What's coming in the next 6 months?

[Crispy]

Is there a roadmap for rumored devices somewhere? My contract is up in April and I'm wondering what will be available. Do we have an idea when the 28mm Qualcomm SoC with integrated LTE will be out? Or maybe price on Prime will drop and there will be custom rom's for it.

 

[MagicTalkingTaco]

Galaxy S3 perhaps???

 

[mightyfacundo]

I don't know the name, but I'll take a random guess that we'll see a phone with the following specs 6 months from now.

HTC, Samsung, or Motorola
1.8GHz Dual Core TI OMAP 4470 Cortex-A9 Processor
Power VR SGX 544 GPU
Super Clear (insert fancy name) HD screen - 720p (720x1280)
12 MP rear camera with dual LED flash
2 MP front camera
1080p video recording
4G LTE on VZW and AT&T
ICS 4.1.1
32 GB internal memory
32 GB micro SD card slot
2 GB RAM
2050 mAh battery
NFC
Wi-Fi hotspot for up to 10 devices


Honestly, I don't know if this phone will be available 6 months from now, but this will be the next superphone we're all drooling over (pure speculation on my part).

Oh, and I may have been a little optimistic on the battery. They'll probably stick us with a 1600 mAh battery to keep it as thin as possible.

 

[kharrigan]

The only real innovation that I can realistically see for the next 18m is improvement in ICS and maybe the GPU. Increased CPUs, cores, and memory will only drain battery faster... unless battery technology improves dramatically.

I don't even think that the camera will improve significantly. 8mp is a LOT of info to capture per shot. Going to 10 or even 12 mp isn't that dramatic - unless you talk about storage impact.

 

[mallengi]

With the new quad-core / single core hybrid chips, battery technology doesn't have to get more efficient for the battery to last longer. Basically what we're looking at is the same concept NVIDIA used with Optimus technology -- you have two separate processors and the device intelligently chooses the one appropriate for the occasion. When a 1 GHz, single core processor is sufficient, then the quad-core, 2 GHz chip will be turned off to conserve battery life. Also, screen technology may become more efficient (we already saw a step forward with Super Amoled Plus screens, which display blacks more efficiently), and our phones are becoming smarter about the way they handle tasks, too. Android batteries are crushed by background applications, but with ICS we will be able to limit which applications can run in the background and at the same time I'd imagine the next step is selective LTE/WiMax radio usage. When I'm downloading podcasts, then I want to be on WiFi, LTE or WiMax. When the phone is in my pocket with nothing downloading, and data sync is enabled only so that I can get an update about a new e-mail message arriving, I don't want those radios on. I suspect that some kind of intelligent radio selection is going to be integrated to the carrier skins of phones going forward (that is, if it is not included in the first upgrade to ICS, whenever that may be released). Even if the batteries themselves do not improve, the devices are becoming more efficient in the way they use batteries.

 

[zhawks]

I'm hoping for a Moto-Nex (aka Nexus device by Motorola).

 

[Officerpolabear]

The only real innovation that I can realistically see for the next 18m is improvement in ICS and maybe the GPU. Increased CPUs, cores, and memory will only drain battery faster... unless battery technology improves dramatically.

I don't even think that the camera will improve significantly. 8mp is a LOT of info to capture per shot. Going to 10 or even 12 mp isn't that dramatic - unless you talk about storage impact.

I agree with this, we have hardware acceleration now so that means we don't need to up the power in SoC technology for a while as there won't be any real benefit. I'd say, we should start to upgrade in that area once there are more CPU/GPU intensive tasks (1080p playback, HD games, etc.).

 

[Jaycemiskel]

The only real innovation that I can realistically see for the next 18m is improvement in ICS and maybe the GPU. Increased CPUs, cores, and memory will only drain battery faster... unless battery technology improves dramatically.

I don't even think that the camera will improve significantly. 8mp is a LOT of info to capture per shot. Going to 10 or even 12 mp isn't that dramatic - unless you talk about storage impact.

In 18 months we will probably be way past ICS. I'm thinking we'll be running extremely efficient quad cores by then.

Sent from my DROID3 using Tapatalk

 

[powurplayr]

It seems battery technology is still lagging way behind CPU tech. What good are all these advancements without the power to run them...

 

[Scottatron]

The next big move in tech will be designs like Tegra 3, using smaller low power CPUs for some tasks, and beastly CPUs built on designs like 28nm and smaller.

 

[TvTechGuru]

I do think that phones coming out within the first 6 months of 2012 will start to migrate more to the new Quad-core chips that NVIDIA announced and TI & Qualcomm will surely make. As far as the other specs you listed, those are questionable.

I really doubt we'll see cameras go over 8MP for a long time. It's just not practical in a phone just yet. We should be happy with 8MP for a while, they will produce more than satisfying images. I do think a 2MP front cam would be nice. Time to get rid of the 1.3MP and move forward. I would also too like to see more RAM, 2GB, and more internal memory, like the 32GB you listed. If iPhone 4S can offer up to 64GB, then why can't Samsung, Motorola or HTC offer us 32GB internal + up to a 32GB micro SD? That would be awesome.

Battery technology also needs to be dramatically re-invented. With the increase in hardware that sucks battery life, battery cell manufacturers need to develop some revolutionary power cells so that we don't have to worry about LTE or a dual or quad-core chip killing our batteries.

 

[deberry65]

Motorola announced the release of Motorola XT928 this December in China. The specs for this phone are very similar to the specs of the Motorola Dinara or MB886 that was talked about this summer. Does anybody know if this phone will be released in the US and when? I have an OG Droid and I?m ready to upgrade.

Motorola XT928 Specs
Dual Core 1.2GHz processor, 1GB RAMS
32GB memory
Dual Mode
Dual Standby
4.5-inch Touch Screen w/Corning Gorilla scratch-resistant glass
1280x720 HD resolution
1080p HD video capture/playback
13-megapixel rear-facing camera
1.3-megapixel front-facing camera

 

[anon(40376)]

Read it was rumored for AT&T sometime next year. Rumors only.

One of the rumors.....Motorola Dinara

 

[Chinookman]

Gee I was hoping for a more hard core super rumor of ATT next Sammi-phone.....I'm Sooooooooo jealous of wife's Sammi S-II and my Torch is still Loooooooaaaaaddddiiinnnngg...yawn.......sigh....lol... April is when I can upgrade.... and I use Wi-Fi at work for talk radio and audio books while working......oh well keep up the rumors' I'll b lurkn until April then will b ready to jump the good ship BB Torch-pop......lol...

 

[KingKuba]

Seems like 2GB of Ram will be very slowly coming.

1GB has been around forever it seems.

 

[Anonymous7532479]

Before we see phones with gazillion cores and such, I would rather see the companies start improving the phone experience we have now.

Personally, this new batch of phones are plenty fast enough for me. I would rather see them develop software and hardware that gives the average user a day or more on one battery cycle. My new Rezound has a beautiful battery life, but that is because I have a 2750mah battery, and I do procedures to prolong it (one being, I turn off 4G unless I think it's necessary for what I'm doing).

This next subject is kinda straying about from the topic, but I would like to see more application stability across the Android platform. I don't like how an app may work great for my device, but completely craps out on your Droid X (or some other phone).

I know a lot of average Android phone owners who hate their phones and want to switch to an iPhone simply because the OS is shoddy or unstable on the device they use. Me personally, I get the fact that when you have the Android OS operating on a 100+ different devices, there is much room for error. And iOS is pretty flawless because Apple only has one phone to put their OS on, thus it's easier to perfect things. I get that, but I think the average smartphone owner simply wants a phone that does what they want it to do, smoothly, with a good battery life. Most people don't care about what we find important in a phone, they just want a pleasant experience.

I'm always seeing people on my Facebook newsfeed posting about how they're ditching their Android for an iPhone because their 'droid' is just not a good experience. I want to see companies spend more time ensuring that their users have that consistently "pleasant" experience.

DM_Droid wrote:

If iPhone 4S can offer up to 64GB, then why can't Samsung, Motorola or HTC offer us 32GB internal + up to a 32GB micro SD? That would be awesome.

I've been thinking about this lately. It would be nice to have 64GB to store files, but I'm not willing to pay an additional $100 for it. Apple (and the carriers) charge $400 for the 64GB iPhone 4S, while the 32GB version is $300. I don't think it's worth it for me. One, because I don't carry my mp3's on my phone (I have almost 20K songs), and two, everything is turning cloud. I don't even use my iPods much anymore now that I have Spotify, Goodle Music, etc.


-mcskipp

 

[Jmdwifi]

In 18 months we will probably be way past ICS. I'm thinking we'll be running extremely efficient quad cores by then.

Sent from my DROID3 using Tapatalk

Yeah, SugarSmack 1.0 will be out by then.

 

[terr#WN]

I really just wish we could do away with touchwiz, sense, blur, etc. They say it is for the user experience. How about they let us decide on the user experience and let us have regular updates instead. I think if one of these stupid asses would do this they would build a regular loyal following. Cut the out is usually the best approach to anything and everything.

 

[Super Turtleman]

I really just wish we could do away with touchwiz, sense, blur, etc. They say it is for the user experience. How about they let us decide on the user experience and let us have regular updates instead. I think if one of these stupid asses would do this they would build a regular loyal following. Cut the out is usually the best approach to anything and everything.

I think a lot of the average users enjoy blur, sense, etc. I do agree though that it should be optional. I don't mind it coming preloaded on the phone (average users may not want to go through the hassle of finding and loading it onto their phones) but I wish we could remove it if we wished.

 

[Crispy]

The beauty of Android is its different things to different people. OEM skins have a lot of useful features since plain old AOSP is not as feature rich. e.g Sense does a fantastic job with Facebook contact syncing, something stock Android doesn't support. T9 dialer is another thing the base OS lacks.

The added bloatware apps and the extra resource usage are 2 things that are bad, but new phones have plenty of memory, and ICS lets you disable any app, so its no longer really a concern.