monitors? (though we should solve the heat dissipation problem)

It's the software stupid

[dell623]

Although Asus is just behind Samsung among companies that are learning fast how to take on Apple, it is a really bad decision to launch this device without an upgrade to ICS 4.0. Honeycomb is never going to compete in the tablet market. Even if it has reached the point of being quite usable, there are hardly any tablet specific apps available, the iPad is so far ahead. No one outside the geeky world is going to care about quad core, especially when the software experience still lags so far behind Apple, and the iPad still has a better GPU so it can look flashier playing games. The Prime is an incredibly sleek device but it is badly let down by the software, I still don't understand how they can make an incredible device and launch it with awful software.

Google need to convince developers to make tablet apps for Android. They also need to distinguish Google Android tablets from cheap chinese junk that has really damaged Android's reputation. The slow laggy bloated bloatware infested Android phones and tablets that major manufacturers have released haven't helped either of course.

It would be a terrible failure for Google if having a two year lead over Windows 8 they still can't develop a decent tablet OS and ecosystem to take on Apple.

Re:It's the software stupid

[ErikZ]

Man, if only Google had money. They they could PAY developers to build apps for Android.

Chipset?

[imroy]

The secret ingredient is Nvidia's five-core Tegra 3 chipset

You really think these compact machines use sets of chips? Quite the opposite. They're systems on a chip (SoC), often even a package on a package (PoP) i.e multiple chips layered into one package. Now, don't get smart and point out that technically a PoP is a chipset - they're used for packing an SoC with DRAM and flash memory. The multiple functions of a chipset (e.g peripheral interfaces) are all on the one chip of the SoC.

Never

[G3ckoG33k]

"Cell phone, tablet processors are becoming more powerful by the day, much faster than the desktop processors. Will there be a day when tablet processors are as fast as the desktop ones and we would just be hooking phone/tablet to monitors? (though we should solve the heat dissipation problem)"

Never, with the reason is access to electricity, not necessarily the heat dissipation as such.

Still, the tablets of today may outperform the top-of-the-line CPUs of yesterday. But the time gap is there due to energy requirements, where the battery-powered line-up has the lower hand.

Still, the effect-size may not be that relevant in the very near future. If you can do whatever task that most people do, then the innate upper hand of a desktop CPU may not matter.

As it seems, former high-end tasks like 3D gaming, 1080p video etc is no real match for many slate CPUs. It will be the apps (tasks) that set the limits in the future too.

Re:Tablet apps, Tegra

[perryizgr8]

i don't get it. what's up with menus and app launchers working smoothly only when they are h/w accelerated? windows xp wasn't accelerated. it was pretty responsive. when you've got even a single core at >1ghz you shouldn't be allowed to make excuses about something as basic and simple as the ui of your fucking os.
all this, imo shows how fucked up android really is.

Must be love

[abarrow]

I have an Acer Iconia Tab (It was side by side with the Transformer at Best Buy, but the $100 gift card sold me on the Acer). Same processor as the Transformer. I love it - lots of ports, fast, and as another poster said, apps from my android phone automagically appear on the Iconia.

I find it interesting talking to people about it. Their first words are, "Oh, you have an iPad?" Then the description of Android begins. Generally I get two responses: they either glaze over, or they say, "So it's an iPad knock off, then?".

The other night, coming back from a bar carrying my Acer, I slipped stepping on a friends boat. I went down, one foot in the water, the other on my knee (torn ligaments and a cast now). Where was the Iconia? Sometime during my fall, I managed to carefully lay it on the deck. I don't even remember doing it. Body broken, tablet fine. Even subconsciously I love this tablet.

Re:Must be love

[green1]

I get a different reaction when I tell people that my Iconia is not an ipad. Of course I do get the glazed over look like you describe from anyone who doesn't use such things, but the others don't refer to it as a knock off, more like "so... it's like an ipad... but better?"

I guess it's all how I describe it... It's like an ipad... except that I can pop in a micro SD card for more storage, I can plug in devices like hard drives, digital cameras, or USB keys to the full sized USB port, and I can watch my movies from it full screen on an HD TV thanks to the HDMI output. It has a higher res camera, and costs a fair amount less. Additionally I can load any app I want on it without having to "jailbreak" because it's android.
I've actually seen a look of jealousy from several iPad users when they see how I use the Iconia.

Best is when I'm working with someone who sees me use it at the desk hooked up to keyboard, mouse, and external 300GB USB hard drive, and then we get a call and I grab just the tablet portion and go. Suddenly everyone wants one.

Inevitable comparison to Ipad

[goombah99]

The obvious remark that someone could make is "spec don't matter, the ipad will prevail". This device is going to be the acid test of that theory. Here, finally, is a device at the same price point with unarguably more processor power and a bigger scree and more ports. It's running the first mature (in my opinion) android OS. Will this compete with the ipad when nothing else has?

What is also instructive is that the benches show that all the processor power is very helpful for graphics and math computing but relatively unimportant for many things people use tablets for like checking e-mail and surfing or watching a video. Other things like touch lag or seemless integration or simplicity of syncing are likely to be concerns. What buyers know is that if they buy an ipad they won't regret it. But they worry about the transformer. Will the processor spec overwhelm in interface concerns?

This will be very interesting to watch. it puts out a marker for both the tegra concept and a technical challenge for the ipad 3

Re:in-between high and low end is the Fire

[Locutus]

kindle fire is the in-between? it's locked to Amazon, has almost no local working memory and no SD slot. For $50 more the Nook Tablet or for the same price the older Nook Color are real tablets as opposed to the limited Amazon cloud device the Fire is.

I'm not sure if it's because people don't know about the Nook(s) or what but it sure seems Amazon gets the press when the Nook seems to be the real ebook tablet. And it's been on the market for a year now already(Nook Color).

Other than that, you're spot on about the display and touch and in some cases the packaging/case are most of the cost of the high end devices. Now, if only the original Transformer will come down in price.

LoB

15" Tablet Request Seconded

[Atmchicago]

I could read PDFs in full-screen. 14" diagonal is about equivalent to 8.5"x11". As a scientist, half of what I do seems to be reading articles in PDF format.