A small M8 education for those losing faith.

midsommer · 04-28-2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by sere83

The M8 will not have to down scale anything, this is the whole point. Because the screen res will be so high (720x480) the screen will be optimised to properly handle any mpeg 4 file up to this resolution. In other words it will be optimized to handle 720x480 without a problem so anything lower will be less taxing on the processor. This means that no file up to dvd res will have to be down scaled at all. You could encode your videos at any resolution 320x240/640x480/720x480 and the M8 will be able to play them back sharper and with more clarity than any other phone on the market. Also by the time you have written 1000 cycles you will almost certainly have a new phone anyway!

The Sony Xperia offline will be very expensive when compared the M8, it has other features like 3G and GPS but it will also be more than twice the price! To put a micro sd 16gb card in it will also cost a lot more too as they have not even been released yet. You are looking at around $800 at very least at release and the price will not fall very quickly either. In september 16gb micro sd will probably not be standard in any phones. The M8 will also have other features like USB-OTG/codec support and a bigger screen that the sony ericsson will not have. In September there will be very few (if any) phones that can offer the kind of spec meizu will be offering for the price. There may be better specd phones out by then but they will also cost a lot more money. I am not sure but I think the 8 and 16gb M8's will release at the same time too.

Stongly disagree to the fist paragraph. I think you have never programmed - I wrote two emulators (ok small and crappy one) - and scaling from low to higher resolution cost MUSH (I have not seen any hardware feature for that in the M8 - correct me if I am wrong) - especially if you can not simply double the pixels. So upscaling costs processore time - and it costs battery! Also the the sentence "... the M8 will be able to play them back sharper and with more clarity than any other phone on the market." I so much nonsence. You can not create better qualtiy by a screen if the source is sh***.

In fact: especially the features over the small m8 (+aGPS) the SE X1 will offer are the more expensive ones. And if you want to compare both phones, you have to do it with the M8 released in late 2008 - the big one with front camara, 3G, and big storage - and btw: SE X1 has an mini-USB, most likely with host support - so it is an USB-OTG port! For this M8 we do not know the price yet, but it will most likely be + 100 € (+150 $) in addition to the small m8. That is much for a small, unknown, not established chinese brand, never proven to constuct quality phones.

Also keep in mind: SE put the SE X1 in direct competition to the iPhone 2 - they will not try to make money (in first glance), but to gain market share.

Traps · 04-28-2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by midsommer

P.S.: most movies are downloadable now for the iPhone resolution - so the m8 will have to scale it! This will drain the battery. And: the m8 8GB would only be able to keep one DVD (4.2GB) movie - I will definitelly use the shrunken iPhone optimized one (500 GB). btw: that speaks against your wide screen HD argument, too. You will not be able to use it, as you run out of storage. or you are willing to overwrite your unremovable storage many times - so the storage will be out of order soon (the only reason why flashes are said to hold longer now, is mostlikly due to the OS file system avoing rewriting cicles as much as possible. But if you have always to use allways the full space, the flash will be gone within 1000 write cycles (ok - that will be 2 years, but not guaranty).

I disagree with your point about downloading movies for the iPhone resolution. This doesn't make sense unless you specifically want to watch them on an iPhone, as otherwise you'd choose a better resolution to use on your home computer. In fact I would say that the vast majority of people download movies/series at resolutions around 640x480 or higher.

The advantage of the M8 screen resolution is allowing you to play higher resolutions (those you download to watch at home) without converting. Scaling up from lower resolutions doesn't necessarily mean greater battery drain, since the most intensive computation is the decoding part, and it should be much lighter on those cases.

Regarding the 1000 write cycles for flash memory, this value is incorrect. The current value is 100,000 cycles for NOR memory, and 1,000,000 cycles for NAND memory (you can check it on wikipedia). This means that even without "wear leveling" it should last you a lifetime, as long as you're the only one writing data onto it. With WinCE, you'll probably have constant writes to a swap file, but in this case "wear leveling" is also used, and you'll still have many years of flash lifetime.

darkado · 04-28-2008

lol, x1 doesn't have to do anything with the rumored release of iphone2, it's meant for the bissines market and users, that's why you don't see 8gb in it, it's not multimedia oriented.

midsommer · 04-28-2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by Traps

I disagree with your point about downloading movies for the iPhone resolution. This doesn't make sense unless you specifically want to watch them on an iPhone, as otherwise you'd choose a better resolution to use on your home computer. In fact I would say that the vast majority of people download movies/series at resolutions around 640x480 or higher.

The advantage of the M8 screen resolution is allowing you to play higher resolutions (those you download to watch at home) without converting. Scaling up from lower resolutions doesn't necessarily mean greater battery drain, since the most intensive computation is the decoding part, and it should be much lighter on those cases.

Regarding the 1000 write cycles for flash memory, this value is incorrect. The current value is 100,000 cycles for NOR memory, and 1,000,000 cycles for NAND memory (you can check it on wikipedia). This means that even without "wear leveling" it should last you a lifetime, as long as you're the only one writing data onto it. With WinCE, you'll probably have constant writes to a swap file, but in this case "wear leveling" is also used, and you'll still have many years of flash lifetime.

1) Most online platformes indeed offers only iphone optimized versions by now - I speak about the official ones. Might be due to the fact, that they want to make money. I will not use piracy. I will bet, even in the near future most people will prefere the iphone optimized version, as they are good in quality as well as small (Download time).

2) Disagree here - I will bet, they will have supported decoding, but not accelerated upscaling features - not in a phone! Even most up to date graphic card do not support that.

3) Sorry about the NOR life time cycles. 10 000 to 100 000 is much better than the number I learnd in university... (time runs so fast)

midsommer · 04-28-2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by darkado

lol, x1 doesn't have to do anything with the rumored release of iphone2, it's meant for the bissines market and users, that's why you don't see 8gb in it, it's not multimedia oriented.

In fact the the SE X1 is a mulitmedia phone with business features.
It is in competition to the iPhone 2 as the latter will offer business features soon. How comes you think it is a business phone?

But this is not a topic for here - go to SE blogs, etc. here you will find more infos.

gkai · 04-28-2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by midsommer

The USB-stuff seems a good point! I even could use the PS3 for encoding. But: as far as I know, the m8 will only have a mini usb connector. I am not willing to carry an adaptor cable with me only for the USB-flash... if they use a USB2-OTG - why not implementing the standard _big_ in/output?

Yep, full size usb would be better...but no portable device have that AFAIK: there are space constraints, and power limitation (USB2 full size is required to be able to deliver 5W if I remember correctly).
So i do not see much hope of not carying mini-to-full USB adaptor for taking full advantage of USB OTG, being with Meizu m8 or any other manufacturer...
At least, this cable should be usable as charger adapter, allowing to use any standard USB charger in car or on the move...

parena · 04-28-2008

For comparison between M8 and 'others', some news on the new iPhone.

Engadget says: 3G and GPS:
The second-gen iPhone: 3G, GPS, only slightly thicker - Engadget

And several sites are saying it might haptic feedback:
LEAKED: Apple to Licence Haptic Technology for iPhone : Palluxo! Mac Dose of All Things Apple

That would mean that if you 'press' a 'button' on the touch screen, you'd get vibration like feedback to make it seem you really are actually pressing a button. Nokia has licsensed this as well, the article says.

gkai · 04-28-2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by midsommer

2) Disagree here - I will bet, they will have supported decoding, but not accelerated upscaling features - not in a phone! Even most up to date graphic card do not support that.

hum...the 6410 documentation mention stuff that suggest hardware scaling (or at least, hardware assisted scaling (they have openGL, and 2D engine able to do rotation). So scaling to a different resolution should not be a problem...Especially as TV-out is supported: you will need scaling to do that anyway...
However, this does not mean it will be good scaling (good scaling is more than linear transformation from one resolution to another, AFAIK it uses temporal information (multiple succesive frames are used to compose the scaled frame) or even work at the codec stage...or at least that the info I got while reading about DVD upscaling for HDTV...)
It would probably be fast but poor up/downscaling...but at those DPI, I do not expect up/downscaling artifacts to be really noticeable...

darkado · 04-28-2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by midsommer

In fact the the SE X1 is a mulitmedia phone with business features.
It is in competition to the iPhone 2 as the latter will offer business features soon. How comes you think it is a business phone?

But this is not a topic for here - go to SE blogs, etc. here you will find more infos.

for one fully, functional office suite sets a course, other things just follow. the x1 is in completely other market segment than the iphone.

Traps · 04-28-2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by midsommer

1) Most online platformes indeed offers only iphone optimized versions by now - I speak about the official ones. Might be due to the fact, that they want to make money. I will not use piracy. I will bet, even in the near future most people will prefere the iphone optimized version, as they are good in quality as well as small (Download time).

Sorry, I was not suggesting that you should use piracy. I don't use "piracy" either (at least not in my understanding of the term), as I usually see movies at the movie theater or rent them in DVD.
I do watch many anime fansubs (which you could call piracy, but that's a controversial topic), since they are the only way to get the latest anime outside of Japan. And at least on this case, the tendency is for supported resolutions to increase: 640x480 is normal, but you can get it up to 1024x768 or more.

Anyway, I agree that 480x320 may be nice for 3.5", but on a home theater system it would look absolutely horrible. And it doesn't make sense to buy the same movie over and over for each device you own.