[General Topics] Menneisyys:
Sorry for their being so blurry (hence the lack of a high-res version); check out Engadget’s related article for more shots of it if this is a problem.

Of course, it’s just reference design; real-world devices will be much leaner / prettier; therefore, you won’t really be interested in just a reference design. More in real-world devices if and when they do get released.

3D and hardware video decoding acceleration aside, they seem to enter the mobile business too: their new chipset does much more than “plain” multimedia / gaming acceleration. It contains full support for communications. Again, check out the official specs for more info - its’ certainly worth it. I can only hope their entering the mobile scene as a real mobile chipset manufacturer makes for example Qualcomm spend more time on bringing out better and better products and helping their customers (like HTC) to easily (!) develop drivers that use all of their features. They have even created a VERY nice, 3D phone interface, which is much prettier than that of iPhone. (YouTube demo links below.)

Finally, you may want to check out THIS cellphonenews link collection linking to some other NVIDIA-related articles. Of course, there’re several other resources worth checking out; for example, you will DEFINITELY want to see THIS and THIS YouTube videos on their ‘iPhone buster’ user interface. THIS PPCT thread may be also of interest, particularly my comments in there.

Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments, of course, concentrated on showcasing their new OMAP 3 platform. What’s so special about it? you may ask.

Well, if you’ve ever seen a, say, Nokia N93(i), Nokia N95, Nokia N95 8GB or Nokia N82 running a 3D game, you already know the answer. TI’s CPU’s aren’t as bad as most Windows Mobile users (even geeks!) think. Not in the least. It’s just that HTC is still using the oldest CPU generations (for example, the 130 nm and, therefore, indeed pretty old TI OMAP 850) in their handhelds (other WinMo manufacturers have, in some of their models, have already switched to the 2420 – see the Motorola MOTO Q9h, the Samsung SGH-i617 BlackJack II / Jack, and the Samsung SGH-i616). The second-generation (OMAP 2; all these CPU’s start with ‘2’ as in the 2420 chipset used in most of the N-series Nokia models released in 2007) TI OMAP CPU’s are really-really capable. Their new, OMAP 3 platform and its (then) flagship chipset, the OMAP3430, which was announced just a year ago, is really worth paying attention to. It has specs that are way better than even Qualcomm’s just-announced QST1105. (Note that there’s also a OMAP3440, but I did’t really notice any difference between it and the OMAP3430, so, I don't know in what it's better).

The OMAP3430 is promised to deliver 720p high-definition video playback for mobile phones, while the QST1000 / QST1100 most surely can’t go over VGA resolution. I bet the latter doesn’t support H.264 hardware decoding either. The OMAP3 platform also supports both analog (TV) and digital video output; the latter up to XGA resolution. In contrast to the analog & VGA resolution-only QST1x0x. And the list continues: for example, upon browsing the product data sheet, I realized the OMAP 2/3 series (but, of course, not the OMAP 850 deployed in many Windows Mobile models) are also able to interface with TI’s own digital TV receiver, the Hollywood Solution DTV1000/1001, which is either DVB-H (most of the world) / ISDB-T (Japan) compatible. No such feature is known about the new Qualcomm chipset. (I'll elaborate on digital TV issues & questions in my next article.)

The flagship model, the OMAP3430, is rumored to go into production first half of this year. Hope at least Nokia puts it in the then-to-be-announced models (N97? N98?) so that we can see what it’s capable of. Speaking of Nokia, interestingly, the Nokia N96 (and N78), that is, the two, just-announced MWC models are rumored to run either on the Freecell (as has been explained in one of the post-WMC All About Symbian podcasts) or the STMicroelectronics (more precisely, the Nomadik STn8815 rumoured HERE) platform - that is, most probably not on TI OMAP.

On the TI booth, several third-party companies building on their platforms were present; for example, Ingenient Technologies with their Low Power 3D PND. As their homepage (including their related press release) doesn’t contain almost anything on what their solution is really capable of (as was the case with Samsung’s latest-and-greatest, just-announced 6410 chipset), I ended up having to take a photo of their flyer:

Of course, it’s just an example of the several companies developing system-level support & drivers & API’s for TI.

What next?

Yes, I know you've all been waiting for my article on further MWC devices. Most of the article has already been written, I will publish it tomorrow, along with a thorough explanation of digital (terrestrial / handheld) TV.