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Yes­ter­day Toshiba announced their TG01 prod­uct, a Win­dows­Mo­bile 6.1 smartphone.

Toshiba TG01

Let’s have a look at the basic specs:

• 4.1 inches WVGA touch­screen color display
• GSM, HSDPA, WiFi, GPS
• MicroS­DHC slot up to 32Gb
• 720p HD Video Playback

Fine, you will say, why are you so excited about this?

Well, the answer is: I def­i­nitely think that some­thing is going to change in the mobile mar­ket after the release of this device.

The first thing, and the most impor­tant thing, is that this device is based on the new Snap­dragon QSD2850 chipset from Qualcomm.

I have been work­ing very closely with Qual­comm in the past years, they pro­vide us with the chipsets for most of our local projects, and I have always been impressed by these guys. They have a vision and they can def­i­nitely exe­cute on promise.

I first heard about Snap­dragon about 15 months ago and I was impressed by the vision that Qual­comm had on the sub­ject and by the power of the chipset itself. The basic idea behing Snap­dragon is to build a new and effi­cient proces­sor core with best of class 3G connectivity.

It is inter­est­ing to quote what Qual­comm writes on their web­site about Snap­dragon:

Com­bine a 1GHz proces­sor core, our sixth gen­er­a­tion DSP and 3G con­nec­tiv­ity with ultra-​low power con­sump­tion to cre­ate new mobile devices with the per­for­mance to rev­o­lu­tion­ize the world of mobile com­put­ing. The Qual­comm Snap­dragon plat­form empow­ers a new gen­er­a­tion of Pock­etable Com­put­ing Devices (PCDs) and Mobile Com­put­ing Devices (MCDs) that deliver real-​time ubiq­ui­tous com­mu­ni­ca­tion, high per­for­mance mul­ti­me­dia, location-​aware con­tent, full Inter­net brows­ing and pro­duc­tiv­ity appli­ca­tions, all with the low­est lev­els of power con­sump­tion for all-​day bat­tery life.

When you deal with Qual­comm you know that this is not only mar­ket­ing stuff. They are talk­ing about real products.

Let’s have a look at the Snap­dragon specs:

• 1GHz CPU
• 600MHz DSP
• Sup­port for Linux® and Win­dows Mobile®
• WWAN, Wi-​Fi and Blue­tooth connectivity
• Seventh-​generation gpsOne® engine for Standalone-​GPS and Assisted-​GPS modes, as well as gpsOneX­TRA™ Assistance
• High def­i­n­i­tion video decode (720P)
• 3D graph­ics with up to 22M triangles/​sec and 133M 3D pixels/​sec
• High res­o­lu­tion XGA dis­play support
• 12-​megapixel camera
• Sup­port for mul­ti­ple video codecs
• Audio codecs: (AAC+, eAAC+, AMR, FR, EFR, HR, WB-​AMR, G.729a, G.711 , AAC stereo encode)
• Sup­port for Broad­cast TV (Medi­aFLO™, DVB-​H and ISDB-​T)
• Fully tested, highly-​integrated solu­tion includ­ing base­band, soft­ware, RF, PMIC, Blue­tooth, Broad­cast & Wi-​Fi

They are def­i­nitely impressive.

You will prob­a­bly say that this specs are not much dif­fer­ent from any Intel Atom proces­sor on the market.

That is true but there are a few things that make Snap­dragon absolutely stunning:

• Snap­dragon has 3G, HSDPA and WiFi con­nec­tiv­ity on board.
• A-​GPS is part of the core.
• Broad­cast TV Support.
• A high effi­ciency DSP proces­sor in the core.
• Sup­port for up to XGA display
• An extremely low power consumption

This kind of approach paves the way for smaller devices since device man­u­fac­turer will not have the need to put on the board addi­tional chips for advanced func­tion­al­ity. Almost every­thing you can dream as a cus­tomer is already in there.

As a direct con­se­quence, price will be lower since the BOM will have less components.

The low power con­sump­tion will, finally, make these kind of devices really usable for more than a day. I had the oppor­tu­nity to see a demo of the chipset and, even if I can­not dis­close the real data, I can say that it really con­sumes a lot less com­pared to its near­est competitors.

Less power also means less heat to dis­si­pate. This will lead to bet­ter elec­tronic design and, finally, more usable devices.

Dur­ing the demo I saw we had this ref­er­ence design play­ing a high def­i­n­i­tion 720p video. I was asked to put my fin­ger on the Snap­dragon chipset. Well, if you ever tried to do that on a stan­dard micro­proces­sor you can rest sure that you will have left your fin­ger­print on the chip due to heat. Snap­dragon was only warm and not hot at all.

Kudos to both Toshiba and Qualcomm.

In the recent past I had some con­cerns about Mobile Inter­net Devices or Pock­etable Com­put­ing Devices as Qual­comm calls them. I was think­ing that they were too close to a mobile phone and too far from a net­book to be suc­cess­full.
I have changed my mind. With this new kind of archi­tec­ture you may really bring the power of a net­book in the form fac­tor of a mobile phone.

As of today the Snap­dragon chipset will sup­port Win­dows Mobile and Linux even if Qual­comm already announced that will have also Android on the list of sup­ported Oper­at­ing Systems.

Sure, if the Toshiba TG01 was an Android smart­phone that would have been per­fect. We will wait and see.

One last word on the TG01. As you have read it is a Win­dows Mobile 6.1 device. On top of the stan­dard Win­dows Mobile UI Toshiba has devel­oped their own UI just like we have seen on HTC devices. This is a great choice but, gain, I think it is time for Microsoft to pro­vide its OEMs with some­thing more appealing.

Finally I would say that this is the first real com­peti­tor to the Apple iPhone.. if it only was Android…

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