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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsApple Announces New Phone
Korea's Samsung turned to song and dance on
Thursday as it took a shot at ousting Apple as
king of the smartphone.
In a packed Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan,
Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S4, the latest
iteration of its best-selling smartphone, and set
out its challenge to Apple on the US giant's own
turf.
In a widely anticipated move, the company
unveiled the most eye-catching feature of the
new phone. It has pioneered the "smart scroll
and smart pause" feature. The facing camera on
the handset monitors users' eye movements and
behaves accordingly. Tilting the phone while
looking at it will scroll web pages and it can even
pause a video if a user looks away.
After weeks of teasing, Samsung unveiled a
phone it is promoting as "moving beyond touch".
With a simple wave of the hand, Minority
Report-style, the phone will move a web page or
a photograph....
http://m.guardiannews.com/technology/2013/mar/15/galaxy-s4-launched-samsung-tracking
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brucefan
(1,549 posts)
theKed
(1,235 posts)relating to Apple's propensity for suing Samsung, claiming things that are nothing like Apple products are infringing on Apple products. Also that Apple products based on technologies others pioneer, are revolutionary only when Apple releases them
HappyMe
(20,277 posts)the white flag. 
MadHound
(34,179 posts)I just don't get corporate fanboys. Apple, Samsung, they are both exploitive, soul sucking corporations. What's worse, I'm sure that some fanboy will come along anytime now to tell me how Samsung sucks less souls than Apple
Get a life.
RobinA
(10,476 posts)5-year olds? This stuff is looking more and more toy-like. I'm looking for the Fisher-Price logo on this one.
RudynJack
(1,044 posts)CosmicDustBunny
(80 posts)Motorola used to make them but seem to have abandoned them. With a flip phone all the goodies are safe in a clam shell. I've dropped them from some height onto concrete and they suffered nothing more than scratches - they aren't "shiney" to begin with.
Someone mentioned that it should have a "Fischer-Price" logo on it. I feel the same way about Win8. Smart phones are too big to put in a t-shirt pocket and have a silly interface (same as Win8), and I use a computer to access the Internet because I want to be able to SEE what I'm browsing. I'm sure the eye-movement and motion-sensor features will appeal to the youngins, but I just need a basic phone and right now Samsung offers what I actually need (and at a reasonable price - Apple is expensive and always has been).
Tikki
(15,070 posts)Had an open-face phone for a short time. Hated it. If flip phones go away
I hope there will be a secondary market to retro-fit a cell phone with a flip.
Tikki
theKed
(1,235 posts)Flip phones are great. If I were getting a cell phone solely as a phone, they are what I choose.
I do like the multipurpose functionality of a touch phone, though. Screen sizes are getting ridiculous, though. The 4.2" screen on my cell, now, is just about as big as I would want for portabilty and convenience.
CosmicDustBunny
(80 posts)Mine has two screens, one inside and one out. I keep the outer one on the "analog clock" setting. Believe it or not, I can glace at an analog and capture the time quicker than I can with digital. I know it sounds weird, but I prefer analog. My on-screen clocks on all of my computers are set to a simple "school clock" analog setting - with the second hand. Vista/Win7 clocks all do the little back-tick as they move. It so reminds me of waiting for the end of 3rd period.
theKed
(1,235 posts)And agree on it being faster to interpret an image than read a series of numbers.
My phone serves as a GPS, an on-the-go web browser, spreadsheet editor, email client, and a host of other things.
Sometimes I wonder how chefs got by before computer technology.
CosmicDustBunny
(80 posts)theKed
(1,235 posts)My career. My phone (and computers in general) are a massive boon to my work
CosmicDustBunny
(80 posts)theKed
(1,235 posts)PM me if you like
CosmicDustBunny
(80 posts)Apophis
(1,407 posts)And Samsung is up to octo-core phones now.
Bye bye Apple. 
theKed
(1,235 posts)we should get an "iPhone 5S" from Apple for the holidays this year, with new case styling and a modest incremental performance boost.
They're putting nitrous in last year's car while android phone makers are rolling out rocket cars fueled by pure awesome.
Apophis
(1,407 posts)And Apple will expect their fans to wait in line for hours and pay full retail price for it!
theKed
(1,235 posts)It has Siri! And Google Maps (irony!)! And ... and ... shiny plastic with an apple logo ... they'll eat that shit up with a fork
CosmicDustBunny
(80 posts)Apophis
(1,407 posts)My Galaxy Note 2 is more powerful than my laptop.
CosmicDustBunny
(80 posts)I've also got 9TB of ready storage and can always strap on more externals as needed. A phone is a phone and a computer is a computer. Trying to mix the two is like mating a motorcycle with a pick-up truck. I put smart phones in the "jack of all trades, master of none" category.
sir pball
(5,306 posts)But ARM isn't a performance architecture right now, their emphasis is on power draw. My S3's numbers put it at just over 50% of my laptop (dual-core phone @ 2.1ghz, quad-core laptop @ 2ghz) but the Linpack numbers are, um, not exactly comparable...as in phone is in the megaflops, laptop is in gigaflops.
Then again, a CELL PHONE doing MEGAFLOPS is still pretty mindblowing.
sir pball
(5,306 posts)If it's the new Exynos the press has been speculating on, there's four 2009-era Cortex-A9 cores for "housekeeping" purposes; that doesn't amount to very much either in the way of power or real estate given the much smaller process they're working with.
Now, the 4 full-spec A15 cores on the other hand...salivation. Then again, I'm hearing there's also a quad-core Snapdragon version, which is probably still the Krait cores and would be for the North American LTE market. Nothing to sniff at, but nothing nearly as amazing.
CosmicDustBunny
(80 posts)sir pball
(5,306 posts)The quad-core versions are Qualcomm Snapdragons, most likely the Krait version, a partial Cortex-A15 design - same chip in the HTC One, just a bit faster. The four lightweight cores in the 8-core version are ARM Cortex-A9 cores, two generations old - same chip as in the dual-core Motorola Atrix and Droid X2, just shrunken down and doubled up. The four big cores are full A15s, which I think is the first time we've seen that (the Krait and Apple A6 are both partial).
CosmicDustBunny
(80 posts)X980 3.33GHz. They keep adding new stuff and I haven't kept up with it. Are the processors of similar capacity or scaled down (in terms of 286, 386, 486, Pentium, etc.)? I really don't know much about the processors they are using in the phones.
sir pball
(5,306 posts)Phone processors aren't in the same league as "real" chips; their emphasis is on drawing as little power as possible instead of maximizing performance. Probably Pentium-M class, but I don't know for sure and don't have the time right now to look up numbers.
The 8-core version is a 1.8GHz Samsung Exynos 5 chip that puts 4 outdated, underperforming, but very efficient cores alongside 4 bigger, more powerful, more wasteful state-of-the-art cores, like pairing up an Atom laptop chip with an i7. Use the weaker hardware on a routine basis, and use the heavy-duty stuff when needed. Optimizes both power and performance.
The other chip is a 1.9GHz quadcore Qualcomm part; a lot of manufacturers have been shipping these in North America because they include the necessary hardware for our cell networks (not the same as Europe). As far as I can tell it's just a speedier version of the chip already shipping in the HTC One, which would make the US version quite a bit weaker than the international one.
CosmicDustBunny
(80 posts)I remember when the Amiga came out (first true multi-tasking desktop) and the CEO of IBM said there was absolutely no use for multi-tasking on a home computer. I suspect he said that because IBM was so far behind in hardware at the time. Bill Gates dismissed a multi-tasking operating system as "useless". Oh, my, things change. The Amiga had multiple processors on the same bus from the very start. It took a while for other companies to adopt multiple processors and even longer for the CPU manufacturers to embed them in the same chip. Sometimes all you need is a 6502 to do the job at time and other times you need a mainframe.
Your explanation makes a lot of sense. Use the low-drain cores first and pump up to the higher drain cores when necessary. I just haven't kept up on the specific models of chips and their capabilities and speeds. This almost 5-year old laptop has a sticker on it that says "AMD Turion64". I know AMD is a company and I know 64 indicates the bits, but I'll be damned if I know what the significance of the name Turion is.
"Pentium" basically was a cool name for 586. After that, I sort of lost track of what the names meant, if anything. I'm old school. I prefer model numbers the same way I prefer displacement numbers on car engines. I don't care what you call it, what's the damn lineage and current capacity? But hey, that's marketing for you. Give it a cool name and people think "shiney!"