In May, HTC are planning a milestone revision for their marketing policy concerning the newer products based off the updated platform. These products will be equipped with high-definition screens and 520 Mhz CPUs, let alone a full mess kit of miscellaneous features. All this will be accompanied by a more friendly price policy. The P3470 Pharos model crowns the series of models based off the old platform, giving way to the more modern developments.

One of the key selling points of the new products (in particular, the planned Touch sequels) is the brand new Quallcomm chipset which is remarkable not only for its high CPU frequency but as well a GPU powerful enough to confront Sony PSP with ease.

HTC suffered a good deal of negative customer feedback, largely consisting of lawsuit threats emanating from the angry users of devices utilizing the Qualcomm MSM7200 and MSM7500 chipsets. The accusations were focused around the numerous driver flaws on many occasions known to invalidate the said products' functionality. The new platform features certain improvements meant to prevent the reoccurrence of such problems in the future.

MSM7850 outpaces the predecessors in performance and quality alike. The number of supported graphics standards is surprisingly large, even including full support for OpenGL 2.0:

·         OpenGL ES 2.0

·         Direct 3D Mobile, SM3

·         JSR 297

·         BREW Render 2D

·         Direct Draw, GDI

·         OpenVG 1.1

·         SVG

Besides that, WVGA output (800x480) is available – the same function featured in the earlier MSM7200 and MSM7500 – HTC seems to express little to no interest in developing this direction in their products any further, unlike the i-mate company for instance. Full-fledged TV-out units will probably come to HTC PDAs some day in the distant future, but nothing of the sort is seen in the publicly announced plans.

Let's have a short review of Qualcomm graphics chip engineering history. The majority of modern WM-based mobile products feature graphics chips manufactured by Qualcomm, HTC not being an exception – the company ensures its leading position in the market sector, taking advantage of E-TEN recent move to join Acer as a child division, effectively losing their status of an independent market player. Talking in advance, in the next year the E-TEN brand is planned to be pulled down and substituted by the Acer trademark, which is to bring the likely consequence of market reorientation and revision of regional preferences.

As seen in theory, even the previous generation of devices sport high capabilities, yet nothing close to MSM7850 – the rendering quality of the latter looks more like X-Box 360. This came true once they introduced a dedicated vertex shader processor.

An important point is Qualcomm's promise to keep a full compatibility with the Mx00 platform while retaining all the goodness offered by MSM7850. The graphics performance grew three times as high as the rates displayed by the products designed by the ATI-Imageon alliance.

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MSM7850 is likely to become a most serious advancement easily realizable from a simple explanation: the modern games usually employ about four or less texture layers rendered in a single run while the old Qualcomm Imageon chips could only provide two and the new platform allows up to 512 textures to be rendered simultaneously. The texture filtering techniques were also significantly improved.

But to be able to use all its powers to the limit, the powerful graphics core demands a matchingly large RAM and a fast CPU. While the former aspect has never been a problem to HTC (who equip their products with the traditional 128 Mb of RAM, much in keeping with the fashion that LG also sticks to), the latter point still belongs to the future. The device developed by Qualcomm under the codename of Scorpion is rumored to come with a 1000 Mhz CPU.

In an ideal environment, the performance of MSM7850 should be illustrated with numbers like these below:

To make a better comparison, here are the performance rates of MSM7200(a) and MSM7500(A), MSM7600:

It's noteworthy that the OpenGL standard, let alone its 2.0 version, is supported by a very limited number of WM PDAs nowadays – the most characteristic specimen being the latest Gigabyte models, which are also equipped with fast 520 Mhz CPUs. At the same time, OpenGL support is a standard feature for nearly all Symbian smartphones from S60 and UIQ families, though the level of implementation is till rather low when it comes to gaming. This only further grounds the necessity of a complex solution.

For the time being, HTC aren't making up any 'great jump' plans when it comes to graphics, the development advances in a successive, smooth manner. This upcoming generation of products will eventually phase out over a considerably short period of time, giving way to even more powerful hardware by the beginning of the next year. As for now, let's look forward to announce promised for May.