So I need a phone

gurgi

Regular
Apparently my work phone isn't cutting it anymore, or at least that's what my gf keeps telling me. So I figure as long as I'm finally getting one of my own, I might as well get one that can do some nice 3D.

But I'm clueless. I know nokia has thier ngage, and that there are mbx, ati/nvidia chipsets out there. But I have no idea beyond that. I don't know about support, compatibility, networks, other features (I guess the ngage supports imap which is nice).

What are some of the products out there right now, or where is a good place to find this info?

Thanks guys!
 
Which phone to get depends on where you live. The Japanese and Korean markets range about a year ahead in phone technology of a territory like the US.

For the US, if you could wait, Nokia will finally be bringing their powerful phones to market at around the end of 2006 as they've really been dragging their feet on the next generation for N-Gage.

 
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I would really like some PDA functionality in there too. I guess I just want it all heh.

Are those screens from the next ngage or other nokia models? 2k6 you say?...I think I could hold off if there are some really neat products on the horizon.

I want to remember ATI and nVidia making announcements regarding this market too, are there no products with thier technology either?

Seems like so many platforms, which ones will get the support?

I'm one confused consumer heh.
 
Yes; the images are from a custom Futuremark demo for the next N-Gage expected in, unfortunately, late 2006/early 2007. Other phones, specifically the new DoCoMo FOMA 902i series in Japan, will be using the same kind of technology starting from this year, however.

ATi does already have 3D acceleration for some phones with their Imageon 2300, yet more advanced 3D hasn't been officially announced by them quite yet for the handheld space (they're currently readying an OGLES 2+/SM 3+ part, though) and hasn't been adopted widely from nVidia outside of Gizmondo's GPU so far.

My perspective on mobile phones is limited mostly to the range of discussion at this forum, so I'm unable to help with guidance on which manufacturers, providers, or service plans to get, and anything else outside of the 3D technology, unfortunately.
 
Lazy8s said:
Which phone to get depends on where you live. The Japanese and Korean markets range about a year ahead in phone technology of a territory like the US.


http://imageshack.us
I'm guessing these are promo shots and the real hardare doesn't have 64xAA. Also what resolution are these phones? Really as high as 480x360? What's the screen size in inches?
 
gurgi said:
I would really like some PDA functionality in there too. I guess I just want it all heh.
Nokia has a new 3G cell with Symbian OS, PDA functionality, at least 1 megapixel camera, bluetooth of course, lots of internal memory and flash cardslot, a rather big LCD screen and keyboard (less fiddly), and a great, functional yet stylish design. It really looks awesome and has excellent features, but the price was too rich for me or else I'd probably upgraded from my T610. S-E's 3G phones all look teh suck unfortunately. :(
 
Lazy8s said:
Impressive, to the point I'm skeptical. Quality and IQ suggest to me rendering perforamnce somewhat similar to powerful electricty-guzzling desktop GPUs, yet in a mobile. The amount of AA alone suggest either clever trickery (non-standard edge AA perhaps) or lots of supersampling. If mobile graphics are that capable but so much more efficient, why aren't this chips in desktop solutions? Why'd's it take 85 watts of GPU to do what 5 watts of mobile GPU can do? :???:
 
Tile accelerated display list rendering.

Minimizing unnecessary data calculation and transfer is the point of efficient design. The difference between PowerVR and other approaches is that PowerVR starts from the assumption that it can be completely efficient while other designs assume that they won't be and just do their best from there.

PowerVR attempts to collect the whole scene into display lists for evaluation of just the visible geometry while employing a robust tile accelerator to divide it into a large number of internally manageable, small tiles of screen. The use of display lists gives knowledge of the scene's composition to the processor and therefore the ability to determine just the visible parts, resulting in a pixel fillrate that's unconditionally effective. The use of small tiles saves chip space by not requiring a high amount of costly embedded memory while still keeping processing on-chip and independent from the frame buffer to enable unconditionally precise internal color blending, depth sorting, volume/stencil buffering, MRTs, etc. In order to simultaneously accomplish these separate vertex and pixel goals, the processing units must be structured to be highly parallel and independent so that they can work quickly on separate frames and not get stalled by waiting for each other (similar in effect to unified pipelines). PowerVR processors as a whole then become modular and therefore very scalable and also very fast in fillrate for operations which work from this parallel structure, like visible surface determination (HSR) for opaque overdraw and like volumes/stencils for stencil performance.

Between the advantages of rendering with on-chip bandwidth and of knowing the scene's composition, anti-aliasing, via both supersampling or multisampling, can be sampled directly from the tiles to the render buffer without extra external space or bandwidth requirements. Indeed, MBX boasts FSAA4FREE (4xAA).

Now, the N-Gage2 images might actually have promosampled FSAA, but an FSAA advantage for tile accelerated display list renderers is very real.

With mobile phone sales in the hundreds of millions of units each year, the amount of production and marketing that could be necessary to capture share in the PC space has been viewed as too risky for its market size by semiconductor companies not already established there. The established companies have expressed reservation with regards to tile accelerated display list rendering over issues of compatibility and its ability to deal with extreme rendering scenarios, but the approach is different in no fundamental ways and can render in immediate mode, while still retaining a degree of advantage in efficiency, if scene conditions became too extreme and the ideal deferment was impractical.
 
The full package with PDA/PocketPC and gaming functions would be something like Samsung's SPH-M7000 phone, but it is a Korean model.

communicasia_186.jpg

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