Hey, what?   You thought I was kiddin' ??  ----  really really really BIG tablets.

I will miss HTC... I really wanted to get one of those.

My neighbor has a rotary phone, which is promised to me when he dies.  Not worth fixing his food but worth waiting for.   (We loose cable and power and often cell reception, but not once have we lost rotary phone service in our neighborhood.

Thing is though, most cell phone companies are charging $30 a month to have the "data phone" connected to their service.
And still charging for data downloaded per meg. or only allowing for so many mg.s then charging out the yin yang for whatever you go over.
There are no "free text/talk/data" rates that don't charge for data downloaded.... the "free" is always limited to a specific amount of data downloaded.
I went to wallyworld and checked on the "advertised" free Iphone thing and you have to sign up for a contract....even tho they advertise "no contract", the no contract applies to the cheapo non-data plans.

I had a big tablet in first grade,, pretty danged big pencil, too.

justin_o_guy2 wrote on 10/10/13 at 08:06:04:


That wasn't a pencil, it was a chisel.

As America quietly slides down more and more into 2nd World Power conditions, we will look back fondly on all the stuff that used to be based out of US corporations that came out aimed at us and our particular world view.

NOTHING new seems to be aimed at our market any more, the target markets that all the new stuff are aimed at are Chinese and Indo-Chinese.

Product announcements are coming out daily now about Allwinner going 64 bit in 2015 and Rockchip going 64 bit in 2014 and Allwinner coming out with an Octa core by the first of 2014 to "dominate" Rockchip's first 64 bit effort.   Each market seems to have its own competitive pairings and they all are duking it out furiously.

The big boys (Apple/Samsung) are slugging it out continuously in Europe and America, providing lots of fun and sparks, but it is Qualcomm who is actually producing most of the upper end phone/tablet chips that are in use today.

Qualcomm is in more upper end products right now than the rest of the players combined.   That is sort of scary interesting, now isn't it?

ARM and Qualcomm have a different approach to chip building and both have elements that the other could profit from copying (and as an ARM design licensee Qualcomm does copy some innovations from ARM's stock bag of tricks, but that street is one-way only).  

Qualcomm has a totally optimized and tweeked A9 Krait coreset at 2.3 gigahertz with 4 cores and a large chipset that has absolutely everything about a phone/tablet fully tuned and integrated on the chipset itself.   Qualcomm sells a do-all totally tweeked and tuned complete solution to your phone/tablet needs at a healthy premium price.

The rest of the circuit board on a Qualcomm phone and tablet is pretty empty as the Qualcomm chipset does most all of everything right on the chipset itself.

This makes Qualcomm the absolute winner in 2013-14 as no one can compete with their level of custom tuning right now.

However, the A9 platform is getting long in the tooth now, even the Chinese cheapie guys will totally leave the A9 platform space next year and roll into something faster and more capable.

Qualcomm is silent about what they are going to do until they release it out to their phone design partners, so we don't get a bunch of press releases out of Qualcomm about what their plans for 64 bit actually are.  

Krait is their core brand name and their cores aren't ARM standard designs, so they could cook up a 64 bit Krait that continues in line with their current chipset design flow.   Goodness knows, if they have an A-9 base cooking at 2.3 ghz right now what they could do with a more efficient and faster A50 series thought at 16-20nm manufacturing process.

It is funny.   Samsung actually uses Qualcomm's Krait 800 in any market that requires 4G and really big power.   Samsung makes their own chipsets but they will use Qualcomm to sell "the best" in the 4G markets that demand the best.

Right now that is their 8 core Exynos 5420 in the older 3G markets, and Qualcomm Krait 800 in the 4G markets.

Intel sees Qualcomm as their direct competitor and aims all efforts at out doing Qualcomm's integrated systems.  This is sorta sad as the only way Intel can even go into phone space right now is with a sub-board system with a power choking control chip system to get their stuff to be "energy friendly".

And Qualcomm cheerfully prices their product to be slightly cheaper than Microsoft's at a higher performance level.

Qualcomm is raking it in right now, believe me.