Managed to survive an hour of that streaming rubbish from Times Square very late last night/early this morning. 🙁 Really painful to watch.

Galaxy 3S Seriously, there is nothing here for the most part that can't be backported to the Galaxy S3 or that apps can't do for any modern android phone. The field is wide open for Motorola and Google with their "X-phone" and Apple to finally make a new modern interface and continue to take the lead. Absolutely no one I talked to was anymore excited for the S4 than they were for the S3. That being said, props to Samsung for the replaceable battery and Micro-SD. In addition, that was the corniest presentation I have perhaps ever watched, it was almost painful. No one wonder why Anand just cut his liveblog short; I would have also just done a hands on and left when I saw that show.

And.. It is still made of plastic. 😀

Just because it looks like a S3, doesn't mean it would run like one. Expected better from all the posts here considering this a tech site. Exynos 5 Octa vs a Snapdragon S4, 1080p 441ppi vs 720p 306 ppi, the specs are pretty impressive.

I think most people know/knew the specs were going to be improved. It basically brings the S3 up to par with current generation phones. There is nothing really special about the hardware. A15's at 1.2Ghz probably will come in at around what Krait cores perform at anyway. The biggest complaints about the S3 were the button layout, aesthetic and the interface. Samsung did absolutely nothing to remedy any of that, despite the fact that the korean guy got up on stage and said like 15 times that they designed the phone around consumer feedback. Last time I checked no one wanted to play 7 songs synced at the same time.

Ummm, the Cortex A15s run at 1.6 GHz and the Cortex A7s run at 1.2 GHz in the same chip for the Exynos 5 Octa. It runs in the big.LITTLE configuration that ARM designed. Honestly, I'm more impressed by the big.LITTLE design than Qualcomm's design. Plus, pure clock speed doesn't really make much difference since the experience is still smooth, hell, I underclocked my Nexus 4 as I really didn't see a performance hit, yet I got a lot more out of its battery life. deltatux

Ummm, the Cortex A15s run at 1.6 GHz and the Cortex A7s run at 1.2 GHz in the same chip for the Exynos 5 Octa. It runs in the big.LITTLE configuration that ARM designed. Honestly, I'm more impressed by the big.LITTLE design than Qualcomm's design. The Cortex A7 kicks in for most tasks like browsing, texting and video playback, and then the Cortex A15 will kick in when absolute performance is required, say when you're gaming. Personally, i don't understand why Samsung opted to put 4 Cortex A7 cores since programs that will trigger the Cortex A7 wouldn't need 4 cores, a dual core Cortex A7 would make more sense but I guess Exynos 5 Hexa wouldn't sound as sexy as the Exynos 5 Octa. When either the A7 or A15 is on, the other is powered down, so it'll help save battery. Qualcomm doesn't have a similar design. Even NVIDIA's Tegra architecture has a similar design (Tegra 4 relies on all A15s but the companion core is built on a different process than the rest of the performance cores). Plus, pure clock speed doesn't really make much difference since the experience is still smooth, hell, I underclocked my Nexus 4 as I really didn't see a performance hit, yet I got a lot more out of its battery life. deltatux

Couple things here. Number one Quad A7's are necessary because you are going to be using them a lot. At MWC Samsung showed a demo and pretty much the 4 A7's were used at 100% power, essentially 85% of the time. As for big.little, my problem is that it's only going to benefit use cases where you're racing to sleep. You fire up those A15's at 1.6Ghz and you're immediately going to 4-6w TDP, in which a game would drain the battery in probably close to 2 hours. Second, Samsung doesn't own an ARM architectural license. So they couldn't modify ARM's big.little design for 2 A7's anyway. As for Samsungs implementation, according to anandtech they chose to run the A7's at 1.6Ghz since they are used often and the A15's at 1.2 to save power. So basically they reversed it. At full A15 load, the processor should cap at 2w which is far more reasonable for a phone. So basically you're getting A15's which run at Krait performance anyway. I'd honestly rather have the better GPU in the A600 + integrated LTE than the Octacore any day of the week.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 doesn't come with integrated LTE, it's an APQ, not an MSM SKU. It'll be like the Nexus 4 where it'll require an external baseband radio to work. As for the licensing, ARM do have dual core A7 designs, Samsung just chose to use quad core A7 designs instead, Samsung, being the manufacturer can choose how they implement their ARM cores even though they don't have the ARM ISA license. I read differently and that the A15s will run at 1.6 GHz and A7s will run at 1.2 GHz. Even Anandtech say so as well, not sure where you got your clockspeeds from...: http://anandtech.com/show/6768/samsung-details-exynos-5-octa-architecture-power-at-isscc-13 As for when the A15 gets fired up, not everyone uses their phones to game (I don't use my phone for gaming for instance), so for most people, they'll mainly be using the Cortex A7 and then only fire up the A15s whenever they do game or do other types of processing that will trigger the A15s (like computationally heavy applications like postprocessing effects or image processing). We'll have to see actual benchmark to see how well Samsung's implementation of ARM's big.LITTLE design to see how it compares to NVIDIA's Tegra design and Qualcomm's traditional SoC design. deltatux

The Exynos 5 Octa side is a bit more interesting. Samsung is calling the SoC a 1.6GHz Octa-core part, but that appears to be the clock speed for the four Cortex A7 cores. The four Cortex A15 cores will run at up to 1.2GHz, which should help keep power consumption manageable. We’ve been wondering for a while what clock speeds we’d see the Cortex A15s run at in smartphones, and I believe this is the first line drawn in the sand. If we go back to Samsung’s ISSCC disclosure of Exynos 5 Octa power consumption, it looks like peak CPU power consumption should be somewhere around 2W - definitely better than what we saw from Exynos 5 Dual in the Nexus 10. Again, no surprises here given that we’re talking about a smartphone - it’s just interesting to see.