Not Just Nokia Lumia Have Windows

5 Impressive Windows Phone Powered Smartphones

Microsoft's Windows Phone mobile OS has gained a lot of mileage in the last couple of weeks, courtesy Nokia unveiling its Lumia 800 smartphone. While the Lumia 800 is an impressive device, That’s not the beginning and the end of mobile phones based on Microsoft's Windows Phone platform. There are a couple of other Windows Phone powered smartphones just out in the market or waiting to get launched, which also deserve attention.

Here we take a look at five such Windows Phone powered smartphones that aren't the Nokia Lumia 800.

Nokia Lumia Phones Launched in India:TI

Nokia has announced the launch of its top end Lumia 800 and budget oriented Lumia 710 phones. These devices are Nokia's first Windows Phone powered devices, and will be available in India by mid-December. The Finish Mobile giant has not yet announced the pricing for both these devices.

Both the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 devices run on a 1.4-GHz processor. Also both phones also support HD video playback.
The Nokia Lumia 800 comes in a uni-body design, sports a 3.7-inch AMOLED display and weighs around 142 g. It will also have 512 MB of RAM, 16GB of internal user memory, and will feature an 8 MP camera with 28 mm wide angle lens.

The Nokia Lumia 710, while featuring the same processor as its costlier cousin, the Lumia 800, has a plastic construction. It also features a WVGA LCD display, a 5 MP camera, 8 GB of internal user memory and weighs around 125.5 g.

Nokia has bundled apps such as Nokia Drive, Nokia Music, into both the devices. It remains to be seen how well these Windows phone powered devices will do in a smartphone market that is pretty much dominated by Apple and Google.

TI:Google Releases Ice Cream Sandwich Source Codes

Google has just released the source code for the latest build of Android, deliciously titled "Ice Cream Sandwich." In a Google Groups post, Google engineer Jean-Baptiste Queru says "this is actually the source code for version 4.0.1 of Android, which is the specific version that will ship on the Galaxy Nexus."

The source code is available for download right now from the Android Open-Source Project git servers, though Queru warns that it is a rather hefty file and can take some time to download. If you plan on checking out the source code yourself, I recommend waiting a bit for the servers to calm down.
Clicking on the link from the original post sent me straight to a 404 page so it might be a while before people can actually get their hands on the full file.
Interestingly, the code includes the previously unreleased source for Android 3.0 (Honeycomb). Queru admits that Honeycomb was unfinished and urges all developers to ignore it in favor of Ice Cream Sandwich.
With another Google event happening on November 16th of this week, we can only hope that this source code release signals the imminent arrival of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. We still have no official release date or price for the Galaxy Nexus, but with the source code out in the wild it's only a matter of time before the phone arrives as well.

SandyBridge-E Debuts with Intel Core i7-3960X six-core Processor

Today Intel announced what it called its fastest chip to date for PCs, the six-core Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition processor, which is based on the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture and designed for use in high-end desktops. The 3960X and 3930K processors will be the first to require Intel's new X79 motherboard, which uses an LGA2011 socket.

The processor is targeted at enthusiasts such as gamers, who usually are early adopters of the latest technologies. More cores and faster clocks speed up PCs and are valued by gamers, who demand peak performance when playing graphics intensive games.
The Core i7-3960X runs at a default clock speed of 3.3 GHz, cranking up to 3.9 GHz per core depending on performance required. The chip has 15MB of cache and supports four channels of memory, also the most available on Intel PC chips to date.
The chip is about 52 percent faster in video editing than the Core i7-2600K chip, which is also based on Sandy Bridge and targeted at enthusiasts. The memory performance is up to 114 percent better, Intel said. The Core i7-3960X will succeed the Core i7-990X Extreme Edition, which was the fastest chip based on Intel's previous Westmere architecture.

Intel Core i7 3960X Processor Die Detail
The i7-3960X processor is priced at US$990 for 1,000 units. It will compete with the Advanced Micro Devices' eight-core (Bulldozer) FX-series processors, which started shipping last month and are also targeted at enthusiasts.
Intel and AMD are adding cores and ratcheting up clock speeds in an effort to gain the chip performance crown. AMD in September demonstrated its eight-core FX processor running at 8.429GHz in a system, which the company claimed broke the world record.
Intel also introduced the six-core Core i7-3930K chip, which operates at 3.2GHz and can be clocked up to 3.8GHz. The chip has 12MB of cache, four memory channels, and is priced at US$555 in quantities of 1,000.
Of course, this means that the previously reigning king (Intel Core i7-990X) will have to step down in price. For a quick reference of what the new Sandy Bridge-E series will be competing against, at the top-end within Intel's family of desktop processors, see the table below. Note that all of the processors listed below support Hyper Threading, so they can simultaneously run twice the number of threads as the number of cores they have.
Specifications:

Nokia Lumia 800:TI

Nokia recently launched their first Windows Phone powered smartphones in India- the Lumia 800 and the Lumia 710. Both the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 run on a 1.4GHz processor and support HD video playback.

I managed to get my hands on the Lumia 800 during the Nokia Developer Conference 2011 in Bangalore and tried it out for some time. Here are some of my initial impressions:
1. Beautiful Display: The Lumia 800 sports a large 3.7-in AMOLED display with a resolution of 800x480 pixels. The specs sound pretty good but they don't do justice to how the display looks like in real life. In the little time that I had the device, the display looked like it could stand tall among the best. Colors (especially blacks) looked very rich and made the tile-based Windows Phone UI look even prettier. The only issue was that the display was very glossy which means that it would be a fingerprint magnet.

2. Great Build & Looks: The Lumia 800 felt like one of the best phones I had ever handled. The phone has a polycarbonate body which was unlike anything I have seen on any other phone. The phone's body felt really solid and very smooth to the touch, similar to the aluminum casing on the Nokia N8 and the HTC Legend without compromising on slimness or weight.
3. Windows Phone: The Lumia 800 comes with Windows Phone 7.5 Mango and if you've seen how it looks and handles earlier, there's not much new here. One great addition though is that the always-excellent free Nokia Maps comes pre-installed on the Lumia which means that you don't need to use the default Bing Maps.
4. Touchscreen: The one issue that mostly hounded Nokia's earlier Symbian phones was that touch accuracy was inconsistent. Fortunately, with the Lumia 800 this problem seems to have been dealt with well. Scrolling through the various menus and screens was smooth and the keyboard was also accurate.
The Nokia Lumia 800 and the Lumia 710 are expected to hit Indian markets by mid-December. Expect a more in-depth review by then.

ARM Mali-T658 Eight-core Graphics Chip Introduced Tech Infection

The Mali-T658 graphics processor announced by ARM on Wednesday can be equipped with up to eight cores to help it deliver ten times the graphics performance of the company's existing GPU (Mali-400 MP).

The superior graphics performance is compared to the Mali-400 MP, which is used on a number of smartphones from Samsung Electronics, including the Galaxy S II and the new Galaxy Note. The chip also has four times the computing power of the Mali-T604 GPU, which has yet to appear in any available products.
The performance boost will result in better HD gaming and help usher in new compute-intensive applications, such as augmented reality, according to ARM. Besides smartphones, the GPU will also be used in tablets, smart TVs and automotive entertainment systems.
But don't expect products based on the Mali-T658 GPU anytime soon. Smartphones based on the Mali-T604 GPU will arrive next year, while products that use a Mali-T658 chip with four cores will arrive in 2013. Products powered by a version with the maximum eight cores are expected to be introduced in 2015, according to a chart from ARM detailing the evolution of its mobile processors.
Samsung, Fujitsu Semiconductor and LG Electronics are among the companies that will partner with ARM on products, ARM said.

The chip is compatible with a number of different of graphics and compute APIs, including DirectX 11 and DirectCompute from Microsoft; Khronos OpenGL ES and OpenCL; Google's Renderscript and OpenVG.
Besides the new Mali GPU, this week also saw the introduction of Asus's 10-inch Eee Pad Transformer Prime tablet. It is powered by the ARM-based Tegra 3 processor, which has four cores, and will start shipping worldwide in December.

Download FirstCloud OS

Oracle has updated its Unix-based operating system Solaris, adding some features that would make the OS more suitable for running cloud deployments, as well as integrating it more tightly with other Oracle products, the company announced Wednesday.

"We looked at some of the big challenges that people were having in deploying cloud infrastructure, either in a private cloud or public cloud," said Charlie Boyle, senior director of product marketing. "In the release, we engineered out some of the complexity in managing a cloud infrastructure, and made it possible to run any Solaris application in a cloud environment."
Cloud deployments require even greater levels of automation and streamlining than a standard IT infrastructure would, noted Markus Flierl, Oracle vice president of software development. While an organization may run hundreds of Solaris servers, as it moves its applications to a cloud infrastructure, it may run them across thousands of virtual Solaris instances.
Solaris, a Unix implementation, was originally developed by Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired last year. While not as widely known for its cloud software, Oracle has been marketing Solaris as a cloud-friendly OS. In Oracle's architecture, users can set up different partitions, called Zones, inside a Solaris implementation, which would allow different workloads to run simultaneously, each within their own environment, on a single machine.
Oracle Solaris Zones has 15 times less overhead than a VMware implementation, Oracle asserted in its marketing literature. The company also touted that Zones had no artificial limitations set on memory, network, CPU or storage resources.
Many of the new features were designed to ease the administrative overhead of running a cloud-like infrastructure, Flierl said. One new feature, called Fast Reboot, will allow the system to boot up without doing the routine set of hardware checks, a move that can make system boot times up to two-and-a-half times faster, Oracle claimed. This feature can be handy in that an administrator applying a patch or software update across thousands of Solaris deployments can reboot them all the more quickly. "It allows you safely to upgrade your entire environment," Flierl said.