MWC part 2

So the Mobile World Congress has finally started and a ton of interesting devices has already been shown. Here are a a few things I found interesting.


HTC One
So HTC is changing the way they name their phones. Samsung has the "Galaxy" brand and HTC is now getting the "One" brand. This doesn't really mean anything except that it will probably make life a bit easier for the consumers, since they will look at HTC One X, HTC One S, HTC One V and so on, instead of HTC Thunderbolt, HTC Sensation, HTC Desire, HTC Evo and all the other billions different names HTC use for their devices.
So like I mentioned above HTC announced 3 new devices. The One X, One S and One V.

HTC One X

The One X is the highest end device announced.
It has a 4.7" Super LCD II display (not pentile).
Tegra 3 quad core SoC clocked at 1.5GHz with 1GB of RAM (like the Transformer Prime).
8 megapixel rear facing camera and 1.3 megapixel front facing camera.
Non-removable 1800mAh battery.
No SD card slot, but 32GB of internal storage.
HSPA+ (up to 42Mb/s), NFC Android 4.0 and lots of other stuff.
HTC announced that they will launch an AT&T version called the HTC One XL which use the new Qualcomm Krait SoC which is a dual core A15 SoC running at 1.5GHz. Performance should be better at lightly threaded workload than the A9 based Tegra 3. The Krait SoC also has support for LTE and is built using 28nm processors instead of the 40nm transistors used in the Tegra 3.
The body is made out of plastic (or polycarbonate which is just a fancy word for a specific plastic).

HTC One S

The second new device is HTC's new mid range phone, the HTC One S.
It has a 4.3" SAMOLED screen with a resolution of 960x540 (pentile).
The device will also be powered by the new Krait SoC clocked at 1.5GHz (same as the One XL), but this one does not support LTE. 1GB of RAM is also present.
The rear camera is the same as the One X, but the front facing camera is a lower quality one with just 0.3 megapixels video resolution (VGA).
Non-removable 1650mAh battery.
16GB of storage and no SD card slot.
The body is made out of aluminum with a ceramic film on the outside.

HTC One V

The One V is the budget device.
The screen is 3.7" LCD (not sure what panel type) with a resolution of 480x800.
It uses a 1GHz single core CPU (most likely some older snapdragon)  and 512MB of RAM.
It features a 5 megapixel rear facing camera but no front facing one.
1500mAh battery (not sure if it is removable or not).
Storage wise you got an SD card slot and 4GB of onboard storage.
The body is made out of aluminum.



I should also mention that HTC will include 25GB of storage on Dropbox for 1 year, if you buy one of these three phones.
HTC also talked about their new imagechip which apparently speeds up auto focus as well as the total time it takes to take a picture. You can also take still images while recording video in HTC Sense 4.0.
All of these phones features Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and also the Beats By Dr Dre audio "enhancer".


Asus Transformer pads
Asus is rebranding their tablets. They will now be called "transformer pads", and they also showed off a few new ones.

Transformer Pad Infinity 700

There will be two versions of this tablet. One Wifi only model which is basically just the regular Transformer Prime, but with a massive 1920x1200 resolution (the display is still a 10.1 Super ISP+ screen with gorilla glass).

The second version swaps the Tegra 3 for the new Krait SoC which means two A15 cores and also support for LTE.

The devices will also have a plastic strip where the WiFi, GPS and other wireless connectivity parts are located which should fix the GPS issue the Transformer Prime has.


Transformer Pad 300

The Transformer Pad 300 is simply the Transformer Prime but with a slightly worse camera (same megapixel count but smaller lens), a plastic case instead of aluminum, slightly bulkier and it will be available in 3G, LTE as well as WiFi only models.
The good news is that it will be cheaper than the Transformer Prime and still have the same display and SoC.

1280x800 IPS display, Tegra 3 SoC, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of storage and also the keyboard/dock which is available for all Asus Transformers.

Asus PadPhone

Now this is an interesting device. It's a phone, which transforms into a tablet, which transforms into a tablet/netbook with the keyboard dock.
The phone is where the important guts are.
It has the new dual core Krait SoC with the Adreno 225 GPU and 1GB of RAM. The storage varies from 16GB to 64GB of onboard, and support for a micro SD card. It supports up to HSPA+ at up to 42Mbps down speed.
A 8 megapixel rear camera and VGA (0.3 megapixel) front facing camera is present on the phone. The phone display is a 4.3" SAMOLED screen with a resolution of 960x540. The phone has a 1520mAh battery.
It runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
The device also comes with a headset which you can use for things like phone calls when the phone is docked.

The tablet part increases the screen size to 10.1 inches and also boosts the resolution up to 1280x800. It also has its own front facing camera with a 1.3 megapixel resolution. The tablet also has a built in battery which will charge the phone, and also boost the battery life by 24.4Whr. I am not sure if the keyboard dock will increase the battery life like it does on the Transformer tablets, but if it does then you will most likely get monstrous battery life with this thing.
Asus has said that they will make an LTE version in the future.


Qualcomm Krait
So I have mentioned the Qualcomm Krait a lot of times in this post. It is the latest and greatest SoC from Qualcomm and is built upon the new Cortex A15 architecture which is, performance wise, a lot better than the currently very popular Cortex A9 architecture used in for example the Tegra 2 and Tegra 3.
Each A15 core is, according to ARM, about 40% faster clock for clock than the A9. The Qualcomm Krait has a frequency of 1.5GHz, and is also built using the small 28nm transistors instead of the 40nm transistors used in for example the Tegra 3. This not only reduce power consumption, but also allowed Qualcomm to build LTE support into the SoC.
If you want more info and benchmarks then please read Anand's two articles about it.