MediaTek's Deca-Core Helio X20 Ships Next Month; Helio X25 Goes Official

MediaTek says its deca-core Helio X20 SoC will hit the market next month. The announcement comes ten months after the Helio X20 was first unveiled. On the sidelines, MediaTek also unveiled a slightly improved and more powerful Helio X25 SoC.

The Chinese chipmaker is finally ready to ship its Helio X20, which directly competes with Qualcomm's newest flagship SoC, the Snapdragon 820. The Snapdragon 820 was first unveiled in August last year, and only began to ship on some smartphones recently.

To recall, the Helio X20 is built on top of a tri-cluster CPU architecture. In fact, at the time of launch, MediaTek claimed that the Helio X20 was world's first mobile processor to have tri-cluster CPU architecture, which houses three processor clusters.

Other technical specifications of the Helio X20 include one cluster of two ARM Cortex-A72 cores (clocked at 2.5GHz for extreme performance), and two clusters of four ARM Cortex-A53 cores (one cluster clocked at 2GHz for medium loads, one clocked at 1.4GHz for light activities). A Helio X20-equipped smartphone can support a refresh rate of 120Hz, up to 32-megapixel single camera with 24fps and 25-megapixel with 30fps, and support 10-bit colour depth, HEVC and VP9 HW decoding.

The company also announced the Helio X25 at the media conference. Interestingly, a reported outed the existence of the SoC model earlier this week, claiming that an upcoming smartphone named Meizu Pro 6 will be exclusively powered by Helio X25. It added that Helio X25 will be available soon after the Helio X20. The Helio X25 SoC offers minimal upgrade over the X20. For instance, it is clocked at 2.5GHz instead of 2.3GHz, and offers GPU with 850MHz instead of 780MHz.

Virtual reality set to transform filmmaking

Chris Milk stepped onto a TED Conference stage and took the audience on an awe-inducing trip into the future of movies. While much of the early attention on virtual reality has focused on use of the immersive technology in video games, Milk and his US startup Vrse are using it to transform storytelling and filmgoing. "We have just started to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality," Milk said. "It's not a video game peripheral. It connects humans to other humans in a profound way... I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world." He had everyone in the Vancouver audience at TED , which ended Friday, hold Google Cardboard viewers to their eyes for what was billed as the world's collective virtual reality experience. Google Cardboard gear is literally that -- cardboard

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...

Freedom 251: 30,000 Units Sold, Components for Up to 2.5 Million Will Be Imported

Ringing Bells, the makers of the Rs. 251 smartphone - the Freedom 251 - confirmed to Gadgets 360 on Tuesday that it has still only accepted payments for 30,000 units of the phone. It also added that the components for these phones will be imported, and only assembled in India, not made here. Ringing Bells stopped accepting orders on February 19, and claims to have received over 70 million registrations. The company President and Director both repeatedly stated that the price of the phone would be made possible through economies of scale, and making the phone in India to cut out import costs. Economies of scale? However, in a discussion with Gadgets 360 the company revealed that it had only sold 30,000 units of the phone on day one. The company has now confirmed that it has not sent out the payment emails to anyone else who registered - "we were working out details of cash on delivery, which we are announcing now, so we will be sending emails to the first 2.5...

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