Update: After speaking with our very own Matt Booth, he brought up a very good point that may prove some of this information as inaccurate. Samsung would be extremely unlikely to use a Texas Instruments SoC in favour of their own Exynos SoC. The main differences are, the clock speed and GPU used. The OMAP4460 uses a 1.5GHz Dual-Core ARM Cortex-A9 with a PowerVR SGX540 GPU. The Exynos is a 1.2GHz Dual-Core ARM Cortex-A9 but coupled with the Mali-400 MP GPU. These are almost the same, as well as both supporting ARM’s SIMD engine (Media Processing Engine), which is known to have significant performance advantages over Nvidia’s Tegra 2. Did you stick with me there?
According to information given to Boy Genius Report and following on from previous reports about the Nexus 4G, it does seem as though Samsung are the likely manufacturers for the next Google Nexus phone, codenamed Prime. It is said to be the first handset to pack Google’s latest announced version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich. The so called “Super Phone” is said to pack an insane 720P HD display, dubbed “Super AMOLED HD” which was reported previously, pushing the handsets resolution up to 1280×720. Also confirmed was the processor, that being the TI OMAP4460, the same SoC used in the new ARCHOS 80 G9 and 101 G9 Honeycomb tablets announced last week. Want to read into it a little more? hit the break
If all this rumour/speculation or even evidence is true, then release should be sometime around September. It lines up with other reports that Samsung is readying a handset that will not use the “Galaxy” moniker and will be released in time to compete with the new iPhone, also rumoured to be released in September. It also fits with the availability time for the OMAP4460 SoC, which is slated for Q3. It would make sense for this “Super Phone” to both be released in the timeframe for reasons already covered but also to be a Nexus handset and not part of the Galaxy range, especially considering Samsung have just released their new flagship, the Galaxy S II. Samsung have been very good at not releasing handsets into the market that directly compete with existing handsets they have in a lineup. Releasing a Nexus handset would allow that to happen without causing too much issue.
