The discussion of what is and isn’t a MID will continue forever but I guarantee that most people would say ‘yes’ to this being one. It’s a rumored device from HTC called ‘Leo’ I mentioned it briefly in a ‘MIDPhone’ post a few weeks ago but there’s now an image showing a candybar (or possible slider?) phone and some great MID-centric specs to consider.

Snapdragon MSM 8250 1Ghz

Display 4,3″ 480*800 capacitance touch-screen

512 ROM and 320 RAM

Camera 8mp with autofocus

Wi-Fi, A-GPS Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, support GSM/EDGE, HSDPA

3,5mm Jack

MicroSD Slot

G-Sensor, motion sensor and light sensor

Manilla (TouchFlo) 2.5

Quite a tasty line-up don’t you think? Apart from the OS. Manilla means Windows Mobile and although I don’t mind Windows Mobile, the OSK isn’t up to the quality of the Android or iPhone keyboards so I’d rather be using it with a slide-out keyboard.

Android on a Snapdragon platform with a 4.3 inch WVGA screen, high quality cam would probably satisfy my desires for 2009 and early 2010 but it looks like it isn’t to be just yet. It’s the Omnia Pro or the Nokia Rover on the top of my list right now.

Via Slashgear.

ZDnet posted some information about a rumored ‘Chassis 1′ specification for Windows 7 mobile phones yesterday and although it’s great to see, it looks like a list of the hardware that many of us in the ultra mobile PC and MID community have been been talking about for the last few years. It’s basically a list of currently available mobile technology and includes ARMV6+ processor, 800×480 multi-touch, 3MP cam, compass, accelerometer, light Sensor, high speed USB, BT2.1 and fast SSD. The other interesting spec is a screen size of 3.5 inch or more. 

ARMV6 is not exactly thrilling but the ‘+’ would indicate that Microsoft are going to build WM7 for the Cortex architecture meaning ARMv7 and high-end platforms like Snapdragon, Tegra and OMAP.

What we don’t know is what the software layer is going to be like and that’s arguably the most important element.

Completely screwing up any categorisation I ever used in the mobile computing space is the Wistron PurseBook (aka PBook and what we highlighted incorrectly as the ‘FirstBook’ last week.) Take a look at this video from Engadget and then consider some of the specs, especially the weight which comes in at an impressively light 800gm.

• Snapdragon Platform: 1Ghz ARM V7 CPU
• Hardware video decoding
• 3D-capable GPU
• Integrated 3G, Wifi, BT, GPS
• 11.1 inch screen (resolution unknown. Touch unknown)
• 800gm
• Linux OS (Thundersoft and Xandros possibilities)
• ‘Full size’ keyboard
• Optical Mouse
• $299-$499 estimated price range.
• 8hrs battery life
• Full specs and info.

The 11.1 inch screen size is quite misleading as it’s a super-wide aspect meaning it would be something like 1024×480 resolution, less pixels than many 8.9 inch netbooks. Update: ‘Kola’ spotted a pic (see comments) that shows the resolution as 1280×545. My guess on the size is about 280x150x25. [See comparison image below] The processor isn’t going to give you netbook browsing speeds either but it’s going to be way better than we’re seeing on smartphones. 8hrs battery life with instant or ‘always-on’ means you’ll save time when opening it just to make a quick check on email or a web page and it also means you could leave IM, Skype, Tweetdeck running all the time.

Specifications (unofficial) and links are in the database.

Size comparison:

Netbooknews.de have posted a video via (PDA.pl) from ARM that shows the Wistron Netbook, a thin, Sony Vaio-like netbook baed on the Quallcom Snapdragon CPU and running Linux. Jump to the action at 2:32

I really realy want to get my hands on a snapdragon-based device as soon as possible. I want to feed back to you all on the real-world browsing speed and capabilities.

Video: Qualcomm Konzepte auf dem MWC 2009 | Netbooknews.de – das Netbook Blog.

Note. ‘Firstbook’ is the name i’ve picked up from the video. It’s unconfirmed.

Update: Now confirmed as the ‘PurseBook.’ Article title changed.

Prepare for a bumpy ride in the MID/Smartphone space. A confusing one too because according to DigiTimes, one of the most successful smartphone designers is getting ready to launch Snapdragon-based phones. The target for launch is Q2 of 2009, later than the planned Toshiba TG01 which is also running Snapdragon.

The leaked roadmap from last month show’s two devices that would fit well with the Characteristics of the snapdragon platform.

 
HTC Ihoth and HTC Whitestone W. Images and info from jouwmobiel.nl

Also in the brief article, Digitimes states that HTC are designing with Atom. This is similar to news we had 10 months ago and could be anything from a phone to a next-gen HTC Shift.

Digitimes.

Another article has been posted about how Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform is ideal for low cost, long battery life, small form factor notebook PCs. We heard about this a few weeks ago but Brooke Crothers of CNet visited Qualcomm to hear more detail about what’s going on. The article gives me a chance to dive into the details and give some thought about what’s happening here in both technology and market terms. Is it significant or not?

First of all a little background about Qualcomm’s Snapdragon. Its a small-form-factor, mobile computing platform (think of it as a ready-to-use computer on a tiny motherboard a bit like the image you see below-right.) that includes a CPU core which is based on a licensed ARMv7 architecture. ARMV7 is the architecture used in the ARM A8 Cortex CPU design that you can now find in the new Archos devices, the Open Pandora and BeagleBoard (image below-right) projects. Snapdragon has been a four year, $350 million project. It’s not clear how many snapdragon versions there are but the one that CNet are talking about is the new dual-core QSD8672 capable of clock speeds up to 1.5Ghz. The platform also includes the following features: (Details from Qualcomm.)

• WWAN, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity
• Seventh-generation gpsOne® engine for Standalone-GPS and Assisted-GPS modes, as well as gpsOneXTRA^TM Assistance 
• High definition video decode (720P)
• 3D graphics with up to 22M triangles/sec and 133M 3D pixels/sec
• High resolution XGA display support
• 12-megapixel camera
• Support for multiple video codecs
• Audio codecs: (AAC+, eAAC+, AMR, FR, EFR, HR, WB-AMR, G.729a, G.711 , AAC stereo encode)
• Support for Broadcast TV (MediaFLO^TM , DVB-H and ISDB-T)
• Fully tested, highly-integrated solution including baseband, software, RF, PMIC, Bluetooth, Broadcast & Wi-Fi

Looking at the article from CNet, these tech specs might be referring to a previous Snapdragon platform because the CNet article mentions 1080p video and an ATI graphics core.

As JKKMobile pointed out , one of the important things to note about this platform is its inability to run Windows desktop software meaning that it’s restricted to mainly Linux-based distributions or WindowsCE-based operating systems but lets take a look at a few other aspects of the platform first.

Performance

According to some references on the Internet that I’ve been able to cross-check, raw single-core CPU performance of the platform, an important factor in rendering browser-based pages and applications, is in the order of 2000 Dhrystone MIPS at 1Ghz. Obviously a dual-core version, clocked at 1.5Ghz means we’re in the region of 3000-5000 MIPS which means, if you take a look around for Dhrystone tests on the Atom N270 used in netbooks, its right in the same ballpark. The N270 appears to return about 4000 Dhrystone MIPS. These figures don’t indicate anything about the real-world performance but they do tell us that, given good memory and storage performance the results are good enough to run a basic desktop OS.

Power Efficiency

This is something I think we should be careful to remain realistic about. While ARM cores are extremely efficient and idle at extremely low levels, we’re at the point where CPU power usage on Atom and ARM-architecture CPUs aren’t a world apart from each other. When taken as a ratio of total system power drain, including screen, radios, DC-DC components and storage, the CPU is well under 50% of the equation. In 10" screen devices, it’s even less. 20% maybe. The major power advantage here is gained through on-board integration. Packing processing cores, communications silicon and memory tightly together, unifying the power-saving methodology across the board and writing efficient firmware is they key. Qualcomm have a lot of experience in that and I expect to see well-designed Snapdragon-based netbooks in 2009 to be running in the order of 5W  about half the power that an N270-based notebook will use. Due to the high level of integration, the boards will be smaller too. The solution gives designers the option to make the devices smaller or run with longer battery power. With more space for batteries, you could even see devices where thin Li-Poly take up most of the underside of the netbook and offer capacities that will allow you to leave your netbook on all day. An always-on netbook is a seriously interesting prospect!

Cost

It’s difficult to do a complete estimate on this but experience tells me that in quantities, the highly integrated Snapdragon platforms would be significantly cheaper than a full Atom-based motherboard build-out.

Markets

This could go two ways. Initially I would expect to see manufacturers use the new Snapdragon platform to make cheaper Linux-based netbooks that will go into some of the emerging markets in India and China. These markets are less sensitive to desktop OS types due to the shorter history of XP and Vista. We will see some low-cost and long-battery life versions coming to ‘our’ markets (I speak to 80% of readers when I say that; Americas, Europe, Japan) but without XP, the devices won’t get the traction and channels that the Intel-based devices will. There’s one thing that could change this though and I know for sure that people are working on this. High-quality consumer focused, easy-to-use, reliable, branded, thin operating systems. Operating systems that completely hide their roots and offer a slick UI, rich applications suite, content and branding. So far we haven’t seen anything but there are a few projects and companies out there that are working on this. The Open Handset Alliance work has potential. Moblin too. They will need a good company to ‘finish’ the product though and the branding will need to come from a big name in order to give it traction. It will need that all-important app-store too. The one OS that could really change the game though is WM7. I don’t really expect this to happen but if it is an OS that offers a large-screen experience and the opportunity to work with native document formats and in both a ‘business’ and ‘consumer’ mode, there’s no reason why it can’t be used as a netbook OS.

Back to that article now. (Sorry, I got carried away. I actually wanted to write a quick re-blog article!) CNet mentions a few companies working on solutions:

Companies including Acer, Asus, and Toshiba are planning devices based on Snapdragon, according to Qualcomm. Acer, for example, will initially introduce Qualcomm’s Gobi 3G modem into its devices, then gravitate to products based on Snapdragon.

Of course we need to take that with a pinch of salt considering the fact that there are already supposed to be 15 ultra mobile devices out there running on Snapdragon.

Qualcomm demonstrated a Snapdragon based netbook in London last week and gave us a few hints as to how netbook-style devices based on it might turn out. Silicon.com, who published images and information from the event, asks if it’s the next-gen netbook.

‘Alternative-gen’ is more like it in my opinion.

We probably won’t see many of these in the western world as we like our processing power (way) too much but I do expect these to be a success in 2009 and 2010 in other markets. Markets that haven’t really had the chance to use laptops and who’s main form of communication is a GSM phone could benefit from this.

We could see one or two ultra-light, ultra-thin devices here but for them to be a success, they are going to have to offer levels of portability, user interfaces and battery life that only a few companies are in the position to be able to achieve.

As for battery life, in normal Internet-connected scenarios, there won’t be much advantage as screens and radios take the lions-share of the battery. There’s a lot of talk about multi-day battery life but the people that talk about this fail to mention that it’s standby life. Once you start switching those transistors on and off to decode today’s intensive web pages, power drain rises into the same ballpark as ultra low power X86-based devices. Even Qualcomm themselves are being honest about this.

Snapdragon will enable mini laptop style devices – with screens of between nine and 12 inches – to run for between four to six hours without needing to be charged, according to a spokesman.

The last time I spoke to Texas Instruments, they were talking about similar figures too. The 3-4W total power drain range is about the limit of technology for 8-12″ screens in the short term.

Personally, I think the more interesting market, is the mobile Internet device market where 5″ screens enable the best balance between size, portability and quality for video, navigation and our old friend, the world wide web. It’s here, where screen power drain is much smaller, that the new ARM-based platforms could make a bigger impact. Those ARM-based devices were supposed to be in the market already but appear to have been delayed. According to word-of-mouth reports that i’m hearing though, devices are on their way. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple putting out a larger, more powerful iPod web and video-focused device on these architectures in 2009. ComputerWorld thinks so too. Unless Apple have something up their sleeve with PA-Semi

Despite Samsung reporting just a few weeks ago that a MID will come ‘sooner or later’ and there only being 11 days left in June, Aving are reporting that Qualcomm are saying (ahem, not exactly first hand news this is it!) that Samsung will release a MID in June 2008. The quoted specs included a 1Ghz ARMv7 which is going to be very fast indeed. ARMv7 is the ARM-licensed architecture used inside the Cortex-based processors which are said to be four times as fast as current ARM architectures for the same clockrate. If that’s right, this Samsung device could have something like 10 times the processing power of the Nokia N810. Of course, that’s just based on marketing talk but even if it’s half as good, this baby could really fly! The Qualcomm platform that will be used is known as ‘Snapgragon’ which includes the ARMv7 core, a 600Mhz DSP for A/V operations, support for high-end photography and a universal modem that will keep most anyone in the world confident that it’s going to work with their carrier. Here are some of the key features of Snapdragon:

• Universal Modem supporting all 2G and 3G mobile broadband standards (CDMA2000 1xEV-DO, Revisions B, A and 0; HSPA, WCDMA, GSM / GPRS / EDGE)
• High definition video decode (720P)
• 3D graphics with up to 22M triangles/sec and 133M 3D pixels/sec
• High resolution XGA display support
• 12-megapixel camera [support for.. – Ed]
• Support for multiple video codecs
• Audio codecs: (AAC+, eAAC+, AMR, FR, EFR, HR, WB-AMR, G.729a, G.711 , AAC stereo encode)
• Support for Broadcast TV (MediaFLOTM , DVB-H and ISDB-T)

No images of the device were shown in the Aving article which might indicate that the launch is yet to happen at WITS 2008. The images below show demonstrators presented by Qualcomm at CES in Jan. Maybe we’ll see one of them with the Samsung brand on it but it’s more likely that Samsung have kept their own ID under wraps.

Qualcomm ‘Anchorage’ demonstrators shown at CES. (Geek.com)

This image of the ‘Anchorage’ device from MSMobiles news

The big question is, what OS will we see on this device? Windows Mobile 6.1 is currently the most likely option but if you’re breaking into a new product category that sits close to your existing products you might want to be differentiating it somehow. Could this be the first Android device?

Qualcomm have already said that up to 15 Snapdragon-based devices would be released in 2008 and Samsung, along with HTC, have long been known as customers so maybe we really can expect something in the next week. Will ARM beat Intel to the MID market?

WorldITShow website. News from Aving.