BB10. Hardware/Software

Hey Guys,

Have watched the videos from yesterday's keynote, and articles here on CB.

Thorsten said the apps are always open. This has me thinking.

We all know, to get the best experience, software and hardware has to be in perfect bond. Currently with the PlayBook, one of the biggest issues plaguing it is, the OS and the apps clearly aren't using the full power.

Even the bb10 dev alpha they used in the keynote, not the one they handed out, clearly has to be fairly powerful.

Applications running all the time in the background is definitely gonna need CPU and RAM. Also the battery is gonna take a thrashing.

Current OS7 devices runs down under email and chat.

RIM acquired a RF tuning company that also does battery optimization recently. I can see how this will be needed.

All this said, I am now wondering, what kind of spec will the bb10 devices carry. I don't believe they need to get a quad core nVidia chip, I personally believe the dual core s4 snap dragon with 2GB of RAM can really work it.

What do you guys think?

Lol I think this has been talked to death over time. But if the Dev Alpha is any indication.

They'll have 1GB of RAM. Which what the competition will be using for this year also. Haven't seen or heard about a phone pushing it to 2GB yet.

And the chip should be TI OMAP5. I hope they use that opposed to Snapdragon S4 anyway.

I'm not sure if you know about the ARM Cortex-A9 and Cortex-A15 architectures. But current quad cores are Cortex-A9 and the Snapdragon S4 and OMAP5's are A15.

Instead of me explaining it, they just had an article on Android central about it,
http://www.androidcentral.com/why-my...your-quad-core

So I'm really hoping OMAP 5.

But as for the apps. I can't really say unless I know more about the OS.

Just because they are always open doesn't mean they are always using gpu power, they could be in a sort of idle state until you click on the app.

Originally Posted by mithrazor

Lol I think this has been talked to death over time. But if the Dev Alpha is any indication.

They'll have 1GB of RAM. Which what the competition will be using for this year also. Haven't seen or heard about a phone pushing it to 2GB yet.

And the chip should be TI OMAP5. I hope they use that opposed to Snapdragon S4 anyway.

I'm not sure if you know about the ARM Cortex-A9 and Cortex-A15 architectures. But current quad cores are Cortex-A9 and the Snapdragon S4 and OMAP5's are A15.

Instead of me explaining it, they just had an article on Android central about it,
http://www.androidcentral.com/why-my...your-quad-core

So I'm really hoping OMAP 5.

But as for the apps. I can't really say unless I know more about the OS.

Ti doesn't really make the most powerful chips, unless they come out and blow everyone away with their omap5 I can't see it being any different and won't be much if any better than the s4 chipset.

The only sad thing about BB10 yet is that people think the Alpha Dev device is the BB10 UI...

Originally Posted by emirozmen

The only sad thing about BB10 yet is that people think the Alpha Dev device is the BB10 UI...

Agree, the alpha device isn't even running bb10 it is running pb os 2.1 so I could see a lot of people being very excited once bb10 actually shows up.

Originally Posted by mithrazor

Lol I think this has been talked to death over time. But if the Dev Alpha is any indication.

They'll have 1GB of RAM. Which what the competition will be using for this year also. Haven't seen or heard about a phone pushing it to 2GB yet.

I think I've heard some rumblings of some phones heading to 2GB.

But anyway...the devalpha's specs are not a great indication at all. It has 1GB RAM because it's basically PB components. The reason apps close in the background, some of the browser crashes and some of the suckiness of android player is due to lack of RAM, it would surely made sense to increase it. Especially so as the OP points out apps will be running all the time. Obviously they could vastly improve the memory management from PB os 2, but a lot of the RAM is simply consumed by the android runtime being on the device. 2GB of RAM would make sense to me, but then again we're not fully clear on the implementation of "always running" apps yet...

Whether it's 1GB of RAM or 2 or 4, it will still be finite. So best thing I heard today was more admissions in the breakout sessions that RIM is figuring out that there will have to be some limitations on background apps. (e.g. access to video buffers, access to LBS, access to audio channels, etc.)

As more sophisticated apps come out and as resolutions increase, etc, it will not be possible to just naively say "everything runs all the time, we have enough resources". I'm happy to hear RIM engineers finally understand this.

I think RIM has done some smart programming the new BB OS 10 because it must be good on battery life otherwise if it won't even last two hours how can they sell it? They must've added some standby feature on apps when you're not switching between them or something. Or they use like a 10,000 mA battery which I highly doubt. Hopefully that's whats going on and these knew device aren't going to eat up the battery like nobody's business.

I have been thinking about it more, and it would make more sense to have more ram than what is commonly out there. RIM is building their new flagship device, I don't believe they need to go quad but a dual core with 2 GB or ram would do great. Remembering that they are really trying to push the multi-tasking capabilities of qnx with their "Flow UI". When you have native apps running a considerable amount of the time, and then take into consideration that a lot of consumers will get this device and games will be installed in addition to other apps. CPU and RAM will definitely need to be a cut above what we have seen with the current market... Who knows, this is all speculation, but i can see rim like apple having a special chipset created for them. I really hoping the battery life can be something like the Galaxy Note's 2600MHa.