Here in Australia, our experience with phones and tablets sporting Mediatek processors, have generally been quite bad, with most only appearing in low-end devices that are of dubious build quality and often slow and full of bugs. From this many of us make the jump to MediaTek chips being junk. MediaTek have made leaps and bounds in recent times, joining with Google to power the new Android One phones released last year. They have also turned around their poor record of releasing source code for their chips/kernels while releasing a high end octa-core, 64 bit processor. Today they have announced a new processor, the MT6201, a processor designed specifically for Android Wear watches.
The majority of current-gen Android Wear smartwatches use a Snapdragon 400 as their CPU as its ARM Cortex-A7 architecture is relatively power efficient while still being fast enough. Mediatek’s new processor is also based on this A7 architecture and has a Mali 400 GPU and can support resolutions up to 960×540 (qHD). With the introduction of this I would expect a lot more Android Wear smartwatches and other devices to be produced by lesser-known manufacturers using this low-cost processor. I think we are about to be inundated with a plethora of choices in the Android Wear category thanks to this processor.
My MTK6582-powered phone is quite reliable.
Smart hardware is the future!
It’s about time Mediatek got some good news.
true but they haven’t done themselves any favours in the past. I think the last few months have been very positive for them. They have been embracing the wider Android community (ie. those outside of China and India) and it is hopefully going to pay dividends for them
Hopefully.