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Sony Announces the Xperia E4
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Sony Announces the Xperia E4

Sony has two fairly well defined lines of smartphones. Their Xperia Z smartphones and tablets represent their flagship Android devices, while their Xperia E line targets a more budget oriented market. Sony launched their Xperia E3 in September of last year, around the same time as the announcement of the Xperia Z3. Now, not even six months later, Sony is announcing the successor to the Xperia E3, the E4. From a purely aesthetic point of view, the Xperia E4 is larger and thicker than the E3, but has significantly smaller bezels surround the display. This means that the size of the device does not increase as much as one would expect from a shift to a 5″ display from a 4.5″ one. Moving past aesthetics, the specifications of the Xperia E4 have been laid out below.

Sony Xperia E4
SoC MediaTek MT6582 1.3GHz 4 x Cortex-A7 + Mali-400MP2
Memory and Storage 8GB NAND + MicroSDXC, 1GB RAM
Display 5″ qHD (960×540) IPS LCD
Cellular Connectivity 2G / 3G (21.1Mbps HSPA+)
Dimensions 137 x 74.6 x 10.5 mm, 144g
Camera 5 MP Rear Facing, 2MP Front Facing
Battery 2300 mAh
Other Connectivity 802.11 b/g/n + BT 4.1, USB2.0, GPS/GNSS
SIM Size MicroSIM (Dual SIM SKU available)
Operating System Android 4.4.4 KitKat

As you can see, the specifications of the Xperia E4 are strictly in the lower end of the mid-range. Unlike the Xperia E3 where Sony opted to use a Snapdragon 400 SoC in their mid-range phone, Sony has used MediaTek’s MT6582 in the Xperia E4. MT6582 is a quad core Cortex-A7 part with a peak frequency of 1.3GHz paired with ARM’s Mali-400MP2 GPU. Looking beyond the SoC, the other internal specifications of the Xperia E4 include 1GB of RAM, 8GB of NAND with MicroSD support, and a 2300mAh battery. Some of these specifications may be outclassed by other smartphones at the higher end of the mid-range segment, and so pricing will definitely be a key factor in making the Xperia E4 appealing to potential buyers.

On the back of the device we have a 5MP camera, and on the front we have a 2MP camera. The front is also home to a 5″ 960×540 IPS display. Sony’s effort to put in an IPS panel is definitely appreciated, but in 2015 a display with a pixel density of 220pi may be a hard sell when there’s competition from devices like the Motorola Moto G with smaller display sizes and higher resolution. However, this again comes down to pricing. If Sony prices the Xperia E4 accordingly, then they should have no trouble making sales in their target market.

On the connectivity side, there’s no LTE support to be seen. Network speeds max out at 21.1Mbps downstream and 5.76Mbps upstream on HSPA. There is support for Bluetooth 4.1, but WiFi connectivity is limited to 2.4GHz 802.11n. Like many mid-range devices, the Xperia E4 will come in a dual-SIM variant in certain markets where that feature is desired.

The Xperia E4 will be launching later this month in certain markets. There’s currently no word on pricing or availability in North America.

OCZ Releases Important Firmware Updates for ARC 100 & Radeon R7 SSDs
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OCZ Releases Important Firmware Updates for ARC 100 & Radeon R7 SSDs

A little less than two weeks ago OCZ released mandatory firmware updates for the ARC 100 and Radeon R7 SSDs, so I figured I would give the owners a heads up along with a more detailed explanation of the contents of the update. 

The first and only observed issue is related to DRAM corruption. In the old firmware a DRAM refresh could happen during a what is called the training period, which is the duration of DRAM timing calibration during the controller power on. That lead to potential DRAM corruption that could jeopardize the drive’s reliability, so the new firmware simply moves the DRAM refresh outside of the training period. This is a rather corner case issue and only applied to the 480GB ARC 100 and Radeon R7, but it’s an important fix nevertheless.

The second fix in the new firmware is improved robustness of uncorrectable error handling. This is a fruit of OCZ’s robustness testing and improves the firmware recovery in worst case scenarios. 

The third and final fix improves read-retry on bad block list, which enhances the security of the bad block list. As the list is stored in NAND like any other data, it’s susceptible to the standard NAND failures, so the update puts improvements in place in case the NAND blocks storing the bad block list went bad and required read-retry routines. This is more of a theoretical “what if” scenario, but as always any and all reliability improvements are welcome. 

Basically, the error handling and bad block list enhancements were engineered for the upcoming Vector 180 and are now making their way into the existing Barefoot 3 based SSDs. Neither of them are related to any known issues, but are simply a part of OCZ’s continuous firmware development and support. The Vertex 460A will also be getting the update with more robust error handling in the near future.

The update carries a version number 1.01 and is available on OCZ’s website.

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Mushkin Reactor 1TB SSD Review

Silicon Motion has practically become the new SandForce. Almost every tier three manufacturer (i.e. one with no controller/firmware IP or NAND fab) has released an SM2246EN based drive in the past ten months and recently Silicon Motion scored two major tier one partners (namely Micron/Crucial and SanDisk) as well. To be honest, this hasn’t come as a surprise because the SM2246EN is a really solid controller with good performance and more importantly it’s been mostly issue free (which is something that cannot be said about SandForce). Mushkin’s Reactor combines the SM2246EN with Micron’s latest 128Gbit 16nm MLC NAND, and this is actually the first time we’ve encountered a non-Micron/Crucial SSD with Micron’s 16nm NAND. Read on to find out how the SM2246EN performs with Micron’s latest NAND!