ARM and Nvidia are major mobile players, so it pays to listen when the firms announce new technologies. The latest developments from both serve up an interesting similarity with regards to how these companies are tackling one of the biggest annoyances of the modern smartphone: inefficient batteries.

ARM’s recent announcement, big.LITTLE, pairs one of its high-end Cortex A15 MPCore chips alongside an entry-level Cortex A7, which consumes much less power. It’s designed to seamlessly takes over when a device is tackling low-intensity tasks, so the power-sucking A15 is reserved for intensive games and apps.

Nvidia’s Tegra 3 chipset, meanwhile, uses a near-identical approach: the four cores on the main chip can be turned on and off to tackle everything from basic web browsing to high-end games but, if the phone’s in standby mode or you’re running low-power apps, those four cores will shut down, with processing power provided by a “Companion Core”. It’s based on the same Cortex A9 used by the main Tegra 3 chip but, crucially, it runs at 500MHz instead of 1.4GHz.

They’re both designed with power saving in mind – in fact, low-power processors are one of the main pillars of ARM’s business – but the fact that these workarounds have to be considered at all merely serve to highlight just how little innovation occurs in the battery market.

It’s clear that lithium-ion power packs just aren’t keeping up with the demands of modern devices, with more powerful processors and bigger screens hampered by batteries that aren’t much bigger or more efficient than those included in phones from a couple of years ago. While components, screens and apps have become more sophisticated and impressive, batteries are stuck in a rut.

It doesn’t seem like the problem will be resolved any time soon, either. Nvidia and ARM might be tacking on chips to handle low-intensity tasks but, as soon as you ramp up four Tegra 3 cores, your phone’s longevity is likely going to plummet, especially if it’s used on devices such as the Samsung Galaxy Note, which has a whopping 5.3in screen.

One of the few drawbacks of modern smartphones is the daily charge: a ritual that sees people leaving phones attached to the mains at night or to their computers at work. Until a newer, more efficient type of battery arrives, this will continue to be the case – even if Nvidia and ARM are doing their best to give outdated lithium-ion hardware plenty of help.

Any qualms as to whether Nvidia’s Tegra 2 is up to the job are soon dispelled – the Folio 100 eagerly zipped through the familiar Android menus, and the whole experience felt suitably slick and refined. The full-sized HDMI socket on the device’s edge gives a clear indication of the Tegra’s mighty graphics crunching power: this is one tablet that’ll relish the challenge of HD video playback. And, with Flash 10.1 on board, YouTube HD footage is only a few clicks away.

While most of the Folio 100s were tethered to a wall, secreted from the clumsy, prying hands of eager journalists, we found Toshiba’s conference demo unit sitting quietly in a dimly lit corner. But while we were pleasantly surprised by the fine figure of ViewSonic’s ViewPad tablets, Toshiba’s effort is a touch disappointing.

The 14mm thick chassis feels lightweight, and even relatively gentle twisting motions left the Folio’s plastic body creaking under the stress. It might weigh a very reasonable 760g, but if you’re expecting a Toshiba-branded iPad, this just isn’t it.

That 10.1in multitouch screen boasts the usual 1,024 x 600 pixel resolution, but image quality is also far from stellar. Tilting the Folio from side to side revealed narrow viewing angles, and the Android home screen looked noticeably less sharp than Viewsonic’s efforts.

At least the specification is more promising. The 16GB of internal storage is complemented by a full-sized SD card reader which supports cards up to 32GB. Wireless networking stretches to 802.11n speeds, while Bluetooth and 3G comes as standard. A 1.3 megapixel webcam rounds off the proceedings.

We’re not overly keen on the plasticky-feeling chassis, but with Toshiba suggesting the Folio 100 is going to retail for around 399 Euros, we’re willing to cut it some slack. The Folio 100 might yet be the Flash-enabled iPad killer some people have been waiting for.

(The picture, in case you’re wondering, is a strange engine-type affair that’s been set up at the entrance to the delegates’ hotel, apparently to welcome us as we arrive. I guess that’s how they communicate with one another down here in the Valley.)

Under pressure

Yet despite the company’s outward confidence, you have to wonder whether the green team really enjoys its 72 hours under the spotlight. Last year the recurrent themes of the event were faulty notebook GPUs and Larrabee – hardly the issues Nvidia will have wanted to focus on.

This year the notebook GPU issue seems to have died away, and it’s become clear that Larrabee is no threat for the immediate future. Yet Nvidia is still on the back foot in several fights. In the desktop market, it’s been playing catch-up with ATI for over a year: it’s rumoured that a new generation of GeForce cards may be unveiled in the coming days, but they’ll have to be very impressive to compete with the ATI Radeon HD 5870.

Challenged by new technology

In the mobile and lightweight markets, meanwhile, the company’s Tegra and Ion platforms have attracted praise, but will soon be challenged by Intel’s two new Atom architectures – Moorestown for handhelds and the CE4100 for media devices. Nvidia did well to get to these markets first, but can it really cling onto the territory now Intel’s tanks are rolling into town?

And lastly there’s CUDA. This time last year, Nvidia was touting the flexibility of CUDA as a unique benefit of Nvidia hardware, and since then the technology has shown its potential in some real-world applications – notably the built-in CUDA acceleration for Premiere Pro CS4. But now that DirectX 11 is here, its extensive platform-agnostic GPGPU functions make CUDA’s exclusivity look like a liability.

With all this in mind, I think it will be very interesting to see what the company has to say for itself over the coming days. Stay tuned and I’ll report back with all the news and nuggets that emerge…

The ARM11 core (which is also used in the Zune, several Nokia phones and the HTC Dream) is the main processor but, for tasks that have specialist demands, several other chips are included: a GPU handles gaming and 3D tasks, an audio unit is optimised for mp3 and radio playback, a 2D graphics chip can handle a camera.

Separate chips tackle video encoding and decoding, with Nvidia promising the ability to encode and decode 720p video simultaneously. The board also houses flash and system memory, which are the larger chips towards the bottom of the PCB.

This “modular” approach, according to Bill Henry, the head of the Tegra Mobile Business Unit, has resulted in “the first high definition mobile processor” capable of playing 1080p video – and, indeed, the device we tried handled HD content without so much as a whimper.

Nvidia is also touting Tegra’s environmental credentials. The modular chip is capable of shutting down unnecessary sections: Henry gave the example of mp3 playback, which uses the audio chip and nothing else, explaining that Nvidia’s engineers have had to “target [their] silicon very, very specifically for that task” and “justify…anything you want to do” with the new chip.

The result is tiny power consumption, with Henry claiming that playing SD video sucks only 200mW from the 24W battery, with this figure rising to 500mW at 1080p. He also declared that the entire Tegra chip and its memory never drew more than 1W.

Henry also cited Flash animations, which are featured on “around 85% of sites in the Alexa top 100“. Arguing that a standard laptop, even with a low-power CPU, will draw “between 15W and 35W” when running a web page using Flash, he booted up the same animation on one of the Tegra-powered MID devices, claiming that it used a mere 150mW to deliver the same content.

This, obviously, has a positive effect on battery life. Whereas the average netbook will be lucky to see six or seven hours, Nvidia claims that Tegra devices could last for “25 days” when playing audio, since every other chip, and the screen, can be shut down. Nvidia also mentioned a more believable figure of a day’s solid use when the machine is used for web browsing.

Tegra’s performance and power draw seem up to scratch, then, but we can’t say the same about the Tegra-powered device that Henry demonstrated, with our hands-on test leaving us far from convinced.

Made by Mobinova – the consumer arm of Foxconn – the N910 looked like a small, slim netbook, albeit far flimsier and cheaper, with a cramped keyboard and trackpad that even had Henry slowing down during his demonstration: while the pad itself was responsive, the buttons were uncomfortably tucked away in the corner, much like those on the Dell Mini 10.

After going hands-on with the device ourselves, we can confirm that it’s more uncomfortable than the first archaic netbooks and, while these devices are meant to fill a niche below the netbook, that’s no excuse for making them so difficult to use or cheap to the touch. Henry did have positive musings on the price, though, saying that these devices will be cheaper “than any netbook in the marketplace today”.

The Mobinova also wasn’t running Windows XP, which has now become the de-facto standard for netbooks: because Tegra is built around ARM11 rather than an X86 CPU, it’s not possible to run the popular Microsoft OS, with the devices we’ve seen using Windows Mobile instead. The result is a Windows-style interface with a dock, much like Mac OS X, with popular applications such as Mozilla Firefox and Windows Media Player, both of which launched within seconds.

Henry argued that consumers would be glad to see a Windows OS rather than Linux, which inspired a spate of unfamiliarity-driven returns when it was included with the first netbooks, and that XP isn’t a natural fit for these machines, anyway, claiming that “we’re not a PC, we’re a device to serve up a browsing interface and media”, and that a traditional taskbar and start button would detract from the machine’s main focus as a media and web machine.

According to Henry, Nvidia has demonstrated the Tegra technology to 27 telecommunications companies from around the world, including Orange, Vodafone and T-Mobile, all of whom were apparently impressed but none of whom wanted to run any version of Windows on any device – instead, they all favoured Android-powered devices, none of which are available at the moment. Apparently, devices like the Mobinova N910 could be licensed for use by these companies, but we’re not sure that they’d want to be associated with such a product.

And what of the big players in the netbook market, such as Asus, Acer and Samsung? Thanks to the ARM11 processor, none of those are interested either, put off by the lack of an x86 infrastructure. Henry seemed bullish when asked about the lack of support from phone companies and OEMs, backing his technology to come good in the end, saying that “we know what’s missing [from the marketplace], we can fill that hole, but it’ll take some time”.

It seems that Henry knows that Nvidia has an excellent product on its hands, with Tegra a success in every area: it’s quick in 2D and 3D applications, adept with HD video and music and is wrapped up in an interface that, while not Windows XP, isn’t half bad at all – and all this with a tiny power draw that promises excellent battery life.

It’s also a product that Nvidia predicts will make up 50% of its revenue in the longer term, with more powerful Tegra 2 and 3 parts set to launch in 2010, and that when the first devices are launched towards the end of 2009 they’ll be half Android and half Windows Mobile.

It’s just a shame that, at the moment, the devices we’ve seen using this platform are wholly unconvincing. Until Nvidia demonstrates one of its much-touted MIDs or Smartphones to truly take advantage of this exciting new technology, we’ll still have our reservations.