$310 Xiaomi Phone: 1.5GHz dual-core,1G RAM,4GB ROM,480x854 4',MIUI+Android2.3.5 | Hacker News Reader

$310 Xiaomi Phone: 1.5GHz dual-core,1G RAM,4GB ROM,480x854 4',MIUI+Android2.3.5

engadget.com

60 pointsest28 comments

So this is already more powerful in all aspects over the first generation netbooks.

At the end of this decade will cellphones be as powerful as today's average integrated desktop computer?

Can you imagine a server rack of cellphone sized computers (the drives will all be external SSD by then of course).

A single-core Atom will still beat these in single threaded performance. Multi-threaded performance is a different story, but I would still not expect an outright win for these Snapdragons. However, Adreno 220 is clearly superior to the GMA 950 crap bundled with most Atoms.

I wouldn't be too sure of that. And these were BEFORE a 1.5ghz ARM chip.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_pEfSMUbljUA/S9yFTQn2xoI/AAAAAAAAAD...

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_pEfSMUbljUA/TIJceUBPyCI/AAAAAAAAAE...

Coremark isn't a good benchmark. I have been benchmarking Snapdragons and Atoms myself on a variety of integer and floating point codes. I will publish them sometime soon but Atom-based netbooks came ahead of the Snapdragon based systems I had access to. I suspect this is partially because you have more memory bandwidth available in netbooks compared to mobile devices.

edit: Also, I do expect results to change quite a bit when the Krait architecture comes into play for Qualcomm.

Ah interesting - I look forward to your benchmarks!

might be that cellphones will be as powerful as todays computers by the end of the decade, but the average computer will also have moved forward alot so its still unlikely you will see racks of cellphone sized servers. But for private use if they are enough for what you need, maybe.

While not exactly cellphone-sized, blade servers are quite small compared to conventional servers. I would be surprised if server manufacturers aren't keeping a keen eye on ARM CPUs.

Dells Fortuna[1] concept server is a nice example of an extreme end of blade servers, and it's already few years old. "six servers per rack unit (U) or 252 servers in a 42U rack."

[1] http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/direct2dell/b/direct...

It's not a 310$ phone unless I can actually buy it.

I googled for 10 minutes to work out how to pre order this phone, a website, something, anything. It's all just stuff about the MIUI ROM or news about this phone.

"will be available for pre-order on August 29th for October delivery"

Maybe the websites will come up by then.

Ah, googling for just the company name returns a more relevant result. But not in a language I can understand :(

translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_m&sl=auto&tl=en&twu=1&u=http://product.pconline.com.cn/mobile/miui/473461_detail.htm...

here is a site to pre order this phone

When they say "4gb ROM", do they literally mean 4gb of crapware burnt in? (Which might help explain the low cost) Or is it perhaps supposed to say flash.

ROM = Read Only Memory, so yes they do mean "flash" as you understand it.

So flash as I understand it, generally refers to memory that can be written many times, whereas ROM specifically refers to memory that is "written" once (often before leaving the factory) and that's it. I'm slightly perplexed by your reply. :)

Didn't realize until after posting that Android needs a writeable FS, so the article was clearly wrong.

I wish I could get myself together to put some trust in telecom equipment from PRC-based companies, but I just can't. The phone seems like an awesome piece of hardware.

Wasn't there some thing about Lenovo laptops having crazy spy chips in them, or was that just silly CIA psyops propaganda?

The CIA hardly need exert itself to create crazy, unfounded rumors on the internet.

Looks like Chinese copy of what Apple did in 2006, despite the technical specs.

Imitation is the highest form of flattery, and the specifications seem to be almost the best around.

At that price-point, some thing like the battery life might not be very good, especially with such a high-clocked processor, but it seems to be a quite reasonable design from the pictures, not counting the buttons, I prefer hardware buttons.

I don't own an Android phone right now, but I am definitely considering buying a Xiaomi Phone, and if you can actually import it at that price, well, then it is competing with phones like the Wildfire S. Which may make it quite a nice high-end phone popular with geeks and developers, befriending those groups is always important.

I would very much recommend waiting for reviews to show whether that potential results in a good phone.

Phone specs have a way of not making much difference in the end.

Cheap phones might have low-end displays too. The quality of a display is hard to quantify as numbers (unlike the CPU, memory, etc) so it's easy to leave that out from your marketing material.

They claim to have a huge 1930mAh battery (http://www.gadgetsbing.com/2011/08/first-chinese-phone-with-...) and that the display is a Sharp 480 x 854 LCD, but there might be many models.

> Looks like Chinese copy of what Apple did in 2006, despite the technical specs.

The first iPhone was unveiled by Apple CEO Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007.

Thanks, but I don't see how that adds or takes away from "did in 2006", unless of course you state that the phone was built during first 9 days of 2007 before going public.

In the same way that the iPhone was an Apple copy of what Samsung and HTC did in 2005. It's the despite that counts.

Very interested to see what htc and samsung did that apple copied? I'm talking about presentation style and phone visuals, not that it's "a phone, someone did a phone before, so they're copying a phone".

Touchscreen-oriented phone that appeared mostly as a large touchscreen with a couple of buttons around the periphery. You can add LG to that list, too.

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