Why no flagship Windows Phone for 2013 or Is Microsoft OEMs moving too slow?

[a5cent]

For example, in 3dmark, the snapdragon and tegra 4 beat the iphone with the a7 processor. In javascript (sunspider) the a7 chip ties with tegra 4 in the surface.

3DMark is a bit strange, as the A7 does terribly poor in every one of 3DMark's benchmarks. Even last year's A6 SoC gets much better scores than the current A7. I suspect that all of 3DMark's tests stress one particular aspect of the A7 in which it performs poorly, or maybe 3DMark is just screwing up something on iOS 7. I don't know, but I think it's probably better not to take 3DMark on the A7 too seriously at this point. All the other benchmarking suites portray a much more balanced field. Since 3DMark seems to be an outlier, I'd tend to disregard it somewhat. We can also find the reverse scenario, where the iPhone 5S scores extremely high, most commonly due to onscreen rendering tests. Depending on what we think is important, we might want to disregard these too. Anyway, after disregarding the outliers on both sides, what remains is an A7 that is at least extremely competitive, if not slightly ahead (depends which benchmarks you find most important).

Ok wait a minute. While the iphone processor at a dual core 1.3ghz is a great processor, it does not blow anything out of the water.

I agree. I don't think anyone wanted to imply that. It is definitely a close race. I think you might be missing the point however (some others here definitely are). This is the point:

Product	SoC	Specs
Apple iPad Air	A7	Dual Core CPU, 1.3 GHz
Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 International 2014 Edition	Samsung Exynos 5	Octa Core CPU, 1.9 GHz

99% of consumers would bet their last dollar that the octacore CPU with the notably higher clock rate performs better, based purely on specs, when in fact the opposite is true (see this benchmark comparison of these two devices). That was the point.

 

[Mark Dart]

Iphones are just upgrades every year, boring same old

 

[Chregu]

Iphones are just upgrades every year, boring same old

This is true in terms of hardware design language. Concerning everything else, you can say this about every phone manufacturer. What have Windows Phone devices brought new, except of the one 41 MP camera phone?

 

[paulxxwall]

This is true in terms of hardware design language. Concerning everything else, you can say this about every phone manufacturer. What have Windows Phone devices brought new, except of the one 41 MP camera phone?

nothing really....1080p and quad core have been out for a year and we only have a phone " if you count the 1520 as a phone" with those specs and only one more rumor "929" and that's it

 

[SwimSwim]

Did you actually pay $500 for a phone? Ouch...

That's actually a pretty good price when compared to many other smartphones out there (on-contract prices don't count).

 

[ohgood]

Its not that im a fan of old technology. I just prefer my $500 phones to last a few years before having to upgrade.

Sent from my HTC6990LVW using Tapatalk

your $39 lumia 521, $179 android motog or $850 iphone still work just fine years after another phone is released.

not only are you not forced to upgrade, but you can just keep on running it forever if you like.

when flagships are released, people buy them, and sometimes, they change platforms for them.

it's a win win for manufacturers, and you.