Conexant Announces New Audio Processing Solutions At CES

At CES, Conexant gave me a demo of some of the audio processing technology that they’ve been working on. Conexant is a company that probably has their technology in a product you own without you knowing it, and they focus a lot on SoCs for doing audio processing in everything from TVs, to smartphones, to IoT devices.

One of the most interesting demos shown by Conexant is of their 4 microphone voice system to provide 360 degree direction detection. The company’s CX20924 DSP enables this, and in their demo it worked quite well regardless of the angle you were at, and it even worked properly with multiple users speaking at the same time. While many devices can do this kind of detection, they often require arrays with 6-8 microphones, which can be cost prohibitive. Conexant claims that the system can work at a range of up to five meters, and it’s able to tune out background noise in order to properly interpret your voice. This system could be used to drive down the cost of voice-activated devices by reducing the amount of hardware needed, and in my mind I can think of products like the Amazon Echo being brought to lower price points without sacrificing functionality.

The second major announcement from Conexant is their CX20926 audio and sensor SoC. The chip consists of a Cortex M0+, along with Conexant’s own audio DSP for voice processing. This chip is aimed at IoT applications and other battery powered devices like smartphones where a vendor is looking to implement always-on voice detection with minimal idle power consumption.

The last announcement from Conexant is their RoomAware Optimizer sound processing for televisions. This feature has been included on LG’s 2016 OLED and QD TVs, under the name Magic Sound Tuning. The technology uses microphones to analyze the acoustic characteristics of the room in order to tune the sound produced by the TV’s speakers. While I wasn’t able to get a demo of this feature, the fact that Conexant has already gotten adoption from LG shows that there’s clearly interest in this type of tech from manufacturers and consumers.

Hands On With the Huawei Honor 5X

We’ve reviewed Huawei Honor devices before, but by and large they were designed to target China and similar markets. There were also a number of growing pains as seen in our Huawei Honor 6 review. However, in the time since that review Huawei has done quite a bit of growing up when it comes to resolving some of their weaknesses and improving upon their strengths. Their Kirin SoCs started off with some notable issues in implementations, but with the Kirin 950 we’ve seen a major leap in performance and power efficiency. To keep their momentum going, Huawei Honor is bringing their first phone to the US, the Honor 5X.

The basic specs aren’t really going to be all that fascinating at this point as Snapdragon 615 is a known quantity. Huawei continues their trend of shipping odd WiFi configurations as this device only supports 2.4 GHz 802.11b/g/n WiFi. The rear camera is a rather well-understood Sony IMX214 sensor and the front camera sensor is a similarly common OmniVision OV5648 sensor.

However, the Honor 5X actually manages to hit the right point for price and features. The display is a 5.5” 1080p LCD, with an aluminum unibody design. There’s also the usual dual SIM capabilities along a decently sized battery and an FPC1020 fingerprint scanner shared with the Ascend Mate7. At 200 USD, this has the potential to beat out the Moto G for best value smartphone in that price range.

Subjectively, the in-hand feel and overall build quality is shockingly good for the price. The Ascend P8 Lite that we reviewed last year was pretty much par for the course when it came to materials and in-hand feel for a ~200 USD phone, so to go from some rather hard and cheap-feeling plastic to an aluminum unibody that is basically comparable to the HTC One M9 in feel is quite a leap in the course of less than a year. The comparison to the One M9 is rather apt in this case, as the design of the phone is such that the phone has a brushed finish that can be seen, but not really felt in the hand.

Unfortunately, the performance of the Honor 5X is a bit wanting. I suspect that Cortex A53s alone aren’t quite enough to get the amount of performance needed to make Android run perfectly smooth, as while in some cases the phone was perfectly smooth in some transitions like opening and closing app folders I saw noticeable frame drops and similar issues.

Casual use of the fingerprint scanner was also quite impressive, as the Honor 5X behaves pretty much identically to the Ascend Mate7 in how the fingerprint scanner will automatically detect and scan a fingerprint even when the screen is off, so with fingerprint unlock set up it’s possible to unlock the phone by simply placing a finger over the fingerprint scanner and waiting for the phone to wake up and unlock automatically.

As previously mentioned, Huawei is selling the Honor 5X for 199.99 USD. It will be available for preorder starting January 6^th, and will have general availability starting January 31st on HiHonor.com and Amazon. Although it would have really been exciting to see something like Snapdragon 650 show up in this phone, at the price it’s going it could be a viable option if Huawei has managed to nail down the details without show-stopping issues.

Gold Nexus 6P Comes To The US

One of the smaller announcements from Huawei at CES was the arrival of the gold colored Nexus 6P in the United States. The gold Nexus 6P, also known as the Nexus 6P Special Edition, was shown off at Google’s original San Francisco launch event for the phone. However, when it was released it was an exclusive to the Japanese market. It has since expanded to other markets, with India being the most notable. As of today, the gold Nexus 6P will be available in the United States as well, in both 32GB and 64GB capacities. It will be available on the Google Store and from Bestbuy for the same $499 starting price as the other Nexus 6P models.