Powerful S60 phones and Maemo tablet coming to markets this year
The new Samsung i8910 is coming to stores at summer. You can see a review at allaboutsymbian. Samsung i8910 will be S60 5.0 based device with capacitive touch screen and OMAP3 chipset. The OMAP3 chipset is very powerful platform with OpenGL ES 2.0 and ARM cortex processor. It will probably be a lot faster than iphone. Also a new Maemo device with OMAP3 is coming, take a look at Maemo roadmap.
Long waited Nokia N97 is also coming to markets at summer, but there is no information about the CPU inside the phone. Nokia 5630 XM will have 600MHz ARM processor, so that’s also very interesting release. Unfortunately the 5630 has a small screen, so I’m really not eager to buy it. I really hope that the Nokia N97 has better processor than 5800 xpress music, so I could run AntSnes with better performance. The Nokia N97 style full qwerty keypad + OMAP3 platform would be the dream phone for gaming and emulation. The touch screen( even capacitive) isn’t so well suited for emulators, since the player want’s to use more than 1, or 2 (with capasite touch) buttons at same time.
Update: The Nokia N97 will have ARM11 with only 437Mhz clock rate. There is also no sign about Opengl ES accelerated 3D graphics. I think that it should be in the speks close to the processor like it was for example with N95. I’m so disappointed. The N97 will be dissapointment for all gamers. It just doesn’t have the juice that phones should have at year 2009. How long we’ll have to wait for 5th edition device with keyboard, fast processor and 3d acceleration. Now the Samsung’s i8910 looks a lot more appealing. I hope that the prize will go down fast.
Update: Nokia has also announced Nokia E52, which is a S60 3.2 phone with 600MHz ARM11 processor. The E52 will also be quite cheap, around 245 euros in Europe. It’s kind of hard to decide which phone to buy next, when there are cheap and powerfull phones with old S60 3.2 and weaker phones with new S60 5.x wiht homescreen etc.
I think that the new Samsung i8910 could emulate even ps1 pretty well. See what ZodTTD did with Pandora, which is also OMAP3 based device. ZodTTD already ported the psx4all to the iphone, and I think it could probably be ported to Opengl ES 2.0 enabled S60 device, like Samsung i8910. The psx4all would be very interesting project to port, when new phones arrive.
It would also be very interesting to run AntSnes with faster phone, and newest Snes9x sources. The current version of AntSnes is based on older Snes9x branch + ASM optimizations made by various GP32 developers, so it has some bugs on it. It’s hard to fix those bugs, without loosing performance.
I’m also waiting for better and faster QT port to S60. I have already started the QT development with N810 Maemo platform, and now I’m waiting for official S60 release. The next maemo device will have QT and OpenGL ES 2.0, which will also be in Samsung i8910 phone, so we should be able to compile same application to Maemo and S60 phones. The QT speed shoudn’t be an issue with OpenGL ES, since the QT is used only to get a surface to draw for Opengl ES 2.0. I’m not going to spend 999 euros for new Samsung i8910 phone, but I could buy the new Maemo internet tablet, if the prize is reasonable.