Broadcom shows off NFC, HD video playback abilities of new mobile chips
Broadcom showed us the capabilities of its latest smartphone chipset with a focus on HD video playback, streaming, GPS and NFC.
Smartphones today are an integral part of our lives. We rely on them for a lot more than making calls and texting. From consuming video content, reading books, catching up with news, work and a whole lot more; the smartphone has become the go to device for anything and everything when a full-fledged computer isn’t at hand.
With the dawn of the budget smartphone era, we have devices under the Rs. 20,000 price point doing these things for us and doing them quite well even if they are plagued with a few issues. If you have used a smartphone in the past 10 years, chances are that there is at least one component in that smartphone that has been made by Broadcom. Apart from components (such as 3G/4G in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc. in smartphones), Broadcom has also supplied the SoC for a large number of smartphones including the Samsung Galaxy Grand, Galaxy Mega 5.8 and many more smartphones.
Qualcomm and MediaTek have been dominating the budget smartphone SoC for some time now and so, Broadcom invited us for an event to showcase the abilities of the chipset that will power some of the future smartphones. How the power of these Broadcom chipsets stand against the MediaTek and Qualcomm powered devices is something we will comment on once we have these devices for review. Here we will talk about the features that the Broadcom chipsets will bring to these devices.
NFC
Near Field Communication (NFC) technology lets you wave a smartphone over an NFC-compatible device and send information without the hassle of going through multiple steps to setup a connection. Now, making transactions and exchanging data with NFC technology is just a tap away. Broadcom powered smartphones allow you to read business cards and advertisements, make payments, and do a lot more. If you have an Android smartphone with a Broadcom NFC chip, sharing music playlists, documents, and pictures is easy. Some solutions that exist today include pairing a Bluetooth headset with a phone and pairing a Bluetooth-enabled sound system with a phone to easily share music with friends.
Who doesn’t forget their car keys, wallet, or even their phone every now and then? With NFC powered smartphones, you can track items such as your wallet, phone, keys, and luggage. By simply pairing the proximity accessory with your smartphone, you can make your Bluetooth low energy (BLE) fob beep or get its precise location. Application developers and accessory providers can also extend this to address features like child safety.
As you can see, these abilities are demoed in the video. The downside is that the process of paring these devices is easier said than done. There are still a few hiccups when it comes to the tap and play simplicity of the technology.
Broadcom claims that in the future, you can expect to interact with your car by sending it driver preferences and linking to navigation and entertainment systems—all by simply tapping your phone.
GPS
Broadcom powered smartphones use a hybrid data fusion approach, where information from various sources is used to yield precise and fast location results. The initial location information comes from knowing the locations of nearby cell towers. That initial location information is used to quickly get a more precise location, using a combination of data simultaneously received from the GPS (US), GLONASS (Russian), and QZSS (Japanese) satellite constellations.
For indoor or obstructed areas, where satellite signals can be too weak, information from and about Wi-Fi hot spots is used to refine location results. For example, even in a mall, a Broadcom powered phone always determines a precise location.
1080 video playback
The ability to play 1080p videos without any difficulty has been a desire for quite some time. At the event, Broadcom demoed the ability of a smartphone to play 1080p and 720p videos without any hiccups.
The format of these videos isn’t known, but we would like to put this claim to the test with a number of formats before commenting on it.
Miracast
With Miracast, you can watch a video on your smartphone, and even share what you are watching with your family on the big screen TV. You do not need a Wi-Fi router or any additional equipment; simply buy a Miracast dongle that plugs into the TV and start streaming.
In this scenario, you may see some glitches on the TV if your phone is capable of only streaming at 2.4 GHz. One of the reasons for this poor quality is that other devices in the home, like cordless phones, microwave ovens, and Bluetooth cause interference in the 2.4 GHz frequency band. This can result in severe picture quality degradation while streaming content from a phone to a TV. Broadcom chips can operate over 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz simultaneously. They also have a feature called Bluetooth Coexistence that minimizes interference and ensures a glitch-free experience while streaming videos from your phone to TV.
At the event Broadcom claimed that the Miracast feature would be great for gaming as well since the input lag between the smartphone and the TV would be low. We would like to put this claim to the test as well. At the event, while this technology was being demoed, there was a time lag between the content playing on the smartphone and what we were watching on the TV. There was a problem with the audio too so all we got was video and no audio.
The features on offer with the new Broadcom chipsets seem really exciting and we can’t wait to get our hands on smartphones that will showcases these capabilities, especially if they are priced in the budget price range.