Intel's Medfield finally review - decent performer, but not exceptional

[Guest Victor von Zeppelin]

The Lava Xolo X900, the first of many devices based on Intel’s Medfield reference platform is out in India and has promptly been reviewed by the fantastic guys over at AnandTech.

Many of you may not have heard of the Xolo and may wonder why it’s important to us outside of India. The answer is that it’s part of Intel’s method of quickly getting devices out to consumers - instead of selling their chip alone to your usual Motorolas and such, Intel are releasing the reference device to consumers. India got it as the Xolo, and here in the UK we’ll be seeing it as the Orange Santa Clara. This means that the review from Anandtech will be of the device Orange will eventually sell, albeit under a different name.

As hinted, the biggest draw of the phone is that it’s powered by an Intel CPU. The Medfield chip contains a 1.6GHz single core Atom and a PowerVR SGX 540 GPU (similar to the GPU in the Galaxy Nexus, but clocked higher).

The high clock speed and powerful x86 architecture allows the phone to power through browser benchmarks, but the single core wasn’t quite enough to beat out the Tegra 3 and Snapdragon S4 in most other tests. Overall the device was speedy, but it looks set to have a lot of trouble against next generation of ARM chips.

Find the whole review on Anandtech, it’s a highly informative read!

[Guest eLJay]

Still rather have the Nexus, though I'm currently settling on the Skate/OMC as I have enough old gadgets kicking around to know when to wait (but at least this dual core laptop has lasted me a few years - hurray for architectural limitations (th only change being to put a 500gb Seagate hybrid drive in it to speed it up but keep the storage high for a low cost).