Quad-core Smartphones Review

   Get ready for quad-core smartphones, mobile cameras with 8 or more megapixels, a multitude of devices running Android Ice Cream Sandwich, and mainstream adoption of LTE 4G and NFC technology at this year’s edition of the GSMA Mobile World Congress (MWC).

     The International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has finished for 2012 but mobile device makers are getting ready to showcase their latest achievements at the GSMA Mobile World Congress — a four-day event dedicated to cutting-edge mobile technology.MWC is accompanied by a string of high-profile mobile device announcements and as such is the most closely followed event in the mobile industry.

   Rumours suggest that smartphones including the quad-core HTC Edge, the HTC Ville, the Samsung Galaxy S III, the Asus Padfone, a quad-core Android device from Fujitsu, an improved Lumia 900 with 12MP camera, and new Sony Xperia smartphones will be on the menu along with the first devices running the Linux-based Tizen open source mobile operating system, the launch of BlackBerry 10 OS, and an overload of handsets and tablets running the Ice Cream Sandwich build of Google’s Android mobile operating system.

 
                                              

   A long, hard look at the iOS 5.1 beta 2 shows that Apple is getting ready for quad-core processing in its mobile devices.

The A5 chip in the latest iPhone and iPad models supports dual-core processing only.

Quad-core A6 chips are rumored to be in the works and may land in consumers’ hands as soon as this year.

   By looking at the most recent iOS beta’s code, as 9to5mac already has, we see the operating system supports up to four cores, numbered core.0 to core.3 (developers always start counting with the number 0; don’t ask us why, that’s just how it is).

Quad-core mobile devices aren’t unheard of in these parts. Back in May, Nvidia started singing the praises of its new Tegra 3 quad-core mobile processor. Code-named Project Kal-El (Superboy’s given name, for all you non-nerds), the chip was designed to give mobile phones and tablets performance capabilities on par with those of laptops and other personal computers.

Just last fall, we saw Nvidia demonstrate a quad-core Windows 8 tablet, but the Tegra 3 chip came to market first on Asus’ legally beleaguered Transformer Prime Android tablet, a quad-core beast.

In order to keep the iPad competitive, Apple has to start thinking about quad-core processing power. And quad-core processing would be an awfully nice advantage for gaming and other heavy-duty software.

We’ll see if Apple launches new iPad (and perhaps iPhone) versions featuring quad-core processing in the next few months, but we’d be shocked if the company lets Android manufacturers sneak ahead of it in innovation for very long.

                                                                MWC 2012 Pic

   The rumored HTC Edge will supposedly be the world’s first quad-core smartphone, running the Tegra 3 chip. Mobile news site PocketNow claims to have exclusive images as well as a spec sheet. We take such rumors with a grain of salt, however. The mobile world is prone to shake-ups and surprises, and news of phones from so-called “reliable sources” don’t always come to fruition.

     Nvidia was the first to bring dual-core processing to mobile with the LG Optimus 2X, which debuted at the beginning of this year with the Tegra 2 chip. Nvidia is blazing the multicore trail again with the release of the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime TF201 tablet. The Transformer Prime is the first device to ship with Nvidia's 1.3-GHz Tegra 3 quad-core processor. For now, it’s the only quad-core device on the market. The Transformer earned high praise from us for its stunning graphics and zippy performance.

   Qualcomm stated last month that its quad-core Snapdragon chip, the APQ064, will join its S4 line of products. Based on ARM architecture, the S4 chips will run at clock speeds between 1.5GHz and 2.5GHz. Qualcomm’s Vice President of Product Management Raj Talluri, confirmed that the first phones with quad-core Snapdragon chips will ship around the holiday season next year.Unlike Nvidia and Qualcomm, chipset manufacturer TI isn’t putting a number on its OMAP processor. Rather than calling them dual-core or quad-core, TI refers to them as “multicore.” My colleague, Melissa Perenson, visited TI last week at its headquarters in Dallas, Texas, where the company showed off its latest system-on-a-chip, the OMAP 5. The company didn’t give any exact benchmarks, but maintains that the OMAP 5 produces speeds competitive with Nvidia’s quad-core processor.