Nokia at IFA 2013: hands-on with the Lumia 625

The last smartphone we met before we say goodbye to the IFA 2013 was not actually presented on the expo. Unlike Samsung, Sony, Acer and Asus, Nokia didn’t even hire a booth to show its devices to the consumers. We still managed to find the latest Lumia 625 smartphone at one of the IFA side-events, showcased by the company’s new owner – Microsoft. It’s quite an interesting gadget that offers big screen on a budget price.

Nokia announced the Lumia 625 back in July, a couple of weeks after the company unveiled its 41MPLumia 1020 cameraphone monster. This is also the last Lumia phone unveiled before Microsoft acquisition of Nokia Devices and Services. And while it’s still unclear what will happen with the rumoredLumia 1520 phablet, the Lumia 625 has already gone on sale.

The Nokia Lumia 625 is running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 chipset with a 1.2GHz dual-core Krait processor, Adreno 305 graphics and 512MB of RAM. Microsoft and Nokia successfully proved the Windows Phone 8 is a miracle worker that runs hassle-free on this, now considered lower mid-range, hardware. Unfortunately for the gamers, there are lots of titles incompatible with WP8-handsets with less than 1GB of RAM, so the Lumia 625 doesn’t quite make for a killer gamin experience despite its large screen.

Now that we get this out of our way, let’s focus on the positive sides of the Lumia 625.

First, Lumia 625 comes with a big 4.7″ IPS display of WVGA resolution. This adds up to a rather low 200ppi density, but in this class it works quite fine. And it’s not like the screen looks pixelated or anything – sure it’s not the sharpest we have seen but with the WP8 interface it certainly isn’t irritating. Besides, the screen offers lively colors, good contrast and decent (if not quite perfect) viewing angles. It isn’t a ClearBlack unit, which suggests it probably won’t do all that great ourside.

From a design standpoint, the Nokia Lumia 625 is pretty much an oversized Lumia 520. It has the same lines, controls layout and its back is made of a very similar material.

The front has the three mandatory Windows capacitive controls below the display and the earpiece plus the secondary VGA camera for video chats.

Lumia 625 front

The right side of the Lumia 625, just like the rest of the Lumia gang, houses the volume rocker, the Power/Lock key and the hardware camera shutter – all three of them made of plastic.

Lumia 625 controls

The left side is completely bare.

Lumia 625 left side

The 3.5mm audio jack is on the top of the Lumia 625, while the microUSB port is at the phone’s bottom.

The top of Lumia 625 • the bottom of the Lumia 625

The back is made entirely of polycarbonate. The curved shape and soft rubbery finish make for a handset that’s got plenty of grip and style.

Lumia 625 at the back

The 5MP camera lens accompanied by a LED flash is at the Lumia 625′s back. The loudspeaker grilled is also around.

Nokia Lumia 625 is available in Orange, Bright green, Yellow, Black and White flavors. We met the orange and yellow units and they both look quite fresh with a distinct youthful appeal.

Nokia Lumia 325 in orange and yellow

The large 4.7-inch display is not the only thing that sets the Lumia 625 apart from other mid-range Lumia smartphones. The Lumia 625 also supports LTE connectivity, comes with a faster 1.2GHz dual-core processor compared to its 1GHz 520/620/720 siblings and offers 1080p video recording at 30 fps.

Nokia Lumia 625 seems like a pretty decent deal, seeing it costs only about €230. We will be able to tell for sure once we get a review unit and put it through its paces.

Intel takes charge (again) to redefine the data center

Intel is acknowledging the changing face and internal functions of the data center with a new initiative designed to re-architect the underlying infrastructure, allowing companies and end users to adapt their data centers to a more services- and mobility-oriented environment.

The strategy, as laid out at its Datacenter Day event held in late July and hosted by several Intel executives, is for automation and speed to replace manual, time-consuming and often fixed functions, each with their own independent configuration, said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and Connected Systems Group at Intel.

"Today, the network is still manually configured. The process to reconfigure a new network to support the service is a manual process that can take weeks," said Bryant. With the virtualized, software-defined network, the time to provision software and hardware on a new service can be reduced to just minutes.

She also noted that data storage continues to grow at a 40% compound annual growth rate, with 90% of it unstructured. She cited an IBM study that found businesses store on average 18 copies of the same piece of data. "That actually sounds quite logical having run IT for four years," joked Bryant, who was previously CIO of Intel.

Finally, she noted that even with virtualization, server capacity is barely at 50%. "That means 50% of server capacity is unused, which is a true crime," said Bryant.

We see traction around software-defined data centers and Intel has plenty of software capabilities in terms of programming into the chips. They can help to define software definitions and that underlying layer in the data center.

Christian Perry, senior analyst for data centers, Technology Business Research

To solve this, Intel is looking to rearchitect not just servers but the network for cloud services, and plans to do this via software-defined networks. "Software-defined networks allow us to extract the control function out of the switch, run it globally, run it on standard high volume Intel hardware as just another app running on your Intel architecture. That drives up the utilization and drives down the capital expense through the movement off proprietary servers," said Bryant.

Intel wants to help companies move beyond the standard generation of data centers by offering what it calls the Rack Scale Architecture (RSA), which will virtualize the whole network and every component in it. An application will assemble the CPU, memory, storage and networking it needs from the pool of assembled hardware and build its own virtual server, storage and network.

Why is Intel doing this?

Intel is a chip company yet it's taking charge of a component of downstream technology, the server architecture. For Intel to get into server, network and storage architecture would like Qualcomm, the dominant player in mobile phone chips, deciding the cellular networks are not being well managed by Verizon, AT&T, etc., and it was going to do something about it.

The problem is the big server vendors aren't taking charge. They are distracted to some degree or another. CEO Meg Whitman is slowly righting the ship of HP but that company took a severe body blow in recent years. Dell is in even worse shape with its lingering privatization plans, and IBM isn't interested in the x86 business because it tried to sell the System x business to Lenovo but the two couldn't reach a price agreement.

Nature and business abhors a vacuum and Intel is stepping in. And as Nathan Brookwood, research fellow with Insight64 noted, it's happened before with great success.

"Intel is acting as a leader and there is nothing wrong with Intel picking up the leadership mantle and moving forward. They did it in the past. Who drove WiFi into mass market? It was Intel with Centrino. Before that, WiFi was a curiosity. It took Intel putting Centrino with WiFi in every laptop to make it popular. They also did it with USB and PCI Express," Brookwood said.

Christian Perry, senior analyst for data centers at Technology Business Research, agreed. "They see an opportunity, it's theirs for the taking to define that leadership role. They've probably had that opportunity in the past few years, but why now? We see traction around software-defined data centers and Intel has plenty of software capabilities in terms of programming into the chips. They can help to define software definitions and that underlying layer in the data center," Perry said.

Not only is Intel taking a role that should fall to hardware vendors, it is also taking on the job of defining a software-defined data center, something you'd expect from VMware, Citrix or Microsoft, noted Perry.

"They have a very well-orchestrated definition behind software-defined anything or everything. I never heard a more sensible approach in terms of explaining how everything can work in a software-defined data center. We hear things from EMC and VMware, but Intel really sees the big picture and they should see the big picture because their chips are running the big picture," Perry said.

Quietly building the infrastructure

So it remains to be seen if Intel can do for software-defined networks what it did for WiFi, but it sure will try. Without a lot of hoopla, Intel has made some major moves into networking infrastructure. Intel has introduced Open Network Platform reference designs to help OEMs build and deploy a new generation of networks that it says will maximize bandwidth, reduce costs, and offer flexibility to support new services.

In April 2013, Intel introduced three platforms for software defined networking and network function virtualization: the Open Network Platform Switch Reference Design (ONPS); the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) Accelerated Open vSwitch; and the Intel Open Network Platform Server Reference Design.

ONPS allows for automated network management, and coordination between the server switching elements and network switches. The DPDK will improve small packet throughput and workload performance, while the Open Network Platform Server Reference Design, previously codenamed "Sunrise Trail," is based on Intel chips and Wind River software. Intel acquired Wind River in 2009.

These are not new efforts. Intel has been working on them for years and claims customers for this technology include including HP, NEC, NTT Data, Quanta, Super Micro, VMware and Vyatta (a Brocade company).

New edge servers (a recap)

In a departure from traditional Intel operating procedure, the company plans to offer custom chips to big customers. Already Facebook and eBay will get custom low-end Xeon E3 processors in a system-on-a-chip (SoC) design, and there will be more. Expect more of this, said Jason Waxman, general manager of the Cloud Computing Platforms Group at Intel.

At the event, Waxman introduced the Atom C2000, an eight-core processor, known by its codename "Avoton." It will come with an encryption acceleration network device codenamed "Rangeley" as well as with many Xeon features, such as error code correction (ECC), Intel Virtualization Technology and 64GB of memory capacity.

In short, it looks a lot like a Xeon, and that's no accident. "People want consistency. They want 64 bits and software compatibility and error correction code even on the low end," said Waxman.

He also announced a future chip based on the Xeon E3 design but will use a system-on-a-chip (SoC) design instead of the usual discrete design for Xeon servers, which involves several chips on the server board. A Xeon SoC means much lower power consumption and smaller motherboards, since fewer chips are used. The Xeon SoC will be introduced next year with the Broadwell generation of processors. Broadwell will be the current Haswell architecture, built on a 22nm design process, shrunk to 14nm.

That the first customers for this chip are Facebook and eBay is no coincidence. Consumer networks like those use thousands of edge servers to handle their millions of visitors at any given moment and to serve up HTML pages generated on the back end. It has slowly dawned on server vendors that using a powerful processor such as Xeon E5, or even an E3, for a server that simply handles Web connections and spits out HTML pages is overkill. The Atom (and ARM) is more than adequate for that task.

That was the appeal of using Atom and ARM processors in ultra-dense edge servers such as HP's new Project Moonshot and the 10u server from startup SeaMicro, which AMD acquired in 2012. Both make the same point: save your Xeons for the database work and let a chip that uses a fraction of the power to pump out HTML pages.

Perry says that edge servers are a new market for Intel and the industry at large. Not a huge one but a new one nonetheless.

"Microservers won't be huge for revenue but Intel will play in that market. It will be a while before that market grows out. Customers are still in a wait and see mode on microservers," said Perry.

Customers may be waiting but the vendors are not. AMD made its move with the acquisition of SeaMicro, which makes ultra-dense servers using Intel's Atom processors. AMD will eventually put its own chips in those servers. HP has Project Moonshot servers using an ARM-based processor designed by Calxeda.

So Intel doesn't want to be left out. "Intel wants to be a part of that market but it's more of a 'We'll provide anything you need for your workload environments' strategy," said Perry.

ET deals: coupon for Dell XPS 12 convertible Haswell ultrabook

Manufacturers have been offering different solutions to the dilemma of multiple devices in one form factor, and while they all have their merits, we especially like the hardware Dell includes in theirs. The XPS 12 is a 12.5-inch convertible ultrabook that was recently refreshed with some top tech.

Powering the machine are the new Intel Haswell processors in ULV form, which offer substantial power savings at low-to-moderate usage levels. The ultra-thin (0.59 to 0.79 

inches) chassis houses a 12.5-inch display that is able to flip inside the top cover, a different approach to others that instead rotate the entire top cover around the base. This display is the real gem though, an IPS LCD with multi-touch support and 1080p resolution.

The chassis itself is a combination of machined aluminum, carbon fiber composite, and magnesium with edge-to-edge Gorilla Glass covering the display. Ports are a little on the scarce side due to the ultra-compact design, but you should be able to make do with two USB 3.0 ports and a Mini DisplayPort output. A wireless card is included that supports the new 802.11ac standard, along with 802.11n and Bluetooth 4.0.

Performance should be smooth, thanks to fourth-gen Intel processors, 80GB-or-larger mSATA SSD, and 4GB or 8GB of RAM. All of these high-tech goodies are backed up by a one-year warranty that includes on-site service, 24×7 phone support, and accidental damage coverage at no extra cost, an offering that is unmatched in the industry.

The XPS 12 has never been one to receive many discounts, so this $60 coupon code is a very nice happenstance. Take in the whole picture of a premium chassis, top-notch tech, and excellent warranty coverage and you’re getting a lot for your buck. The base model with Core i3, 4GB RAM, and 80GB SSD runs $939.99, while a Core i5 with 128GB SSD bumps the price to $1,139.99.

Internet companies in new effort to disclose more on NSA requests

(Reuters) - Some of the world's biggest Internet companies on Monday increased efforts to disclose more about their forced cooperation with U.S. spy agencies, and Google Inc asked a court to hold what would be unprecedented public oral arguments.

Google Inc (GOOG.O), Facebook Inc (FB.O) and others met with a panel established by the White House to review the sweeping domestic surveillance exposed by Edward Snowden, a former contractor at the National Security Agency.

Separately, Google asked the secret court that approves spying requests for a public hearing on their quest to reveal how many orders the company complies with. Facebook and Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O) made their own first filings on Monday seeking the ability to disclose more about the orders following Google and Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) filings in June.

Google's new court filing adds to its earlier petition. It complains that its reputation and business have been damaged by what it says were misleading reports that the NSA had "direct access" to its internal servers. The companies have denied those reports, and most now publish summaries that give the number of all the government requests they receive.

Most lump together foreign intelligence demands with routine criminal inquiries, though Google says it receives fewer than 1,000 National Security Letters per year, affecting fewer than 2,000 accounts.

The companies want to say more, and Google argues that its First Amendment right to speak out, especially on a matter of great political and public importance, outweighs any harm to intelligence efforts that would come from releasing more detailed but still aggregate statistics.

"The government has identified no statute or regulation that prohibits such disclosure, and it is not appropriate for this court to undertake the essentially legislative function of creating such a prohibition," Google wrote in its filing with the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The court, whose members are appointed by the U.S. Supreme Court chief justice, has never held a public session and generally hears only from the U.S. Justice Department and intelligence agency lawyers.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

Google's move follows its confirmation that it is moving more quickly to encrypt data as it moves internally at the company.

On Sunday, Brazilian television cited new Snowden documents in reporting that the NSA has tried to attack Google or at least intercept communications from its users to the company.

The panel established by the White House, called The Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology, was charged with recommending how to balance security and privacy concerns. President Barack Obama met with the new group on August 27. It is to provide an interim report within two months.