There’s been a trend for the manufacturers of high-end phones to prove the power of their tech by connecting them to LCD and plasma screens via TV-out. It’s hard to know who exactly would want to do this, although there is an argument that mobile devices could be used this way in developing countries as a sort of PC replacement.
Still we had to take our metaphorical hat off to Nvidia which ran a high defintion H.264 720p stream of Monsters Inc onto a 60 inch plasma screen direct from its APX 2500 development hardware.
Of course, this is a bit of a trick in the sense that the APX 2500 isn’t a phone, although its innards could be powering phones by the end of 2008 if Nvidia gets its way.
It being marketed as an ultra high-end platform - “the heart and brains of the competition to the next iPhone” was the way Nvidia explained it to us.
More words and pics after the break.
As for some tech specs, the integrated chip - which is being fabbed at 65nm - consists of four main parts. There’s an ARM 11 running at up to 750MHz, an audio/video core that handles H.264 coding and encoding, an imaging core which supports cameras of up to 12MP resolution, and an OpenGL ES 2.0/Direct3D Mobile 3D graphics core which offers a ‘PlayStation 2 + shaders’ level of resolution. The OS is Windows Mobile. Aside from the Monsters Inc trick however, perhaps the most impressive part of the APX 2500 was its touchscreen user interface. The main UI was set up like a carousel of screens which you flicked to rotate and then tapped to select that application. Another neat touch were the Mac OS X-style widgets which contain live information such as stock quotes, map data, weather and time etc. These could be moved around on the screen and then locked into relative position with each other. A button on the top of the hardware was used to toggle between the main UI and the widgets.
Of course, this being a demonstration from Nvidia to entice phone manufacturers - and a relatively quickly put together project - none of the services on the device were actually running live, but it was easy to see how the APX 2500 could push forward the capabilities of future Windows-based smartphones. At this rate, TI and Qualcomm might have their work cut out trying to keep up.
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