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You may recognise the Xperia T. It was the smartphone featured in the 2012 James Bond blockbuster, Skyfall. But beyond that, it also has some beefy specs that just beg to be reviewed.


The Sony Xperia T boasts a scratch-resistant 4.8" Bravia display with high resolution (1280 x 720 pixels), a 1.5 GHz Qualcomm S4 dual-core processor, 1 GB of RAM and a 13-Megapixel Exmor CMOS camera sensor that films in 1080p. The OS is Android (Ice Cream Sandwich, with a Jelly Bean update in the works), but it's a slightly revised version with Sony's own user interface overlay. The question is: does this high-end addition to the Xperia range (having nudged the Xperia S out of that position) really have what it takes to attract the likes of James Bond?

> Read the full review: Sony Xperia T

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Nvidia's new Tegra 4 mobile SoC should make its first appearance at the CES tech show in Las Vegas next month. In the meantime, info about the new chip is slowly starting to leak out.

Nvidia's Tegra 4 is expected to be quad-core ARM Cortex A15 chip clocked at 1.8 GHz. The Tegra 4 is also rumoured to use 28 nm transistors, compared with 40 nm for the Tegra 3. Performances should therefore be higher with no real increase in power use. In fact, power consumption could even drop!

A few more specs have now leaked out about "Wayne", the codename of the Tegra 4, which is due to take over from "Kal-El", the Tegra 3.


According to a document seen by Chiphell, the GPU in the new Tegra will boast 72 cores compared with just 12 in the Tegra 3. This should make for at least six times the graphics processing power in the new SoC.

This extra power will be particularly useful for high-end smartphones, which are increasingly moving towards Full HD screen def. It could also prove handy for top-of-the-range tablets looking to use 2560 x 1600 pixel displays. That said, the Tegra 4 is still no match for PC graphics cards. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 680, for example, uses 1536 CUDA cores, and the basic GeForce GTX 650 Ti uses 768, with power use that can't even compare. Note, however, that Jen-Hsun Huang announced back in March 2012 that the Kepler architecture used in these cards could one day be used in "superphones".

It seems that the Tegra 4 SoC will be able to decode and encode 2560 x 1440-pixel video and that it'll be able to display 2560 x 1440-pixel video images at 60 Hz, Full HD at 120 Hz and UHD (3840 x 2160 pixels) at an as yet unknown frequency. USB 3.0 support is also mentioned, which would certainly be handy for moving large amounts of data (videos, music) between devices.

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The spectre of the Galaxy Skin is back with a vengeance. Samsung already revealed the concept in 2011, but we now know that what we see in 2013 will be a bit more spec'd out than originally planned: before, the screen was to be in 800 x 480 resolution; now it's in 1280 x 720, which is much more in tune with today's world.

The displays will be bendable, but not to the point that you can roll them up like a newspaper. According to Samsung, the screens will open the market up to new design concepts.
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We already got a glimpse of this ultrabook last October at La Factory, but now we finally got to poke and prod at will. It's a 13.3-inch ultrabook with a Full HD IPS touchscreen, the Acer Aspire S7-391.


At a time when the trend is notebooks that convert into tablets, Acer has launched an ultrabook with a touchscreen that does not convert into a tablet. This is an atypical computer right now, one that deserves a review. Here's what we think of it.

> Read the full review: Acer Aspire S7-391

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