HTC Announces Desire 510: First 64-bit Android Phone

While normally one might expect high end phones to get the latest and greatest features first, this time we see a bit of a surprising reversal. The Desire 510 is HTC’s first 64-bit phone, and the first announced device with Snapdragon 410. For those that aren’t familiar with Snapdragon 410, it has four Cortex A53 CPU cores running at 1.2 GHz, along with an Adreno 306 GPU which suggests that it is a mild modification of the current Adreno 305 GPU that we see in the Snapdragon 400. Overall, this should make for a quite fast SoC compared to Snapdragon 400, as Anand has covered in the Snapdragon 410 launch announcement.

While it may seem strange that ARMv8 on Android phones is first to appear on a budget smartphone, it’s quite easy to understand how this happened. Looking at Qualcomm’s roadmap, the Snapdragon 810/MSM8994 is the first high-end SoC that will ship with ARMv8, and is built on a 20nm process. As 20nm from both Samsung and TSMC have just begun appearing in shipping chips, the process yield and production capacity isn’t nearly as mature as 28nm LP, which is old news by now.

At any rate, outside of the SoC the Desire 510 is a relatively standard budget phone. As this phone ships with Android 4.4 it’s likely that it is running in AArch32 mode only, with AArch64 coming with Android L. The display is a 4.7″ size, with FWVGA resolution (854×480) which makes for a rather low 208 DPI. This will be the cheapest LTE phone in HTC’s product line, and also has support for a Dot View case. I’ve included the rest of the specs below, but for the most part the key point of interest is the SoC.

The only additional comment I have to make is that there is no 5 GHz WiFi. This is probably a WCN3620 part like the Moto G. While there’s no word on pricing, HTC will have to price this near the price of the Moto G for it to be reasonably competitive. The Desire 510 should find its way to Europe, Asia, and the United States.

Google’s News & Weather App Updated to Version 2.0

Today Google has rolled out an unexpected update to an app that seemed long forgotten. It’s the News & Weather application that comes on Android phones running software maintained by Google like Nexus and Google Play Edition devices. The big change with the update is a complete design overhaul that implements Google’s Material Design principles. The app previously sported a design that was like a relic from the distant past, with an interface that seemed like a mixture between Android Gingerbread design and some parts of Google’s original Holo design from Android Ice Cream Sandwich. There was heavy use of black, with horizontal scrolling sections and gradients throughout.

Old News & Weather on the left, new on the right.

The new design is like a breath of fresh air. I had not even used the old app to change the temperature units from Fahrenheit to Centigrade because the design was so outdated that I looked to other apps to get weather and news information. The weather images had also not been updated to support very high resolution devices in the 400+ ppi range, and looked quite blurry. The new design does away with the black color scheme and features information displayed on white cards with high resolution weather images. The tabs at the top have also been removed, and all weather and news information is displayed in a single vertically scrolling list. Specific news topics can be accessed by the navigation pane that slides in from the left. Information about temperature and precipitation trends can be revealed by tapping the downward arrow on the weather card.

Old News & Weather widgets on the left, new on the right.

The widgets for the app also receive a makeover. The app maintains the options for news + weather, news only, and weather only, with the weather only widget being changed to display the forcast for the coming days rather than just the current weather. The widgets also have a semi-transparent border around them, which may be another element in Google’s new design language.

News & Weather 2.0 is out on Google Play now. Like all of Google’s updates, it may take some time before your device receives it.