We’ve been excited about Nvidia’s Tegra chipset making its way to mobile handsets for as long as they’ve been showing off their prototypes – which, to be clear, is quite a while. They’ve managed to jam a beast of a computer down into a itty-bitty chip and sink the power requirements down to less than one watt, all while keeping the thing cheap. In other words, straight ridiculous computing power (games, HD video output) on a handset that lasts, as Nvidia puts it, “days and days”.
We’d heard whispers from Nvidia’s crew back at CES that this thing ought to make its mobile debut in Q4, but we had a hard time getting an official statement on the matter. Looks like it has become a sure thing since: in an interview with The Street, Nvidia’s GM of mobile Mike Rayfield fessed up that one of the big five manufacturers should launch a Tegra phone by the end of this year.
We aren’t going to take a stab at which of the big five we’re talking about here, but we can make educated guesses as to which platform it’ll run. Last we heard, Tegra played friendly with Windows CE Embedded, Windows Mobile, and Android. If you see us around, pardon the shade of blue that has conquered our faces; we’re not going to stop holding our breath until we get a Samsung-made, Android-based Tegra phone.
UPDATE: Looks like our own Peter Ha of CrunchGear nailed out this information in an interview with Nvidia last week. Not only that, but he took it one step further, getting pricing/carrier information; expect Tegra phones to launch in Q4 on AT&T/T-Mobile for right around the $199 price point.
I would love to see Tregra in smartphones. If what we’ve heard about the Zune HD, the good battery life and HD video capability, then I’m all for smartphones getting these chips. It would make video recording and browsing the internet much better. I could picture these on the iPhones in the future. I guess the Zune HD will be the test subject.
http://ziggytek.com/
Sounds really good for the future of graphics on cell phones.
Q409? :)
4th quarter 2009
With other words, in the end of 2009 :)
Some of the claims for Tegra are pretty exciting , and not totally believable. Here
they talk about 25 days playing music on a single charge.
http://www.notascoolasitseems.com/review/what-tegra-next-gen-pmps-and-smart-phonesIf your not sure what Tegra is , or what its capable of there’s a good write up here
My guess is they will release a Zune phone, but after reading about the zune HD I am not that excited.
Probably the HTC Superstar. Wasn’t their a leaked spreadsheet of HTC’s upcoming devices before and it shows the nVidia APX chipset? http://www.cellphone-reviews.co.uk/2009/03/htc-superstar-htcs-answer-to-samsung.html of course, it’s just a hunch.
I think its going to be Samsung as mentioned in many articles now
http://future-mobilez.blogspot.com/2009/07/samsung-working-on-tegra-phone.html