If you're not familiar with Nvidia's Tegra chip, now would be a good time to tuck that name away somewhere in your memory banks. As Noah showed us at the Nvision 2008 show, Tegra brings Hi-Def video and resource hungry UIs to the end user with plenty of power to spare, thanks to the unit's low power consumption. If the buzz is to be believed, Tegra represents a new generation of mobile devices that challenge perceived performance of current mobile computing standards.
TheStreet.com recently interviewed tech reporter James Rogers (embedded below), and he mentioned industry speculation that Nvidia's rumored alliance with one of the top-five mobile OEMs concerns Motorola or Samsung. Unwired View
reports that the general manager of Nvidia's mobile unit, Mike Rayfield, has declared that we could see a Tegra phone by the end of the year.
Android's involvement in all of this is perhaps wishful thinking at this point, but it is a lovely thought. Light weight and open operating system meets super powered G/CPU in sleek new handset? Count me in.
John Walton - Cell phone editor
John Walton is a student and writer who spends most of his free time fingerpicking an acoustic guitar and authoring biographical snippets in the third-person. He lives with his wife and their cat,...
The top 5 smartphone manufacturers are:
Nokia, RIM, Apple, HTC and Fujitsu..... So, the phone in this article is either the HTC Superstar running Windows Mobile 6.5, powered by an APX chip from Nvidia (Tegra).... or (wishingful thinking ahead) it's the G2.
Here's the article with the leaked HTC Superstar specs:
http://www.unwiredview.com/2009/03/20/htc-star-and-htc-superstar-to-come-with-windows-mobile-65/
So if this is the case, I'd say the leak contained no news, except for the fact we won't be seeing a Tegra Android for a while now.
Which means that my quest for a qwerty Tegra Android phone has been further extended to God knows when in 2010... Summer/Fall 2010? Very likely...
Also, we know that Tegra needs OpenGL ES 2.0 support. Donut won't have it, and Eclair will be the first version of Android to support it. With Donut arriving around September/October, It's fair not to expect Eclair before February 2010, when the HTC Tegra Android phone will be demoed at the MWC, if we're lucky.
By then, Tegra's already not-so-new ARM processor will definitely be considered "aged".... and another wait will begin...
It really bummed me out... I sooo wanted a qwerty G2 with Tegra inside.