Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc

Sony Ericsson unveiled only one handset at CES 2011 in Las Vegas this year and it's not the rumored PlayStation Phone, which we suspect would finally be announced at next month's upcoming Mobile World Congress. Meanwhile, the Xperia Arc, which looks stunning with its sleek profile and generous display, is hard to ignore. It's also the first sign that Sony Ericsson is stepping up to the game.

Front and center is the 4.2-inch, 854 x 480-pixel touchscreen with 16.7 million colors. Unlike the earlier Xperia X10 which had a long-running issue of not supporting multitouch initially, the Xperia Arc will get pinch-to-zoom out of the box. Perhaps in response to Samsung's Super AMOLED and Apple's Retina Display screens, Sony Ericsson has fitted the Xperia Arc with a Reality Display powered by a Mobile Bravia Engine. The phone-maker claims the new panel will enhance colors and clarity. It also has a shatter-proof sheet layer on scratch-resistant mineral glass.

The other draw of the Xperia Arc is the 8.1-megapixel camera which comes with a Sony Exmor R mobile CMOS backlit sensor and F2.4 lens. The key benefits of these are better low-light performance, lower noise level and improved speed and dynamic range, so it'll be interesting to see how the Xperia Arc delivers for imaging purposes. The camera also supports 720p video capture and offers a range of features including face detection, autofocus, smile detection, geotagging and an LED flash.

The look and feel of user interface is pretty standard Sony Ericsson fare, although you'll find that some areas resemble those offered by Apple and HTC. For example, you can create a folder on the home screen by dropping an application on top of another. You can also pinch on the display to see all the widgets on the five home screens at one glance. Sony Ericsson's take on the user interface includes the Media pane which gives you quick access to photos, videos and music, as well as Timescape which aggregates all your communications on a single pane. A row of four customizable shortcuts sits permanently on the five home screens, so you can get to frequently used applications such as Messaging or Calendar.

Exterior features include the usual repertoire of microSD card slot, 3.5mm audio jack, physical Back, Home and Menu buttons and a micro-HDMI connector. The latter lets you connect to a TV for multimedia display and Web browsing. According to Sony Ericsson, if you have a Sony Bravia TV with Bravia Sync, you can also use the TV remote to navigate the gallery and Web browser. Note that the Arc also supports Wi-Fi-enabled DLNA connectivity, which means you can share content wirelessly with compatible devices.

The highlight, however, is the Xperia's Arc arched back that squeezes down to 8.7mm in the middle. It isn't as slim as the LG Optimus Black with a girth of only 6mm at its thinnest point, but beats the 9.3mm iPhone 4 and 9.9mm Galaxy S. In reality, you probably won't feel the small difference, but the takeaway is the Xperia Arc feels really great in the hand.

Under the hood, the Xperia Arc is powered by a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and 512MB of RAM. It also runs the latest version of Google's mobile operating system, Android 2.3 Gingerbread. What we hope to see down the road is that proprietary software like Timescape wouldn't interface with future OS updates. The rest of the features are what you can expect from a current Android smartphone. The usual set of Google applications are available, in addition to Wisepilot turn-by-turn navigation (may not be available in every market), support for Microsoft Exchange Active Sync, Webkit browser, Assisted-GPS and USB mass storage mode.

According to Sony Ericsson, the Xperia Arc will be available in midnight blue or misty silver later this quarter. Pricing wasn't available at the time of this writing,

General

Phone type: Candy bar

 

Operating system:  Android

 

Dimensions (H x W x D):  125 x 63 x 8.7 mm

 

Weight  117g

 

Expansion slot(s) microSDHC

Connectivity

GSM frequency bands Quadband

 

Connectivity options : 3G, A-GPS, GPS, EDGE, HSDPA, HSUPA, microUSB, Bluetooth, WLAN, DLNA, HDMI

Display and Text Input

Display resolution:  WVGA

 

Display type : TFT

 

Touchscreen : Yes

 

Keypad : None

Performance

Battery capacity : 1500 mAh

Multimedia

Maximum camera resolution : 8.1 megapixels

 

Imaging features :Onboard flash, Autofocus

Sound features: MP3 playback, Stereo sound, Voice recording

Audio jack type: 3.5mm

32-Core CPUs From Intel and AMD

 

What is it? 

With the gigahertz race largely abandoned, both AMD and Intel are trying to pack more cores onto a die in order to continue to improve processing power and aid with multitasking operations. Miniaturizing chips further will be key to fitting these cores and other components into a limited space. Intel will roll out 32-nanometer processors (down from today's 45nm chips) in 2009.

When is it coming? 

Intel has been very good about sticking to its road map. A six-core CPU based on the Itanium design should be out imminently, when Intel then shifts focus to a brand-new architecture called Nehalem, to be marketed as Core i7. Core i7 will feature up to eight cores, with eight-core systems available in 2009 or 2010. (And an eight-core AMD project called Montreal is reportedly on tap for 2009.)

After that, the timeline gets fuzzy. Intel reportedly canceled a 32-core project called Keifer, slated for 2010, possibly because of its complexity (the company won't confirm this, though). That many cores requires a new way of dealing with memory; apparently you can't have 32 brains pulling out of one central pool of RAM. But we still expect cores to proliferate when the kinks are ironed out: 16 cores by 2011 or 2012 is plausible (when transistors are predicted to drop again in size to 22nm), with 32 cores by 2013 or 2014 easily within reach. Intel says "hundreds" of cores may come even farther down the line.

Memristor: A Groundbreaking New Circuit

What is it? 

As its name implies, the memristor can "remember" how much current has passed through it. And by alternating the amount of current that passes through it, a memristor can also become a one-element circuit component with unique properties. Most notably, it can save its electronic state even when the current is turned off, making it a great candidate to replace today's flash memory.

Memristors will theoretically be cheaper and far faster than flash memory, and allow far greater memory densities. They could also replace RAM chips as we know them, so that, after you turn off your computer, it will remember exactly what it was doing when you turn it back on, and return to work instantly. This lowering of cost and consolidating of components may lead to affordable, solid-state computers that fit in your pocket and run many times faster than today's PCs.

Someday the memristor could spawn a whole new type of computer, thanks to its ability to remember a range of electrical states rather than the simplistic "on" and "off" states that today's digital processors recognize. By working with a dynamic range of data states in an analog mode, memristor-based computers could be capable of far more complex tasks than just shuttling ones and zeroes around.

When is it coming? 

Researchers say that no real barrier prevents implementing the memristor in circuitry immediately. But it's up to the business side to push products through to commercial reality. Memristors made to replace flash memory (at a lower cost and lower power consumption) will likely appear first; HP's goal is to offer them by 2012. Beyond that, memristors will likely replace both DRAM and hard disks in the 2014-to-2016 time frame. As for memristor-based analog computers, that step may take 20-plus years.