Lava Xolo X900 Review - The First Intel Medfield Phone
by Brian Klug on April 25, 2012 6:00 AM ESTDisplay
I mentioned earlier that it’s interesting that Qualcomm, Intel, and others have identified and gone with WSVGA (1024x600) for their reference designs at around 4“. In the case of the FFRD/X900, it’s 4.03” WSVGA TFT-LCD. That works out to 295 PPI and looks extremely attractive in person. I find it quite hard to pick out individual pixels; this is definitely a high PPI display that’s right up there with the best. In addition, the capacitive digitizer is excellent; I have no complaints about tracking accuracy at all, again just like you’d expect from a shipping device.
The X900 also goes pretty bright, at 375 nits, and has good contrast at around 800. I’m impressed with the display again just because up until recently seeing good LCDs outside of anything but the iPhone 4/4S has been a rarity. The HTC One X and Rezound are probably the only other devices in recent memory that surpass, but suffice it to say Intel/Lava haven’t skimped here.
As you can see from the gallery above, the display's performance is pretty good. CIE shows primaries and secondaries are close to where they should be, but not perfect (but way better than AMOLED insanity). Unfortunately color temperature is around 7500K constantly, and gamma is a bit sporadic. It’s worth dealing with those inconsistencies for that high PPI though.
Outdoor viewing angles are also pretty good, basically what we're used to for LCD displays outside in direct sunlight.
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jed22281 - Thursday, April 26, 2012 - link
Vanilla MeeGo is nothing like MeeGo-Harmattan (aka Maemo6x) on the N9...The only relation Tizen has with Vanilla MeeGo, is that it's structured/administered in a similar fashion.
Plus many of the same partners involved in MeeGo, have moved to Tizen...
The developmental libraries/environment is totally different, although there's still some tacit support for Qt.
MeR+Nemo (& other UX's e.g. Cordia/Plasma etc) is what has supplanted the original MeeGo.
And yes you could in theory run MeR+Nemo or Tizen on this or other Medfied devices.
But I'm not so sure they'd necessarily be any less locked down than ARM-based ones.
Locked boot loader etc... But once that's out of the way, they'd have their advantages.
ironargonaut - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 - link
From what I see the only phones that best Intel in performance are not on the battery chart.If a phone computes something faster, will that not mean it can do more in less time? Thus, while the artificial surfing battery time is "average", wouldn't I be able to surf more pages and run more apps also in that same time period?
What is the power/performance metric?
fm123 - Thursday, April 26, 2012 - link
There is no clear way to tell from this, given that the CPU is likely ramping up and down. The other phones are not listed, I suspect, as they are new. They actually include newer battery saving features, so you can't see that yet on this comparison.ironargonaut - Thursday, April 26, 2012 - link
So,then could I safely say, that since battery life is not listed here, of the phones in both tests Intel has the highest cpu performance with midrange battery life.If they are not going to test the batteries of the same phones then you shouldn't have them listed on the same graph for CPU power. IMHO
It's like a Ford commercial saying Ford fullsize has better gas mileage then Chevy, more towing power than Dodge, more cargo space then Toyota etc..
Which if written the way of this article is more like Ford worse gas mileage than Dodge, less towing power than Toyota, less cargo space then Chevy etc...
All are misleading. IMHO
mcquade181 - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 - link
For the benefit of all us older technophiles with slightly less than perfect hearing, could you please, please test the earpiece volume when testing cellular phones?I had to ditch my otherwise great Nokia N8 because of its ridiculously low earpiece volume, which made it unusable in anything but perfectly quiet environments.
The other very useful test would be how well the phone operates in both voice and data modes in areas at the fringe of network coverage, i.e. the phone’s range. The Samsung Galaxy S2 does not fare that well in this test and is no where near as good as my old Nokia N8. Surprisingly, very, very few reviews of the Galaxy S2 mention how average its fringe reception is.
cmdrdredd - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 - link
To not include any iphone results to the GLbenchmark except offscreen since offscreen looks so great on the iphone and the results I've obtained from around the web when running on the phone's screen show it not to be that much better than the fastest Android devices. How many people ac tually do GPU functions that aren't running on the phone's screen? Not many...suman - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 - link
While BT is very cool technology, why is there so much hoopla around it. We released the Bluestacks App Player (beta) a month ago and have a binary translator embedded in it. We can run ARM NDK, X86 NDK, Dalvik applications side by side on our player.iamastranger - Thursday, April 26, 2012 - link
Basically all are missing a point here. It is a FFRD with miimal changes done by LAVA. Wait for a OEM like Moto deliver x86 based phone.danielt - Thursday, April 26, 2012 - link
Hoe come this site never review the amazing Galaxy Note?RajeevRaj - Thursday, April 26, 2012 - link
One aspect not touched upon here is the price of the XOLO as compared to the other smartphones in the compare list. The XOLO costs INR 22000 ($420). Most other phones in the list (which are available in India) cost upwards of INR 27-28000 (>$520). As example the Samsung Galaxy S2 costs INR 28-30,000 ($550) and iPhones cost upward of INR 35000. (>$700)So if you factor in a price to features ratio also in the comparisons, the XOLO looks very attractive for a smartphone buyer in India.