INDIA’S FIRST 64-BIT ANDROID PHONE

 64-bit Android phones have been quite a while in the workings, primarily because of shortcomings with ARM and its chip making partners to get the platform ready. Now it’s about to change with the 5-inch Huawei G621, expected to be priced at a modest Rs 13,500.

Apple has been the only company to successfully incorporate 64-bit chips in its mobile phones as it unveiled the iPhone 5S late last year, and Android companies have been waiting to get their hands on some 64-bit hardware as well. 64-bit chips will be much more powerful than the 32-bit chips that are currently in use in the mobile phone world. 64-bit chips have almost ejected their 32-bit cousins in the desktop world.

As of now, only three Android phone models, the Huawei G621, Samsung SM-G510F and the Lenovo A805e, have been revealed as upcoming Android phones with 64-bit hardware. And it looks like the Huawei model will beat Lenovo and Samsung to an actual launch in India, according to sources.

It must be noted that the launch may still take a couple of months more.

The underlying Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 chipset promises to deliver quite a performance boost to mid-range Android phones starting from September onwards.

Though it is being speculated that the 64-bit chips may actually come with 32-bit Android, according to leaked benchmarking scores, the phone will be about 40% more powerful than typical phones based on the 1.2 GHz quad-core A7 architecture available in the market. Against a benchmark score of 13,000 in Antutu tests, the Huawei G 621 scored 18,000.

The Snapdragon 410 will be the first 64-bit chipset meant for Android phones and will be based on four ARM A53 cores. The A53 is the successor of the ARM A7 core. The Snapdragon 410 itself will be the successor to Snapdragon 400 chip, which comprises four A7 cores clocked at 1200 MHz.

A newer, more powerful 64-bit Snapdragon chip, meant for top-end phones, will be announced towards the end of this year.

ANDROID L

Android L is an upcoming release of the Android mobile operating system developed by Google. Unveiled on June 25, 2014 and released in beta the next day for select Google Nexus devices, it is expected to be released in late 2014.

The most prominent changes to L include a redesigned user interface built around a responsive design language referred to as "material design", and improvements to the notification system which allow them to be accessed from the lockscreen, and displayed within other apps as banners across the top of the screen. Internal changes were also made to the platform, with the Android Runtime (ART) officially replacing Dalvik for improved application performance, and changes intended to improve and optimize battery usage

Android L introduces a refreshed notification system. Individual notifications are now displayed on cards to adhere to the material design language, and batches of notifications can be grouped by the app that produced them. Notifications are now displayed on the lock screen as cards, and "heads up" notifications can also be displayed as large banners across the top of the screen, along with their respective action buttons. A do-not-disturb feature is also added for notifications. The recent apps menu was redesigned to use a three-dimensional stack of cards to represent open apps. Individual apps can also display multiple cards in the recent menu, rather than only one entry per app; for example, a web browser can show all of its open tabs as individual cards.

Android L also contains major new platform features for developers; over 5,000 new APIs were added for use by apps, and the Dalvik virtual machine was officially replaced by Android Runtime (ART), a new environment introduced as a technology preview in KitKat. ART is a cross-platform runtime which supports the x86, ARM, and MIPS architectures in both 32-bit and 64-bit environments. Unlike Dalvik, which uses just-in-time compilation (JIT), ART compiles apps upon installation, which are then run exclusively from the compiled version from then on. This technique removes the processing overhead associated with the JIT process, improving system performance.

Android L also aims to improve battery consumption through a series of optimizations known as "Project Volta". Among its changes are a new battery saver mode, job scheduling APIs which can restrict certain tasks to only occur over Wi-Fi, and batching of tasks to reduce the overall amount of time that internal radios are active. The new developer tool called "Battery Historian" can be used for tracking battery consumption by apps while in use. The Android Extension Pack APIs also provide graphics functions such as new shaders, aiming to provide PC-level graphics for 3D games on Android devices.

A number of system-level, enterprise-oriented features were also introduced under the banner "Android for Work": Samsung contributed its Knox security framework for segregating personal and work-oriented data from each other on a device, along with accompanying APIs for managing the environment, and bulk app purchases for Google Play Store. Devices can also be configured so that users can bypass the need to enter an unlock PIN or pattern if it is within a certain geographical location or in proximity to the user's Android Wear device