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Chalk this one up as rumour, but Engadget’s been sent a render of a new HTC handset codenamed ‘Zeta’. The monster device is supposedly packing a beast of a 2.5GHz quad-core CPU besting the previously rumoured quad-core Edge.
If the source is on-the-money, the Zeta should come packing a 4.5-inch 720p screen, 1GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, Ice Cream Sandwich, an 8MP rear shooter and a front-facing 1.3MP camera. All that and it should weigh in at just 146g. This might be just a render and a far-flung fantasy spec-sheet, but then again we could be looking at HTC’s upcoming flagship. I don’t know about you, but I want to see this thing made, even if it is total baloney. [Engadget]
The picture appears to show capacitive buttons, why, when they are saying it will have ICS?
Maybe HTC’s decided its buyers aren’t ready to switch to touch only?
I don’t think all ICS phones will be buttonless, it’s an option with ICS not a requirement it also eats into the available screen space, personally given the choice I would take hard/capacitive buttons over virtual ones every time
I am aware that buttons are optional in ICS (just as they are in Honeycomb and all previous iterations) but you know what else eats into the available screen space? – having to have physical buttons on the device. With screen buttons they are there when you need them and fade out when you don’t, giving you a bigger screen to watch that film or play that game. Still one of the big things about Android is choice and I’m sure that both buttoned and buttonless designs will be catered for. I apologise if my original statement made me appear ignorant of all this.
no need to apologise, and you make a valid point; without physical buttons you can have a smaller device or bigger screen, but I guess it would just slightly annoy me to see my screen used up by buttons but as you said each to there own and the ability to choose is what makes Android such a great option.
“I guess it would just slightly annoy me to see my screen used up by buttons” but that’s the point, without hardware buttons the screen is bigger, when buttons are shown they take up about as much of the screen as hardware buttons would, so you wouldn’t be losing screen compared to a buttoned version and during films, games and the like you would have the full screen size.
Even if it just a ‘render’, that looks like one ugly phone! Well at least from the back, the front looks ok but with the 4 capacative buttons the source aka Mr Make-believe doesn’t think it’ll be an ICS phone!?!
What would be the point of making a quad-coring beast of a phone which is a. that ugly and b. not enjoying some ICS.
Plus HTC never put enough storage in their devices (32gb really?) and it would have to have a pretty decent battery just to get it through a day with those specs but if they are true, I can’t wait to see what Samsung bring with the Galaxy S3.
By golly thats an fugly device if its real O_o
And I really think phones are getting too big… I miss the good old days when phones were become ridiculously small!
Why does any phone need that amount of power I’m not sure, not a good thing if the battery is going to be drained quickly! A 5th silent core like the Tegra 3 is a better option IMHO, I want a phone that lasts for days not minutes!
Counter intuitively more cores often means less battery use! This is because with tasks divided between more cores the clock speed of those individual cores need not be as high to get the same amount done.
In very simplistic terms if you have 4 tasks to do you could get them done in the same period of time by running a single core CPU at 1GHz or a quad core CPU at 250MHz and a CPU requires a whole lot less power to run at 250MHz than at 1GHz (in the same way a car uses a whole lot less petrol to drive a mile at 30MPH rather than 230MPH)
Of course it depends on the tasks themselves, how good the scheduling algorithms are, ect. there will be an overhead to dividing the tasks between cores so in the real world the benefit wont be as much but the principal remains.
Yeah sure, things get done quicker but there is only so much processing power required to do what most people would on a mobile phone. And more cores is likely to be traded for a shorter batter life, for me it would be getting the balance right between the two. On desktops, laptops etc I agree that more cores are beneficial as I would make use of the processing power for video editing and because battery life would not be an issue!
Ok I’ve not done well in explaining this so here’s a quote from a white paper by nvidia which I hope explains it better (full paper is available online here: http://www.nvidia.com/content/PDF/tegra_white_papers/Benefits-of-Multi-core-CPUs-in-Mobile-Devices_Ver1.2.pdf)
“Imagine a mobile phone that has a dual core CPU with SMP [symmetrical multi processor] support– if the phone’s navigation application is running concurrently with a streaming audio application, the OS can assign the navigation task to one CPU core and the streaming audio task to the second CPU. Another example is a single multi-threaded application that can benefit from multiple CPUs. The OS can assign the threads to run on both CPUs concurrently and finish the task faster by sharing the workload across the two CPUs. Since the workload is split across the two cores, these cores can run at a reduced speed while achieving excellent performance and also conserving power (running at lower frequency lessens the voltage required, resulting in a reduction in power by the square of voltage decrease).”
This power consumption can be reduced even further by using non symmetrical cores which are able to run at different clock speeds so non time critical applications can be offloaded to the slower more energy efficient processor (which is the theory behind nvidia’s Tegra 3 (kal-el) processor)