No exciting Android phones coming out:(

[cronos]

The galaxy s6 has the performance I'd expect from a two year upgrade cycle. I love what they've done with their in-house processor, and their new storage option. It's just less versatile.

Maybe I'll just get the S6 active...

I actually *really* like the look and feel of the S6 active after handling it in the store a couple of weeks ago. This surprised me as I have never wanted a Samsung before. It really felt comfortable in my hand, and the pseudo-rugged look is really appealing to me.

 

[Commodus]

It's sad that the market has spoken in such a stupid manner. The GS5 was the perfect phone, but was given a "meh" reaction because it didn't come in leapard print or some other trivial concern.

It's like paying the same money and getting a fiat when you used to get a ford F-150...

I wouldn't call it stupid, just different priorities.

You may think that the GS5 was the perfect phone, but I'd beg to differ. It wasn't as slimy as the GS4, but it still embodied Samsung's love of cheap plastic and fake-premium surfaces. It had more bloatware than ever, just masked with a simpler look. Outside of waterproofing, its biggest hardware features were a heart rate sensor (which, let's be honest, you probably weren't going to use) and a fingerprint reader that was decidedly inferior to the iPhone reader it was trying to copy. It had a faster processor than the GS4, of course, but a lot of that advantage was masked by the burdensome software. About the only big improvement to me was the new camera.

When you think of it that way, it's no wonder that sales started sinking around the GS5 release. Why replace your current phone with something that isn't much faster or practically improved over last year's model? It didn't matter that it had microSD storage or a removable battery, because the core experience was merely "meh."

The GS6 actually fixes a lot of that, even as it's its seemingly a step backward. It's nicer to hold, it actually has less bloat, and its biggest improvements are all in fundamentals. I'm just concerned that it's too late -- Apple finally put out its big iPhones, so many who got Galaxy S/Note phones solely for the big screens weren't going to be that interested.

 

[shady28]

My upgrade is loafing around unused since April of this year. This has been an atrocious year for smart phone releases.

The snapdragon 810 is a dud, and made all the phones with it inside duds as well. Everybody is dropping features that are useful, and adding things that are stupid.

...
I realize that there is no phone that will likely ever meet all the criteria, but dang, couldn't *something* come even remotely close?

Ok, that's basically what I thought too, but I found something really interesting.

So some background. ARM has typically announced a new generation product long before anyone starts using it - sometimes years before. It's like they have a blueprint for something that won't be built.

So knowing that history, I would normally think something like this from back in Feb would maybe impact phones in fall / winter of 2016 :

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8957/arm-announces-cortex-a72

"ARM promises a 3.5x sustained performance increase over the A15 generation of SoCs while remaining in the same power budget. "
...
"The A72 targets roughly 1.9X the sustained performance of current 20nm A57 SoCs, meaning the Exynos 5433 and the Snapdragon 810 can be taken as the base for comparisons."
...
"The Cortex-A72, being a "big" core, can be partnered up with the already existing A53 LITTLE core architectures."
...
"ARM also announced a new member of the T800 series of Mali GPUs. In addition to the T820, T830 and T860 comes the T880. ARM was again light on details of what this new configuration brings, only promising a 1.8x increase performance over 2014 Mali T760 GPUs and a 40% reduction in energy consumption for the same workloads."

Well, seems the phones to use that new ARM arch are already coming - like in 2 months.

A72 is something we would see in high-end phones. The low end and midrange stuff that keeps coming out doesn't use Big.Little, they typically just have a the 'Little' part of that equation (A53 or A7).

So where is this coming first?

MediaTek for one, their new Helios X20 has two A72 cores and is going into the HTC One M9.

Huawei Mate 8 has a new Huawei Kirin 950 processor, which consists of four Cortex-A53 cores and four Cortex-A72 cores.

And the new Snapdragon 620 is going to have 4 A72 and 4 A53 cores :

http://www.fudzilla.com/news/processors/38432-qualcomm-snapdragon-620-looks-promising

The Snapdragon 820 reportedly will be a custom 64 bit part, like the Krait was a custom 32 bit part (this one is called Hydra) -

The higher end Snapdragon 820 comes with four Hydra based cores and 14nm manufacturing node. We are not sure what function the mainstream Snapdragon 620 processor will have for Qualcomm.

So this looks to me like at least performance is about to get a big bump.

This looks impressive -

HEVC decode for 4K
4K 60 fps streaming via Miracast
LPDDR4 with compression
Integrates modem and processor into one chip (makes it easier to have smaller, thinner phones)
"Low power sensor for always on use cases" - I wonder if this is like what Moto did with the X8 computing platform project, that allows their phones to always respond to voice commands even if they are 'asleep'.

 

[shady28]

I wouldn't call it stupid, just different priorities.

You may think that the GS5 was the perfect phone, but I'd beg to differ. It wasn't as slimy as the GS4, but it still embodied Samsung's love of cheap plastic and fake-premium surfaces. It had more bloatware than ever, just masked with a simpler look. Outside of waterproofing, its biggest hardware features were a heart rate sensor (which, let's be honest, you probably weren't going to use) and a fingerprint reader that was decidedly inferior to the iPhone reader it was trying to copy. It had a faster processor than the GS4, of course, but a lot of that advantage was masked by the burdensome software. About the only big improvement to me was the new camera.

When you think of it that way, it's no wonder that sales started sinking around the GS5 release. Why replace your current phone with something that isn't much faster or practically improved over last year's model? It didn't matter that it had microSD storage or a removable battery, because the core experience was merely "meh."

The GS6 actually fixes a lot of that, even as it's its seemingly a step backward. It's nicer to hold, it actually has less bloat, and its biggest improvements are all in fundamentals. I'm just concerned that it's too late -- Apple finally put out its big iPhones, so many who got Galaxy S/Note phones solely for the big screens weren't going to be that interested.

It will be interesting to see what happens to Apple sales in the USA in Q4 of this year.

I'm thinking about the impact of Verizon getting out of contracts. People can still stay on contract, or like in my case, I can just save $50 per month on a 2-line plan and pay up front.

I personally have serious reservations about buying a $750 phones every year though. I suspect many others will too when they see the choice. Reality is that paying up front is cheaper by a bit.

 

[kpkp]

A72 is something we would see in high-end phones. The low end and midrange stuff that keeps coming out doesn't use Big.Little, they typically just have a the 'Little' part of that equation (A53 or A7).

I would rephrase it as "midrange stuff that keeps coming out didn't use Big.Little", but if we take into account the nomenclature of Qualcomm, than it sure does look like the 618 and 620 are intended for the mid-range. If we look a bit deeper in to the SoC there are clear cost optimizing decision like the 28nm manufacturing and DDR3 RAM. Also the A72 core itself is smaller than the A57.

The main difference between mid-range and high-end SoCs next year will be in the manufacturing process, ram controller and GPU. If OEMs will compensate for that with bigger batteries, than the main visible advantage for flagships will be represented in design (weight, thinness).

The Snapdragon 820 reportedly will be a custom 64 bit part, like the Krait was a custom 32 bit part (this one is called Hydra) -

The cores are officially called Kryo.

 

[gorcorps]

iOS can also be jailbroken and you can do damn near anything, the Cydia community is crazy big. And there in lies how beautiful iOS is. My Step Mom who doesn't know crap about electronics can use iOS and love it. And I can JB mine and make it exactly how I want it. I have an HTC One and just can't get over how poor the quality of the apps are compared to iOS. I guess you always have to trade something to get something *shrug*

The fact that you have to jailbreak iOS to get that stuff out of it should NOT be a credit in favor of iOS. If they wanted you to have the phone you wanted they wouldn't require you to jailbreak it in order to get there.

 

[shady28]

I would rephrase it as "midrange stuff that keeps coming out didn't use Big.Little", but if we take into account the nomenclature of Qualcomm, than it sure does look like the 618 and 620 are intended for the mid-range. If we look a bit deeper in to the SoC there are clear cost optimizing decision like the 28nm manufacturing and DDR3 RAM. Also the A72 core itself is smaller than the A57.

The main difference between mid-range and high-end SoCs next year will be in the manufacturing process, ram controller and GPU. If OEMs will compensate for that with bigger batteries, than the main visible advantage for flagships will be represented in design (weight, thinness).


The cores are officially called Kryo.

Agree. In my thinking the 6xx series along with 8xx are high-end though, where the 4xx series is mid-range and the 2xx series is low end. Qualcomm probably ranks it differently, but we're in a world full of cheap quad-core A7 / A53 phones these days.

What bothered me about this latest gen was that A57 sucked too much power (hence the 810 fail), and performance increase was very incremental.

There are some geekbench results with one of the new A72 chips, one made by MediaTek. It isn't a high-end sku so nothing special about multi-thread perf, but the single-thread performance was 60% higher than A57 based SOCs.

That's significant, at least for Android. It just nudged out the Apple A9 single thread perf from what I could tell. Something that hasn't happened for Android since the A6 about 3 years ago.

 

[soccerballtux]

wonder what ARM will do after A72

 

[Dannar26]

Very good research Shady. It does seem like there are positive outlooks to be had on performance this generation if we wait a bit more. Maybe it'll be worth going to a nexus device.

I'm concerned with the loss of features. That the S5 sold poorly because of software only drives my point home. We can't trust carriers with software on our devices. I need some other option other than to let 10 gigs of crapware forever haunt my nand.

Given where things are going with contracts, it may now make more sense to keep your phone for awhile. The argument for sealed batteries that goes "ah well I'll replace this in two years" is no longer valid. We aren't getting a 2 year subsidy. I keep my PCs for longer than 2 years, much longer now that performance has leveled off.

Speaking of performance, soccerballs has a point. You don't have to go too far around here to find out about the slowing of Moore's "law," and its effects on Intel. How will ARM handle it?