If you used a budget smartphone in the last five years, chances are it packed a MediaTek chip. The firm shipped hundreds of millions of processors, modems, and wireless radios to device makers in the past year alone and it is adding two new chips to its arsenal: The Helio P23 and Helio P30.
The Helio P23 and P30 are what is known as SoCs — industry parlance for “systems on a chip.” They are packed to the brim with every component necessary to power a smartphone, like support for dual SIM cards and dual 4G LTE radios. But there is more to them than meets the eye.
The P23 and P30 are both octa-core processors built on 2.3GHz Arm Cortex-A53 cores and the Mali G71 MP2 GPU and they have MediaTek’s CorePilot technology onboard. CorePilot 4.0, the newest generation, monitors the chips’ temperatures to ensure a “high-performance” and “reliably consistent” user experience, according to MediaTek.
On the photography end of things, the P23 and P30 can power dual cameras up to 16 megapixels in resolution (13 megapixels in the P23’s case). And they ship with MediaTek’s Imagiq 2.0 technology suite, which helps minimize aliasing (the wavy lines on background patterns), reduce chromatic aberration (the fringes around the edges of photos), and eliminate grain and noise in pics and selfies.
Those are not the only photo-snapping tricks up the chips’ sleeves. A new dedicated camera control unit (CCU) boasts an “auto exposure convergence speed” that is up to twice as fast as the competition, and a vision processing unit (VPU) reduces the load on the phones’ GPU and CPU at a tenth of the power usage.
The P23 and P30 are no slouches when it comes to wireless, either. MediaTek claims the P23 is the first in the world with dual SIM, dual 4G VoLTE (voice over LTE) support, and both chips come with the latest generation of 4G LTE WorldMode modem, which supports speeds up to 300Mbps download and 150Mbps upload. Another feature, TAS 2.0, intelligently switches between antennas to optimize signal quality.
“Reaching the mid market means bringing people affordable devices that power and perform with the latest features, like dual cameras and 4G LTE connectivity,” TL Lee, general manager of MediaTek’s Wireless Communication business unit, said in a statement. “In the rapidly growing arena of new premium mid-range devices, mobile technology innovators know that they need to stand out in a crowded field — P23 and P30 enable them to do that.”
The Helio P23 and P30 come to market later this year. The P30 will be available globally starting in the third quarter of 2017 and the P30 will launch first in China.
Two new highly requested iCloud plugins just got added to ChatGPT, giving people who rely on Apple’s Mail and Calendar services a way to search emails, check appointments, and manage their schedules directly through the chatbot.
The integration is rolling out to all ChatGPT plans, including the free tier. You can access it on the web, desktop, and iOS.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.
Samsung’s scandal over its Game Optimizing Service, or GOS, has returned with a bill attached. South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission has tentatively fined the company 20.1 billion won, or about $15.1 million, over gaming claims made for the Galaxy S21, Galaxy S22, and Tab S8.
The regulator says Samsung promoted the devices as gaming powerhouses without disclosing that GOS placed preset CPU and GPU limits on certain demanding games. Samsung disputes that conclusion, calling GOS a legitimate way to manage heat.