☕ Good morning! WikiTrivia is pretty good, h/t to friend of the newsletter, Joey! I hit an 11 streak which felt ok?

Exynos 2200 emerges

The Samsung Exynos 2200 chipset launch gets more and more curious. After the silent removal of the January 11 launch, now Samsung has quietly put out an announcement press release and a short, strange launch video.

• Just like the delayed launch, the lack of fanfare from Samsung about its new flagship SoC is concerning.
• And the gaps in knowledge are huge… let’s take a look at what we have here on the new 4nm process.

What’s new:

• The Exynos 2200 features a new AMD RDNA 2-based Xclipse 920 GPU. This is the highlight, and comes from the announcement back in January 2021 of a partnership.
• The expectations are of a big boost over the Mali GPU on last year’s Exynos 2100.
• Samsung is calling what it can offer as “console-quality” visuals with hardware-accelerated ray tracing and variable rate shading.
• The Xclipse GPU is mentioned as being the “first result of multiple planned generations of AMD RDNA graphics in Exynos SoCs,” so there’s room to grow here.
• No word on clock speeds or cores.
• Over on the all-important CPU, what’s in Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is about what you get here: the new Arm v9 architecture, and a Cortex-X2 prime core, three Cortex-A710 performance cores, and four Cortex-A510 efficiency cores.
• Again, Samsung hasn’t listed CPU clock speeds.
• And the last time Samsung didn’t list clock speeds was the Exynos 990 in the S20 line that had GPU overheating issues.

Elsewhere:

• The other elements like ISP, NPU, and modem are all there.
• On the ISP, the Exynos 2200 supports a 200MP single camera, a 108MP single camera at 30fps, or 64MP+36MP dual cameras at 30fps, along with video capabilities including 4K HDR, 4K/120fps, and 8K/30fps recording.
• The NPU has also seen an upgrade: double the performance compared to the Exynos 2100 machine learning silicon.
• And on the modem, there’s support for the 3GPP release 16 features, downlink speeds of up to 5.1Gbps and 7.35Gbps via sub-6GHz and mmWave respectively, and more details.

Well:

• Late launch, little fanfare, no clock speeds. It’s possible this is not up to par with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 or MediaTek Dimensity 9000.
• Reviews of the Exynos-versions of the S22 series will be interesting.

Roundup

• 📆 OnePlus product timeline tipped: OnePlus 10 Pro in March, Nord N20 in February? (Android Authority).
• 👉 Redmi Note 11 series will launch globally later this month (Android Authority).
• 📸 OPPO Find X5 Pro camera specs leak: Bye-bye micro-lens? (Android Authority).
• 🍎 Apple replacing 13-inch MacBook Pro with 14-inch ‘M2’ model, leaker says (AppleInsider).
• 💻 These framework laptop mods show us exactly why modular computers are so cool (Gizmodo).
• 👩‍🏫 Logitech’s Pen is a durable stylus made for Chromebooks in the classroom. It’s $65, but for educational purposes for now (The Verge).
• 👉 In non-Android/iOS phone news: The PinePhone Pro brings upgraded hardware to the Linux phone, with preorders from now from $399 (Ars Technica).
• 📚 New game: Wikitrivia is a web game that challenges your knowledge of historical dates. It’s pretty tricky! (The Verge).
• 🥊 A new Big Tech foe launches today: The Tech Oversight Project organization will push for Big Tech antitrust regulation with a campaign-style launch (WashPo).
• ⚖ This is pretty wild: China’s ‘People’s Courts’ resolve online disputes at tech firms: Volunteers jurors resolved 500 to 700 cases a day at one company last year: “In one case, a user posted a review complaining of poor service at a buffet restaurant after a worker reminded the customer not to waste food. The jury sided with the restaurant and the post was removed.” (Wired).
• 🐟 Over 100 different species made this 2,200-year-old shipwreck home, study finds (Ars Technica).
• 🌋 “With the Tonga Volcano happening; my son asked me how long it would take for another New Zealand-sized island to emerge in the South Pacific. Would it be a matter of thousands of years or billions? Or could it happen tomorrow?” (r/askreddit). Also: Pacific volcano — science will explain event’s ferocity (BBC).

Chart Tuesday

App Annie put out its yearly report on the State of Mobile 2022, with the usual focus on apps, with this bit of detail extracted:

• Incredibly, this graph paints a pretty good picture of the 233 apps which reportedly bring in more than $100 million in annual consumer spending. In 2021, 174 of those were games, which is pretty nuts.
• As Statista points out, just 38 movies had global box office takings beyond $100m (though the film industry hasn’t exactly had a great time during the pandemic).
• App Annie reckons $170 billion was spent in app stores last year, most of which saw Apple and Google clip the ticket at their healthy 30% cut.
• And just to add in marketing budgets, advertisers tipped in a reported $295 billion into mobile ad spends in 2021.

Cheerily,

Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor