If Android doesn't have something at that size there will be a hole in their portfolio
They've never heard of the Galaxy Note, have they?
Google is reportedly planning to get into the phablet market with a 5.9-inch handset code named Shamu: the device is expected to emerge later this month, and the Android operating system will be updated to support it. Two sources familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal that the new handset will be manufactured by …
I got one of these when I foolishly agreed to rent a GPS from Avis when in the US recently.
I don't know if it was the device or the <redacted> apps that Avis load onto it but the overall effect was pure shite. Sure the screen was huge but it was incredibly laggy. Again that might have been the apps and not the device.
I did a test using my ancient and decidely crappy Galaxy Mini (running Android 2.3) and it responded faster to map requests than the Mega. I only use it in the US because it has CDMA support.
Next time, I'll load up my UK TomTom with US Maps and take it with me. The Avis charge per day is also stupid. If you are in the US for 2 weeks then you could buy a GPS over there and save money on the deal. Many UK GPS's devices can take US Maps so that is an even cheaper solution.
Overall, I was not impressed by it.
"Last month's launch of the 5.5-inch Apple iPhone 6+ mobe may have provided an extra impetus to development efforts."
I can't imagine it would'v made any difference whatsoever. Phones are getting bigger and big phones are popular, Samsung has already proved that. Google however, don't seem to be in any desire to directly compete using their Nexus line, they seem to provide reasonable sales for the selected manufacturer but at a much lower margin.
I just can't imagine Google having seem Apples announcement going back and revisiting their development in any way.
It isn't just screen size Google have to market their device against the 6Plus, it's 64bit'iness.
Wouldn't a Snapdragon 610 make more sense?
Yes, with eight A53 low power cores it won't be as powerful as an 805, but it will be able to run the new 64bit Android L in, you know, 64 glorious bits...
Apart from playing the numbers game, just why is 64bit a good idea in a tablet? It's not like it's got many-gigabytes of RAM to manage (3GB can be managed in a 32 bit address space), or that it needs to handle large integer or high-precision floating-point numbers..
Just because Apple thinks that a 64 bit processor is a good in a hand-held device does not mean that it is a good idea at the moment.
PG "...64 bit processor ... does not mean that it is a good idea at the moment."
At the moment? How about in 2 or 3 years? Most of these phones will still exist then, although perhaps with a different owner.
Oftentimes, the correct posture for moving forward is to be leaning forward a bit.
"It's not like it's got many-gigabytes of RAM to manage (3GB can be managed in a 32 bit address space), or that it needs to handle large integer or high-precision floating-point numbers.."
And in fact ARM already has LPAE support. Just like PAE on Intel CPUs, it adds a bit of kludgery (which the Linux kernel already supports) so you may still be limited to 3GB or so per app, but can access 1TB of total RAM on a 32-bit system.
I'm not sure how much speedup you get in general from going from 32-bit to 64-bit ARM, the kind of intensive operations that would get the most speedup already use 64-bit or 128-bit operations using VFP or NEON instructions.
I'd say the reason right now to not drop in a 64-bit chip is simply Android's not ready for it yet; Android-L is supposed to support 64-bit but is in beta. The kernel's supported 64-bit ARM for years, but the Android Runtime is being worked over as well (running a 32-bit userland on a 64-bit kernel works but you wouldn't gain anything compared to using LPAE.)
Roy Batty. Incept date 2016, combat model optimum self sufficiency. Probably the leader. The Nexus 6 was designed to copy human beings in every way except their emotions, but the makers reckoned that after a few years they might develop their own emotional responses - hate, love, fear, anger, envy. So they built in a fail safe device. "Which is what?". A four year life span.