News - Samsung first to unveil Windows Phone 8 smartphone

[HEXUS]

The very well specified ATIV S to be Samsung’s flagship WP8 phone?

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[The Hand]

Very smart. Looks like MicroSD is going to be standard on WP8, which is good news. Snapdragon S4 (Krait) has finally arrived! With Nokia and HTC launching phones in September too, its going to be a very interesting month.

[jnutt]

Hmmm might just move from Android

[TheAnimus]

http://www.samsung.com/global/ativ/ativ_tab.html

It's their windows RT Tab I'm looking at.

It's got USB+HDMI out all there.

It's something I could take with me on holiday, offload images from my camera to external USB HDD with. In 520grams, with a simple touch interface.... Nice.

[crossy]

Spec looks good - especially the uSD support.

Designwise though I'm less than ecstatic - the back looks suspiciously like an HTC One and it's not exactly "pretty" is it. I think I'll pass on this one and wait to see what Nokia can come up with - even a respin of the current Lumia's would be a better "looker" than this.

Just comparing the front face in the picture to my S3 and it's identical - bar the larger "Windows" button that the WP8 device has.

[TheAnimus]

Designwise though I'm less than ecstatic - the back looks suspiciously like an HTC One and it's not exactly "pretty" is it. I think I'll pass on this one and wait to see what Nokia can come up with - even a respin of the current Lumia's would be a better "looker" than this.

http://qkme.me/3qp16r

I have nothing against them using some of the S3 tooling for it, so long as its cheap.

I don't like the 'Andriod Armsrace' of quadcore this and that. Whilst its not a fair comparison because of screen resolution, but hell I'll make it anyway, my Nexus 7 tablet with its Quad Core Tegra 3 setup (iirc 1.5ghz!) is slower, constistantly jerky etc. My Omnia 7 with its single core 800mhz snapdragon is not. Both appear to be memory bottlenecked loading a game.

I don't like that, its expensive, drains battery and is simply used to hide bad programming.

[Fraz]

I don't like that, its expensive, drains battery and is simply used to hide bad programming.

So... instead of quad-core CPUs, they can just use dual-cores and then train every smartphone app programmer to not be crap.

Flippant comments aside, I do totally agree with you that quad-core is unnecessary. Numbers games and marketing people, eh? What can you do.

[Kushan]

Designwise though I'm less than ecstatic - the back looks suspiciously like an HTC One and it's not exactly "pretty" is it. I think I'll pass on this one and wait to see what Nokia can come up with - even a respin of the current Lumia's would be a better "looker" than this.

http://qkme.me/3qp16r

I have nothing against them using some of the S3 tooling for it, so long as its cheap.

I don't like the 'Andriod Armsrace' of quadcore this and that. Whilst its not a fair comparison because of screen resolution, but hell I'll make it anyway, my Nexus 7 tablet with its Quad Core Tegra 3 setup (iirc 1.5ghz!) is slower, constistantly jerky etc. My Omnia 7 with its single core 800mhz snapdragon is not. Both appear to be memory bottlenecked loading a game.

I don't like that, its expensive, drains battery and is simply used to hide bad programming.

I'm going to try and be nice here, but it's quite clear that you're actually not a programmer so it's understandable why you'd think that.
There is an argument to be made that "quad-core" is largely pointless on a compact mobile device, however to say that it hides bad programming is outright wrong. It's actually a lot harder to program for muli-core machines and it gets harder the more cores you add. To actually make use of the extra cores, you have parallelize your workload which isn't always easy and is sometimes simply impossible.
If anything, multi-core machines highlight bad programming because it's obvious when an app isn't using all of the cores properly (if at all).

The reason there's an argument to be made against quad cores is simply because the main benefit comes from multitasking rather than sheer speed of a single app and, although Android does well with multitasking, it's still nowhere on the same level as a desktop machine.

There's a direct comparison you can make to when Desktops first started getting dual and quad cores. Quad cores followed dual cores pretty quickly, but when it came to gaming the people on a slightly faster Dual core could get more FPS than those on a slightly slower Quad Core (i.e. a Dual core running at 2.8Ghz would tend to outdo a quad-core running at 2.6Ghz) simply because most games and applications at the time weren't optimised or designed for them. Even today, a fair amount of games don't push beyond 2 cores. The mantra at the time was that Quad cores were simply unnecessary and some people still agree with that, but as time goes on, more and more will make use of it. Something has to give first, either people have to develop for it or the hardware has to come - most times, it's the hardware.

[Fraz]

I'm going to try and be nice here, but it's quite clear that you're actually not a programmer so it's understandable why you'd think that.

Oh dear. What have you done?!

Still, it's a good point you make.

[K4RIMIN4L]

that is one nice looking phone, gunna wait for nokia to see what they announce though

[TheAnimus]

I'm going to try and be nice here, but it's quite clear that you're actually not a programmer so it's understandable why you'd think that.

Damn, what am I then (I'll give you a clue, I sorta am!).

There is an argument to be made that "quad-core" is largely pointless on a compact mobile device, however to say that it hides bad programming is outright wrong. It's actually a lot harder to program for muli-core machines and it gets harder the more cores you add. To actually make use of the extra cores, you have parallelize your workload which isn't always easy and is sometimes simply impossible.

Not when we're talking about how a JIT is running for indevidual apps, and also the model for the shoddy kernel implementation, simple things like GPU interaction are piss poor. These are all eased by throwing more thread workers at the problem. Or if your using say iOS the cheaper (not thats its bad) form of co-operative multitasking used, rather than pre-emptive.

I would suggest (respectfully) that those have a much higher barance on the 'feel performance' of a device than the number of cores, however andriod feels to have this all wrong, and as such throws more cores at the problem.

If anything, multi-core machines highlight bad programming because it's obvious when an app isn't using all of the cores properly (if at all).

Depends what you mean by highlight, because ultlimately it can hide, if one device is using as much of a thread as it can, having an extra core allows that bad pratice to go by un-noticed, but I'm not talking about 3rd party apps here, I'm refering to the shell and the kernel, and the fact that out of the box, my Nexus 7 feels sluggish.

The mantra at the time was that Quad cores were simply unnecessary and some people still agree with that, but as time goes on, more and more will make use of it. Something has to give first, either people have to develop for it or the hardware has to come - most times, it's the hardware.

But this is the thing, I'm not comparing the desktop, its totally differen't.

Half of Andriod is running a broken Java implementation, the other half a broken kernel implementation that clearly never thought about graphics interactions.

It's as if we can't say that it is so broken.

[Brewster0101]

Hmmm might just move from Android

Me too, although I am waiting for Nokia to release a new Lumina 900 style phone with windows 8 on it.

[Nikumba]

Hopefully someone will make a high spec Win8 phone with a sensible sized screen eg 4" or less

[TheAnimus]

Well given this is ment to be along the lines of the S3:
http://www.samsung.com/global/ativ/ativ_s.html
I can see why they went 4" +

However I doubt all of the handsets will be so big, certianly not the nokias if their current crop is anything to go by.

[pp05]

Something around 4.2inch is perfect balance for web and phone usage.

[crossy]

my Nexus 7 tablet with its Quad Core Tegra 3 setup (iirc 1.5ghz!) is slower, constistantly jerky etc.

You know, you're the first person I've heard complaining the N7 has poor responsiveness. Most reviews etc I've seen have been very complimentary about how smooth it is. But I digress...

Hopefully someone will make a high spec Win8 phone with a sensible sized screen eg 4" or less

4" is the absolute smallest a "top end" phone should go - any smaller than that is seriously compromised - heck, even the iPhone5 is reputed to be 4"+.

Something around 4.2inch is perfect balance for web and phone usage.

I'd cautiously agree that - especially if the phrase "for me personally" is added. Remember that there's a lot of (5"+) Galaxy Note's been sold, and while that's too large for my liking, it's obviously suiting a lot of people fine. Similarly I thought the 4.8" of my S3 would perhaps be too large, now I regard it as "comfortable" - just pocketable while still minimising the amount of zooming that has to be done. I don't think I'd be that happy with my old 4" screen.