No doubt, Apple’s most serious technological competitor is Samsung with
their Galaxy Tab. We are not taking into account such developers like
Fujitsu, who are working with their national market only. Samsung, the
Korean electronic giant, has powerful manufacturing and technical
capabilities, and just like its first competitor, Samsung is not afraid
to experiment and spends great sums for specialists and researches.
Well, Samsung is not afraid to borrow, too, but this is quite a
different story.
We all are looking forward Apple’s future
experiment to make iPad’s screen of an extra-high resolution. The same
surprise Samsung is going to give us, too. It is entirely possible the
Apple’s triumph won’t be so bright thanks to Samsung this time. They are
not only going to improve the display’s resolution, but to make it
bigger in size. 10 inch are not enough for you anymore? Keep reading
then.
What is that we expect from iPad 3? Of course, it is Retina display first. There happen to be a tendency to make tablets with higher resolution. For example, Acer and Asus have announced their tablets with FullHD screens. The second trend of 2012 is quad-core processor for tablets. Asus has represented the first quad-core SoC tablet in the world. There is hope that iPad will have processor of the same level. And what about Samsung is they are going to make something even greater than this.
On the MWC 2012 Samsung is supposed to show iPad’s greatest competitor – the new Galaxy Tab 11.6. There are the rumors around the Web that the new device will have 11,6 inch display with 2560X1600 resolution, and there is even a chance that the device will be same size as all the previous ones thanks to the side panels reduction.
They say that in order to provide an optimal productivity of the device with such a huge resolution, Samsung will add SoC Exynos 5250 to it, which is a vary unusual solution even compared to the famous NVIDIA Tegra 3 System. The new tablet will only have two cores, but they are not the ordinary Cortex-A9, but much more technically and architecturally advanced 800 MHz Cortex-A15. Exynos 5250’s maximum frequency is 2 GHz. This speciality is better than its predecessor in terms of energy efficiency, being twice as productive.
The second important thing about SoC Samsung is its video processor. Previously the company used Mali-400, which is approximately twice as week as Power VR SGX543MP2 from Apple A5 (the one integrated into iPad 2 and iPhone 4S), but still four times more productive than all other solutions of those generation on the market. In Exynos 5250 the company moved to the Mali-T604. According to ARM, it is five times as productive as Mali-400, while consuming less energy and is capable to maintain up to four graphical cores. By the way, iPad 3 can be accomplished with an absolutely monstrous Power VR Rouge solution, which offers 20 times more productivity than Power VR SGX543MP2. Anyway, the real numbers will certainly be more limited.
Of course, this all is nothing but rumors and nobody knows exactly what iPad 3 and Galaxy Tab 11.6 can really offer. But it is more than likely that these two devices will vie for the first place among tablets of the year 2012. By the way, they both will be announced at almost the same time. MWC 2012 will start on the 27th of February in Barcelona, Spain. iPad 2 was announced in early March last year. By the tradition, Apple is going to represent their new product at the same time this year.
WXQGA displays, multi-core processors and video chips, insane popularity – don’t you think tablets are developing in breakneck pace compared to PCs? What took the former more than 10 years, tablets made less than in two! Our world changes and it looks like the computer concept as it is changes a lot. Certainly, there are some issues like physical keypad response or some modern tablet OS limitations. But still all these are nothing but temporary barriers. There are technologies to resolve such issues today, and it means a computer will be something entirely different in five or seven years. What we see today is the only beginning of this process.