It is quite common to see people, after describing to them the latest features in a mobile phone, throw a question: Does it make and receive calls?
While it is easy to scoff at the complexity of mobile phones, it is imperative that this device should have all the utilities one needs hand to make life easier. It is only a matter of time before we start seeing User interfaces on mobile phones get simple enough for a lay man to use phones with incredible computing power. From being simple devices that just made and received calls, most smartphones these days are miniature computers running complete operating systems on them. Case in point - Iphone running Mac OS and some of the new Sony Ericssons running Linux.
Operating systems on phones provide the foundation that enable software developers write applications for mobile phones without having to deal with the hardware details of the phone. This will obviously lead to a lot of applications for mobile phone users, but the question is: How convenient is it for a person to use a computer with a limited screen size?
A few years back, smartphones with easy to use interfaces and usable features belonged to science fiction. But no longer. With the launch of the Iphone, new standards have been set. The Iphone established that it is possible to design a miniature computer with an user interface that makes a feature filled phone easy to use and almost indispensable. Once accustomed to the features of the Iphone, it is hard to settle for anything less.
But the Iphone is only the beginning of the things to come. We are in the first iteration of truly revolutionary phone designs that raise the benchmarks for what phones should be in comparison to the very recent past. So the obvious next question is - what next?
Nvidia tries to answer this question with their latest chip targetting the mobile phone market - the APX 2500. The APX 2500 is a computer on a chip aka System on chip (SOC). While SOCs have been around for quite some time now (you find them in a lot of phones these days), the APX 2500 takes SOC to new levels with its integrated graphics core. This chips comes with a graphics unit that is the equivalent of a GeForce 6 series desktop graphics chip. In the language of a computer gamer, this chip is capable of fragging some bad-ass monsters in Doom 3. Thought I doubt the convenience of playing Doom 3 on a mobile phone, the real achievement is the support for industry standard graphic APIs and the enormous processing power that has been put into a single chip. THe graphic APIs which will give application developers easy access to poweful features of the graphics core that will result in applications having intuitive interface. Take a look at this demo for instance:
I guess the demo says it all.
Technical specification:
ARM11 MPCore
16/32-bit LP-DDR
NOR and NAND Flash support
720p H.264, MPEG-4, and VC-1/WMV9 Decode
720p H.264 and MPEG-4 Encode
Supports multi-standard audio formats including AAC, AMR, WMA, and MP3
JPEG encode and decode acceleration
OpenGL ES 2.0
D3D Mobile
Programmable pixel shader
Programmable vertex and lighting
CSAA support
Advanced 2D graphics
Up to 12Mpixel camera sensor support
Integrated ISP
Advanced imaging features
True dual display support
720p (1280x720) HDMI 1.2 support
SXGA (1280x1024) LCD and CRT support
Composite and S-Video TV output
It is interesting to note that the device in the demo is a developer sample and not a real product, albeit a fully functional one.
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