As part of my work with the Intel Insiders I was given an Insiders view of the LG smartphone. More details on MIDMoves
Gallery of GW990 at the LG booth
Specifications confirmed:
- Intel Moorestown platform with HD 720p encoding and 1080p decoding.
- 5mp cam (single led flash)
- 1850mah (single cell I assume) battery
- A-GPS
- Compass
- HSDPA/HSUPA
- Q3 availability
Note the marketing: Multi-Tasking.
January 8th, 2010 at 8:06 am
Hmm… Much more interested now that I have seen it demoed. Very sleek.
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January 8th, 2010 at 8:10 am
Takes kind of long to boot up. It’s almost a minute. I wonder why it was off in the first place? Maybe it has a crappy battery life or something.
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January 8th, 2010 at 8:46 am
Keep in mind that these are prototypes, and will get much more robust by the time they actually ship. Also, the software will probably go through multiple revs between now and then, shortening boot times, etc.
Besides, you shouldn’t have to boot your phone very often – unless you take your battery out, or something. It mostly goes in and out of standby, and Moorestown is supposed to have a 50x standby power reduction vs. Menlow.
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January 8th, 2010 at 8:53 am
By the way, quick math:
If Menlow average power was 2000 mW, then Moorestown standby would be 40 mW.
With an 1850 mW-hr battery, that’s 46 hours of standby battery life, or just shy of 2 days.
That’s not great by phone standards, but ok for anyone who charges their device nightly.
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January 8th, 2010 at 9:20 am
hence, that’s why it was off because the battery life is crappy. standby times on phones are measured in hundreds of hours.
January 8th, 2010 at 9:40 am
It should be much lower. 2000mW sounds right for Menlow MID, but take that on a cellphone level and idle power usage reduction would be greater on Moorestown. The power reduction innovations doesn’t just end up at the main chips(CPU/GPU/Memory Controller/Southbridge), but everything, like the board they will be on.
January 8th, 2010 at 5:41 pm
where are you getting 1850 mW-hr from? 1850m[AMPERE]h is not the same thing as 1850m[WATT]h. technically, if the thing runs on 5 volts, then it would yield 10 days of battery life.
@battery:
on which phone have you seen hundreds of hours? I’ve seen my share of smart/dumb phones and none of them have a standby time of hundreds(>200 by definition) of hours.
January 8th, 2010 at 6:46 pm
PounceP, good point. My quick math was apparently too quick….
I agree with you on the smartphone standby life, too. Of all the phones I’ve seen, some can last a few days between charges, assuming little to no usage in between, but I’ve never seen a single one that can last more than about 4 days, which would suggest that even >100 hours is unrealistic (not withstanding the extended form factor batteries, which might, but I don’t know anyone who buys these).
It would also suggest that Intel’s 50x claims probably have to do with their own chips, and not the platform as a whole, because 10 days of standby life is greater than most of the power efficient phones I’ve seen. If Intel can hit at least 4 days with a Moorestown phone, it would put it up there with the ones that I’ve seen, at least.
January 8th, 2010 at 10:20 pm
@pouncep
Well if you look up some specs on standby times.
Motorola Droid – 270 hrs
LG Dare – 260 hrs
Nokia Intrigue – 264 hrs
Motorola Karma QA1 – 366 hrs
Nokia Surge 6790 – 400 hrs
Samsung SGH-T239 – 300 hrs
BlackBerry Curve 8500 Series- 408 hrs
Samsung Convoy – 537 hrs
Samsung Omnia II – 375 hrs
HTC Droid Eris – 373 hrs
and many others…
As for anecdotal evidence I had an LG Dare and left it at home for a week to go on vacation and when I came back it had 30% battery left.
January 9th, 2010 at 3:04 am
@pouncep and Arc
You two apparently haven’t seen very many smart/dumb phones then.
January 9th, 2010 at 3:18 am
Google is your friend.
LG GW620 – 600 hours standby
Nokia E52 – 672 hours standby
Samsung Giorgio Armani B7620 – 590 hours standby
HTC HD2 – 490 hours standby
January 9th, 2010 at 4:35 am
Sorry, Phones, I must be way behind the times. However, I’ve always asked the Verizon store for the phones with the longest battery lives, and no one has ever shown me something with 28 days of standby, like the Nokia E52.
It could be that Verizon doesn’t sell any of the more nifty phone. I often see the newest phones sold at the AT&T and TMobile stores, first, but I wouldn’t give up my Verizon coverage with these other carriers. In Oregon, the coverage sucks on any non-Verizon network.
Still, I can hardly imagine going nearly a month between charging my phone. I usually plug mine in before going to bed every night, and keep the charger on my nightstand. It certainly doesn’t bother me to do this, but I suppose I wouldn’t mind if I only had to do this every week or so.
January 8th, 2010 at 10:28 am
is this going to be active stand-by like cellphones or useless stand-by like PC’s?
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January 8th, 2010 at 5:24 pm
Active standby. Intel introduces ‘power-gating’ technology on this platform that finall lets them compete in that area.
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January 8th, 2010 at 10:44 pm
How exactly are they doing their power gating? Are they switching the power off on unused circuit blocks dynamically or just under standby? If they’re dynamically power gating circuit blocks then performance could take a big hit since the main drawback of power gating is the long wake-up latency.
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January 15th, 2010 at 12:17 am
Good point about latency. AFAIK know they are shutting down components when the device is in use, not just in standby.
January 8th, 2010 at 3:22 pm
Moorestown is with Simple Firmware Interface (not BIOS- or ACPI-compatible). Windows 7 is not bootable on such devices out of the box.
Did you hear anything from Microsoft about porting Windows 7 to Moorestown?
This HP-Tablet-PC which Steve Ballmer presented in the keynote was a Pine-Trail-Device, but in terms of battery runtime it will make a lot of sense to build Windows 7 tablets with Moorestwon.
Could you please ask some people about this – I’m quite shure that Microsoft has to fight against all those Netbooks with Android&ARM and Tablets with Android&ARM.
x86&Moblin is nice but x86(Moorestown)&Windows 7 will be what I’m looking for.
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January 8th, 2010 at 5:25 pm
Intel have always said that they will follow-up with a windows-compatible Moorestown.
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January 8th, 2010 at 7:36 pm
I think that the Operating-System-Layer has to use the power-save-modes the Hardware offers to the software or else you will never ever get acceptable battery runtimes. So Microsoft has to adapt windows 7 to the power-save-modes wich moorestown is offering not vice versa.
They already have a windows-compatibel Moorestown -> Pine Trail
The really tricky thing is to control all the clocks and power-save modes of the periphery.
So if Microsoft wants a good implementation they have to adapt it to moorestown. But I think there are some fights behind the scenes between windows mobile division and windows desktop division.
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January 8th, 2010 at 5:24 pm
4.8 inch screen 1020×480
Is that really true?
pretty amazing.
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January 8th, 2010 at 6:40 pm
Where is this concept moorestown mock-up?
It’ll be released in 2010?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b45vpGYte10
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January 9th, 2010 at 7:09 pm
Preliminary info:
4 hour Talk Time
300 hour Standby
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January 9th, 2010 at 8:18 pm
Where did that come from? Intel weren’t talkning about any figures.
4-hour talk time isn’t going to impress anyone but it’s damn amazing for an 1850mah battery on a PC!
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January 9th, 2010 at 9:28 pm
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2357918,00.asp
Here’s another info: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/01/moblin-linux-on-x86-smartphone-intels-small-step-forward.ars
5 hours on 3G browsing. It’s pretty good considering that’s what iPhone 3GS with 3.5-inch screen and on a much slower CPU can do on its 1250mAh. It’s still a big difference, but not a magnitude difference pessimists are predicting. Imagine on a 3.5 inch screen like the iPhone.
CPU is supposedly 1.2GHz, though I assume that could be misinterpreted info.
There’s another phone using Moorestown, the Aava one, that is more compact: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3716
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January 9th, 2010 at 9:22 pm
Are we making up figures now?
20 hours talk time
1000 hours standby
It’s also called the LG SuperPhone.
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