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Hails "amazing job" of new SE handset
Mobile games developer Fishlabs has given Sony Ericsson a welcome boost, by praising the gaming capabilities of its new Satio smartphone and saying it's more powerful than the iPhone 3GS.
"The Satio features the same 3D-Chip PowerVR SGX as the iPhone 3GS running Symbian on an even more powerful CPU ARM11 clocked at 600MHz," blogs Fishlabs boss Michael Schade.
"Furthermore, it comes with plenty of memory and with a bigger display than the iPhone featuring 640 x 360 pixels resolution."
However, specs aren't everything. Schade also praises the way Sony Ericsson has made the Satio's functionality available to developers, reporting that Fishlabs has ported its iPhone game Rally Master Pro to the device.
"Thanks to the better screen resolution of Satio, it is stunning how much more details can be rendered in the scene," he writes.
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Does this mean Satio will be a big hit for mobile developers? Not necessarily. The handset is only part of the story - will consumers find it easy to discover rich games like Rally Master Pro on Sony Ericsson's app store?
For that matter, will they be able to find the Satio? It's currently not being sold in several UK retailers due to unspecified software issues.
Even so, at a time when iPhone is consuming much of the attention in the mobile games industry, Fishlabs' latest blog post shows some developers haven't given up on Symbian - and its handset makers - just yet.
Your quotes are correct, but the headline is misleading. I read through Schade's blog to see if further statements are made about the supposed superiority of Saito to iPhone and they just aren't there. The ONLY claim of superiority was that the Saito had a larger screen resolution so that more details were seen. You left out the quotations describing the limitations of porting to the Saito that made Fishlabs' games run "almost" as well, even on nearly identical hardware. Hardly a cause for claiming it "beats iPhone 3GS in gaiming." The actual blog reveals that there is a better case for claiming the reverse. S'cuse me, your agenda is showing!
Better luck next time;-)
Dan
You would expect better from a supposed expert. The original Iphone used an Arm11 processor. The 3GS is a Cortex A8 which is about twice as fast as an ARM11 at the same clock speed due to architectural changes. The Cortex-A8 uses a superscalar (first for an ARM core), dual-issue, in-order execution pipeline. The pipeline, unusually long, comprises a 13-stage main pipeline and a 10-stage NEON pipeline for data-processing execution. In contrast, ARM11's pipeline has only 8 stages. Which hardware does Satio™ use?
The Sony Ericsson Satio™ uses the OMAP3430 processor from Texas Instruments which includes a POWERVR SGX Family Graphics accelerator IP block licensed from Imagination Technologies.
As far as memory goes it has 256MB of RAM the same as the Iphone 3GS so the bottomline is this combination is in the same class of processors as the Iphone, the larger screen actually will slow down games slightly since he have to fill more pixels. To say it is more powerful is bunk unless you show me the benchmarks to prove it.
I don't doubt that Sony out does the iphone models visual software quality in a much cheaper system. Quality is usually the high-side of Sony. Sony Ericsson k750i, the old and simple cell phone obliterated the Nokia Gaming Cell. Same goes here, you know. iphone is a masterful device but also that its made from the ground up for visual excellence and is quite costly at that. What we also know is that since Sony's exclusive deals with IMGTec around their graphic devices, the same equipment comes into their hands without effort and with little they produce much, you can see the history as they are hardware guys themselves.
According to id's Carmack (Doom creator), iphone's GPU is more powerful than Dreamcast's and heads and shoulders above PSP's... but we have seen how Sony gets performance out of PSP. Be sure to have Satio software far surpassing iphone's and better equipment in parallel to PVR chip is most optimizingly be used in SE's much cheaper device.
While Carmack may have made the statement, he's not quite right. The performance from the GPU of the iPhone is sub-par to that of the PSP and the Saito. It exists in several other devices that struggle with 3D rendering (Exact same chip in the SE Xperia X1 and X2, HTC Hero, Diamond Touch 2 and others). Where Apple makes the difference is in the OS, not the hardware. Apple has a long history of writing for a RISC environment, and they control their environment like a militant dictator. I have seen 3 phones side by side, my Xperia X1, my friends Saito and another friends iPhone (3GS), the Saito has a smoother lag free OS than the iPhone, even my X1 has smoother transitions when in 2D (not in 3D), but the iPhone surpasses in the ease of access to it's app store. Performance for 3D games is pretty close in all 3, as you would expect. None of their hardware specifications are that far off, Yes the Saito uses a different CPU, but it's ARM8 based architecture where the iPhone (and the other devices mentioned) use a Qualcomm Q7200A, which features a basic 3D renderer from ATi (imageon GPU).
Sorry, but these are the facts. Neither phone is significantly greater hardware wise than the other, just different. It's because of the porting that they were not able to achieve the same performance. Same reason why games developed for the XBOX 360 don't run as well on the PS3, and vice versa. I have the white papers on both phones and if necessary I can copy/paste the entire thing here ;)
