Review of the First Medfield Phone

Google85 writes "Beginning April 23rd, Intel, through Lava International, began selling the Xolo X900 smartphone in India for $420, Anandtech has just published a review of the smartphone which runs Android on x86 and uses binary translation as the mitigation for both libraries and NDK applications that haven't yet been ported to x86."

Re:Emulation layer? No thanks.

[vlm]

Aside from abstract contemplation of "progress" vs "backwards" it probably burns power and generates crazy heat.

I have a X86 netbook on my desk running Android ICS. An old Asus EEE model 900. (my wife has like a 700 also running ICS). It works great, really. The keyboard, although icky netbook size, is better than any smartphone I've ever seen, and the speakers, although icky netbook speakers, are better than any phone or tablet speakers I've ever experienced. The problem is that even running non-emulated (limited selection) apps without an emu layer, it pumps out so much heat even just idling that the cooling fan never turns off. Whirr 24x7. I would imagine an emulation layer would consume even more power.

I would theorize that much as laptops which burn laps are VERY old news, in the future, phones that burn ears and hands are going to be news.

Who will make the first smartphone with a cooling fan? Or a monster solid aluminum heatsink case like a handheld land mobile or ham radio HT?

My experiences show Android X86 would make a pretty good desktop OS for the average user. I'm looking into adding a desktop running android and putting it on the KVM with the other 4 machines on my desk at home (I guess making it my 5th machine)

Re:Why.. India?

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd be surprised just how large and healthy the cell phone market really is in India. Everyone there has a cell, from grannies to temple priests to guys on the street pulling carts of produce. Among the youth, smart phones are status symbols just like they are in North America, except probably even more people have them.

I bet India is a vastly larger market than you think.

Re:Why.. India?

[vlm]

30% of 300 million in the USA is 90 mil
They're poor in India despite sending most of our middle class jobs there and also to China, so we'll give them only 1/3 of the market penetration
10% of 1.2 billion in India is 120 mil
Looks like India is a better market than the US, or at least as more theoretical customers.

Indian Middle class is bigger than entire USA

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The population of India is huge. About 25% of them live below the poverty line. And another 25% have barely enough income to survive. 500 million such people drown out the other 500 million people with some disposable income. The top 25% of India are solidly middle class by American standards. They have steady income, are willing to spend humongous portions of their pay on their children's education. The predatory education industry makes more money than you can imagine. Anyway the richest of the rich live in a kind of opulence that defies comprehension. One guy named Mukesh Ambani built a private residence in downtown Mumbai for the cost of some 1 billion US dollars. It is a 25 story high rise as a private residence! Then some astrologer dude told him such wanton flaunting of wealth would attract the evil eye, and the owner decided not to live there!!!

An x86 pocket PC

[nephridium]

So it looks the performance and battery life are on par with the current crop of Android phones, but no one has mentioned the main advantage of the Intel device: binary compatibility with x86 architecture, i.e. tons of software that already exists. So there is huge potential of this being the first phone able to run windows and linux binaries by side-loading Debian/Ubuntu with Wine/Virtualbox.

A 1.6GHz Atom should be enough to run Windows XP sufficiently fast, imagine using all your favorite desktop apps on your phone, the screen's not too shabby either with 1024x600. Sure, most won't be optimized for touch input, but that trade-off is worth it for this kind of flexibility. Apps with source code can have their touch-friendliness added, for those that really require a mouse and/or keyboard, those could be added via Bluetooth (or USB?). I see no reason why it wouldn't be able to run apps like desktop Firefox/Chrome (with touch-input extensions), Gimp/Photoshop, MS Office, VLC, maybe even XBMC, or games like Warcraft/Starcraft titles, Counter strike or Quake (I was really missing the Quake3 benchmarks in TFA ;)

Connect it to a monitor and use it as a *real* PC that fits in your pocket and you can bring anywhere - how cool is that?