Imagine carrying a full desktop computer in your pocket. We're not talking about that crippled Webtop crap from Motorola, either. We're talking about a real desktop OS built in to your smartphone. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, wants to make that happen. Soon.

Ubuntu for Android is something that we've only dreamed about up to this point - one device to rule them all, if you will. In your pocket, it's an Android-powered smartphone. Not just any smartphone, either - it's your smartphone. Pull it out and drop it in a docking station, though, and it becomes a full workstation powered by Ubuntu, complete with monitor and keyboard. Sounds incredible, right?

Canonical seems to have covered all the bases here, too; since the Android kernel is based on the Linux kernel, it's fully compatible with Ubuntu. This means that, thanks to some software tweaks built into Ubuntu for Android, you still have access to all of your phone's goodies, including SMS messages and phone calls.

What kind of horsepower would it take to run something like this, though? Honestly, not that much. In fact, most multi-core phones with at least 512MB of RAM, HDMI, and USB should be able to handle what Canonical is proposing.
At this point, Canonical is still calling out to manufacturers and carriers to hop on board so they can start integrating Ubuntu for Android into handsets, so it's hard to say when we'll actually see this in the consumer market. Canonical is, however, planning to demo Ubuntu for Android at next week's Mobile World Congress convention in Barcelona, so hopefully that will spark more interest.
For more information on Ubuntu for Android, go here. If this is something that you would like to see implemented in your favorite manufacturer's future offerings, make sure to let them know!

The latest version of Google's operating system is reportedly going to play nice with Motorola's "WebTop" platform.

If you don't know what that is, perhaps you've heard of the Motorola Atrix phone. It allows users to dock the phone into a special laptop attachment, and the phone essentially becomes the motherboard for the laptop.

The phone-powered laptop uses a proprietary Motorola interface, which it has called WebTop, but it may opt to use the Jelly Bean interface for the future of these laptop-enabled smartphones.

We still don't know much about Jelly Bean, also known as Android 5.0, but it may be coming out sooner than expected, even though there have been problems with the Android 4.0 rollout process.

Both the Nexus S phone and the Transformer Prime tablet issued upgrades, only to have users complain that their device started freezing or crashing uncontrollably. As a result, manufacturers have become increasingly tepid about their ICS rollout plans.

Motorola announced this week that it would not be updating most of its devices until the second quarter of 2012. And now, Digitimes is reporting that according to overseas component suppliers, Android 5.0, known as Jelly Bean, is already making its way into discussions.

The site reports that Jelly Bean may make its debut in the second quarter of 2012 as well, completely overshadowing the Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade process.

Interestingly, though, Digitimes notes that Android 5.0 has its eye on tablets as well as potentially notebook and netbook computers. Google wants to make a splash in the market where both Microsoft and Apple are capturing a lot of attention with their respective operating system updates this year.

With a problematic Android 4.0 rollout, manufacturers are understandably uneasy about Android 5.0. We all knew Android was growing too big too fast, and it looks like the steam train has finally hit a roadblock.

To put your i727 Skyrocket phone in download mode. (This is typically done to flash back to stock if you bricked your phone or are getting excessive errors)
1 ) Turn your phone off. Power it off. Set your phone down.
2 ) Take your USB cable and plug it into the computer/laptop ONLY.
3 ) This requires both hands. Pick up your phone and hold down the volume up and down at the same time then plug in the USB to your phone with the other hand.
4 ) Keep holding the volume up and down buttons. The phone will vibrate, still hand and when you see Download mode. Let go.

The super short recap is this: Krait is the name of Qualcomm's new out of order ARMv7-A compatible CPU architecture (previous generations of Snapdragon used Scorpion) which is designed for TSMC's 28nm process. Inside MSM8960 are two Krait cores running at up to 1.5 GHz, Adreno 225 graphics, improved ISP and Qualcomm's new baseband with support for nearly every air interface out there.

Even if you're not comparing to Qualcomm's previous architecture, Krait maintains the same low level advantage over any other ARM Cortex A9 based design (NVIDIA Tegra 2/3, TI OMAP 4, Apple A5). Clock speeds are up with only a small increase in pipeline depth. The combination of these two factors alone should result in significant performance improvements for even single threaded applications. If you want to abstract by one more level: Krait will be faster regardless of application, regardless of usage model. You're looking at a generational gap in architecture here, not simply a clock bump.




Occasionally we'll see performance numbers that just make us laugh at their absurdity. Krait's Linpack performance is no exception. The performance advantage here is insane. The MSM8960 is able to deliver more than twice the performance of any currently shipping SoC. The gains are likely due in no small part to improvements in Krait's cache/memory controller. Krait can also issue multi-issue FP instructions, A9 class architectures can apparenty only dual-issue integer instructions.




Krait and the MSM8960 are 20 - 35% faster than the dual-core Cortex A9s used in Samsung's Galaxy Nexus.



On the CPU centric tests Basemark OS is showing anywhere from a 20% - 80% increase in performance over the 1.5 GHz APQ8060 based HTC Rezound. IO performance is also tangibly improved although that could be a function of NAND performance rather than the SoC specifically.

These results as a whole simply quantify what we've felt during our use of the MSM8960 MDP: this is the absolute smoothest we've ever seen Ice Cream Sandwich run.

The MSM8960 is an unusual member of the Krait family in that it doesn't use an Adreno 3xx GPU. In order to get the SoC out quickly, Qualcomm paired the two Krait cores in the 8960 with a tried and true GPU design: the Adreno 225. Adreno 225 itself hasn't been used in any prior Qualcomm SoC, but it is very closely related to the Adreno 220 used in the Snapdragon S3 that we've seen in a number of recent handsets.

Compared to Adreno 220, 225 primarily adds support for Direct3D 9_3 (which includes features like multiple render targets). The resulting impact on die area is around 5% and required several months of work on Qualcomm's part.

From a compute standpoint however, Adreno 225 looks identical to Adreno 220. The big difference is thanks to the 8690's 28nm manufacturing process, Adreno 225 can now run at up to 400MHz compared to 266MHz in Adreno 220 designs. A 50% increase in GPU clock frequency combined with a doubling in memory bandwidth compared to Snapdragon S3 gives the Adreno 225 a sizable advantage over its predecessor.




It goes without saying that MSM8960 is a hugely important SoC release for Qualcomm. It's the first release with Qualcomm's new Krait CPU architecture, an entirely new cellular baseband with support for nearly every air interface, and is manufactured on TSMC's 28nm process. It says something that we're able to hold 28nm TSMC silicon in our hands in the form of the MDP, and it's only a matter of time before we start seeing Krait show up in devices in 2012.

We've gone over basically all of the benchmarks available to us on Android right now, and yet subjective performance impressions are still valuable. The MDP8960 is the absolute fastest we've seen Ice Cream Sandwich thus far - the UI is absolutely butter smooth everywhere, and web browsing in either Chrome or the stock Android Browser is also the smoothest we've seen it. There's no stutter bringing up the application switcher, or taking screenshots, two places that 4.0.3 still drops frames on the Galaxy Nexus.

Krait offers another generational leap in mobile SoC performance. The range of impact depends entirely on the workload but it's safe to say that it's noticeable. The GPU side of the equation has been improved tremendously as well, although that's mostly a function of 28nm enabling a very high clock speed for Qualcomm's Adreno 225. We are eager to see what the Adreno 3xx GPUs that will pair up with future Krait SoCs can do.

The big unknowns today are power consumption and the performance of shipping devices. While we were able to provide power numbers using Qualcomm's handy Trepn tool, we couldn't produce a reference point on older silicon. The move to 28nm and a second generation of cellular basebands has generally been heralded as being the answer to our battery life issues, particularly with LTE. It remains to be seen just how much of an improvement we'll see there. Knowing how much power MSM8960's cellular architecture uses is especially relevant when you consider that MDM9615 includes the exact same modem as MSM8960.

These initial results look extremely promising, however. Krait based devices should begin shipping sometime next quarter, the wait is almost over.