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Review of the First Medfield Phone
Google85 writes "Beginning April 23rd, Intel, through Lava International, began selling the Xolo X900 smartphone in India for $420, Anandtech has just published a review of the smartphone which runs Android on x86 and uses binary translation as the mitigation for both libraries and NDK applications that haven't yet been ported to x86."
The population of India is huge. About 25% of them live below the poverty line. And another 25% have barely enough income to survive. 500 million such people drown out the other 500 million people with some disposable income. The top 25% of India are solidly middle class by American standards. They have steady income, are willing to spend humongous portions of their pay on their children's education. The predatory education industry makes more money than you can imagine. Anyway the richest of the rich live in a kind of opulence that defies comprehension. One guy named Mukesh Ambani built a private residence in downtown Mumbai for the cost of some 1 billion US dollars. It is a 25 story high rise as a private residence! Then some astrologer dude told him such wanton flaunting of wealth would attract the evil eye, and the owner decided not to live there!!!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Instead of theorizing why not look at their measured stats? The phone was pretty much as power efficient as current OMAP4 phones. Secondly, Intel is using static binary translation for native ARM NDK apps so there is no emulation layer running on the phone itself for that. In those cases Intel pushes an x86 binary out to the user that has been translated and validated on their side. For most things, though, they are straight Dalvik apps and so there is no more translation overhead than Dalvik on ARM.