entertainment shopping: From the Editor's Desk: Gearing up for the fall silly season

Sunday, August 5, 2012

From the Editor's Desk: Gearing up for the fall silly season

Phil Nickinson

?It's been in with the "old" and out with the new for me this week. The Samsung Galaxy S3 review units are going back, and I've put my AT&T SIM back in the HTC One X. It's always a good thing when I pick up a phone after a couple months away and find myself in a familiar place -- and don't want to put the phone down. And that's been the case for me with the One X.

I've had other reason to pick up the One X again -- HTC changed the way it handles the on-screen menu function. Jerry's not crazy about it, but I think it's a decent compromise. I'm probably most in favor of on-screen buttons, like on the Galaxy Nexus or the new Motorola Atrix HD, with HTC's capacitive buttons coming in second. I'm definitely over the physical home button Samsung's still in love with. (And I don't see Sammy killing that off anytime soon.) Oh, and AnandTech got HTC to say that the change in menu options will be rolling out to other Sense-based phones. Makes, erm, sense.

Also making the rounds the past few days has been talk of an HTC One X+, with a 1.7 GHz quad-core processor. A few thoughts on that:

Argh. We're as guilty of it as anyone, but we all really need to stop using the number of cores as a major descriptor for these platforms.
Same goes for megahertz. If you can tell the difference 200 MHz makes on a reworked architecture, well, more power to you. But most people can't. It's just more mindless repeating of specs.
NVIDIA's Tegra 3 roadmap has been public for some time now. Coming up is Tegra 3+ (aka "Kai"). That'll be followed by "Wayne" and "Gray," and finally by Tegra 3 with the Icera LTE modem. This is all old (but welcome) news.

So, yeah. New stuff is coming. A lot of it, in fact.

And now, a few other thoughts. ...