The big topic going in to CES was the launch of Broadwell-U, Intel’s 14 nanometer 5th generation Core products for laptops, mini-PCs and all-in-ones, with rated TDPs of 15W and 28W and the new Generation 8 graphics onboard. Into the mini-PC…
Even though I follow the air cooling market, I perhaps do not follow it in extreme detail, but a couple of years back we saw a new form of cooling being engineered. It involved, for a lack of a better explanation, a rotating heatsink whereby the air w…
The smartphone space is not as it was a few years ago. There’s increasing competition from vendors based in countries like China and India who can put out high quality products at a very low price. In a world where vendors are squeezing them on both the high end and the low end, Samsung has been put under significant pressure to improve their mid-range devices moving into the future. We saw the beginning of this with the Galaxt A3 and A5, which had aluminum unibody designs that seemed to defy their low price point. The latest device to continue this strategy is the Galaxy A7, which is the largest and fastest device of the Galaxy A line. I’ve laid out its specs in the table below.
| Samsung Galaxy A7 | ||||||
| SoC | Exynos 5430 or Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 | |||||
| Memory and Storage | 16GB NAND + MicroSDXC, 2GB LPDDR3 | |||||
| Display | 5.5” HD SAMOLED | |||||
| Cellular Connectivity | 2G / 3G / 4G LTE (Ericsson M7450 or MDM9x25) | |||||
| Dimensions | 151 x 76.2 x 6.3 mm, 141g | |||||
| Camera | 13 MP Rear Facing, 5MP Front Facing | |||||
| Battery | 2600 mAh (9.88 Whr) | |||||
| Other Connectivity | 802.11 a/b/g/n + BT 4.0, USB2.0, GPS/GNSS, NFC | |||||
| SIM Size | Nano SIM (Dual SIM SKU available) | |||||
| Operating System | Android 4.4 KitKat | |||||
As you can see, the Galaxy A7 is still a mid-range smartphone like the A3 and A5. However, we get some impressive specifications for a mid-range device. The Galaxy A7 comes with one of two similar processors depending on which SKU you buy. The single-SIM LTE model comes with Samsung’s Exynos 5430 which has a 1.8GHz 4 x Cortex-A15 cluster and a 1.3GHz 4 x Cortex-A7 cluster. This model uses Ericsson’s M7450 Cat4 LTE modem. The dual-SIM LTE/3G model uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 615 MSM9839 which has a 1.5GHz 4 x Cortex-A53 cluster and a 1.0GHz 4 x Cortex-A53 cluster.
Beyond the SoC, we see what looks to be standard specs for a 2015 mid-range phone. The Galaxy A7 is actually very similar to the Desire 826. It has a 2600mAh (9.88Wh) battery, a 13MP rear-facing camera, 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM, 16GB of NAND, and a MicroSD slot. The Galaxy A7 bests the Desire 826 with its size though. It’s smaller, lighter, and much thinner. In fact, with a thickness of only 6.3mm, it’s thinner than Apple’s flagship iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.
The one listed specification that concerns me is the display. It is described as a 5.5″ HD SAMOLED panel, and based on Samsung distinguishing between HD and FHD in previous spec sheets, it’s like that the Galaxy A7 uses a 1280×720 display. At 5.5″, this would put it at 267ppi which will have visible aliasing and PenTile artifacting. However, if it turns out to be a 1920×1080 display then this will be less of an issue, and we will have to wait until further info is released or the device is in the hands of users before we can make a definite conclusion here.
On the software side, Samsung is advertising many of its camera features such as voice or gesture activated selfie capture, and multi-window app support. Something to note is that the Galaxy A7 will ship with Android 4.4 KitKat despite 5.0 Lollipop being available. This means that the Snapdragon 615 model will have to operate in 32bit mode, at least until Samsung provides an update to Lollipop. Like the Galaxy A3 and A5, the A7 will come in white, black, and gold colors at launch. There’s currently no word on price or when the device will ship to specific markets.
When I met with Cooler Master at Computex 2014, the company at the time was discussing the fact that they had lost their focus over the past few years. A portfolio of over 2000 products was difficult to maintain, and Cooler Master had lost their roots…
Since last CES, a couple of Asustor offerings have been put under our review scanner, and we were naturally excited to meet up with them at CES 2015. Towards the middle of December, Asustor had launched the 50T and 51T series NAS models (in 2- and 4-bay varieties) based on the Bay Trail Celerons. While the 50T packs the dual-core Celeron J1800 running at 2.41 GHz, the 51T uses the quad-core J1900 at 2.0 GHz.
The affordable Haswell-based NAS units (Core i3-packing 70 series) were launched before the 50T series. The 70T series packs two network ports, but does have a PCIe expansion slot for 10G cards. The 70R rackmount series comes in two varieties, the Core i3-packing RD ones and the Xeon E3-packing RDX ones. Both of them are targeted towards enterprise users and come in 9- and 12-bay variants. The RDX variant supports ECC RAM.
As I have mentioned in our previous coverage of Asustor, the company is doing quite well in terms of hardware offerings. It is in the software department that they need to play catch-up with the QNAPs and Synologys in this market segment. Naturally, most of our focus during the CES visit was on the upcoming / newly released firmware features.
Asustor claims to be one of the first NAS vendors to support S3 sleep mode for aggressively driving down power consumption in the long run. ADM 2.3 finally brings about Windows ACL support. The mobile apps ecosystem was also shown in detail – the features are pretty standard if one is coming from a QNAP / Synology background. Asustor made specific mention of the hardware-accelerated transcoding feature in their Evansport NAS – both for offline as well as real-time operations via its mobile apps. Ideally, we would like it extended to their 70T series (using the Quick Sync engine).
The demo which pleased me the most was the QEMU front-end that is currently a package under beta-testing. Taking a cue from QNAP’s Virtualization Station feature, Asustor is developing a package to enable ADM to act as a host OS. We saw multiple flavours of Windows running on top of a Asustor 70 series NAS. The UI is a bit basic compared to Virtualization Station, but, given the beta nature, it can definitely be excused.
Asustor has always been competitive on the hardware side of things. However, by virtue of being a late entry into the market, they have perennially been in catch-up mode with respect to firmware features. That was the story from the last two CES shows, and this year was no different. That said, it is heartening to see Asustor accelerating the development on the software side, while also being quick to react to new firmware features / packages that the competition is bringing to the market. That is definitely good news for consumers in this market.