CPU

We have been hearing a lot of rumors about Sony’s unannounced “Yuga C6603” smartphone, and today Russian site Mobile-review.com posted images of the 5-inch, Android 4.1.2 powered device. According to the report, which also includes a number of benchmark tests, the Sony Yuga’s packs in a full HD (1,920 x 1,080) 5-inch display with 440 ppi and Sony’s Mobile Bravia Engine. The display also features on-screen buttons running along the bottom. Other specs include 2GBs of RAM, LTE, a quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro CPU, Adreno 320 graphics, USB Host support, and micro HDMI and microSD for support up to 128GB. This could definitely be an interesting flagship device for Sony in 2013. It’s also sporting a 12 megapixel camera according to the site.

Head over to Mobile-review for more images and benchmarks. We’ll be keeping our eyes out for the device early next month at CES. 
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Anandtech has published some interesting findings based on their extensive Samsung Galaxy S II review. It’s the first smartphone to use the graphics processing unit based on the Mali-400 core from ARM Holdings, a fables chip maker from the UK. In fact, Samsung has engineered and manufactured its own system-on-a-chip solution for the handset.

They call it the Exynos 4210 and it combines a dual-core Cortex-A9 CPU core and the aforementioned Mali-400 GPU sporting four cores. The resulting performance, says Anandtech, is comparable to Texas Instruments OMAP 4 chip that incorporates Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR SGX540 GPU core. However, the quad-core 1.2GHz Exynos 4210 probably won’t hold a candle to iPhone 5, which will likely carry the same dual-core processor-GPU combo as the iPad 2’s 1GHz A5 chip:

Samsung implemented a 4-core version of the Mali-400 in the 4210 and its resulting performance is staggering as you can see above. Although it’s still not as fast as the PowerVR SGX 543MP2 found in the iPad 2, it’s anywhere from 1.7 – 4x faster than anything that’s shipping in a smartphone today.

Interestingly, and per the GL Benchmark seen in the above image, the Exynos 4210 is more than twice as fast compared to the Galaxy Tab 10.1 that runs Nvidia’s Tegra 2 chi. It’s also nearly four times speedier than iPhone 4’s 800 MHz A4 chip which has the PowerVT SGX535 GPU core. However, the 4210 falls short in the triangle throughput department.

The publication this this could be a big disadvantage over the iPad 2’s A5 processor that clocks nine times the graphics performance of the original iPad’s A4 chip. Triangle throughput is important in graphics-intensive games and will become key in “future games that may scale along that vector rather than simply increasing pixel shader complexity”. The video of Anandtech’s Samsung Galaxy S II review is right after the break.

Cross-posted on 9to5Mac.com.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ofK7xFhb1k]

Android powered nano-like watch anyone? The video above from I’mWatch, a brand owned by Blue Sky, shows an interesting little Android powered touch screen with wristband, which eerily resembles the many third-party products available for turning Apple’s iPod nano into a similar accessory.

I’mWatch is a device that appears to be focused on connecting to your phone in order to provide quick reference to everything from incoming calls to emails, and Facebook and Twitter notifications. It does this by fastening an iPod nano-like, fully functional touch screen to the traditional wristwatch form factor. The site even mentions the ability to “touch, drag, swipe or pinch”.

Mysteriously, a list of compatible devices mention the I’mWatch is compatible with iPhone 4, in addition to Android devices, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone 7. We haven’t seen an Android device that is able to interact with an iPhone or iOS like I’mWatch claims, so we’re skeptical about this so called iPhone 4 compatibility.

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