Quad-core handsets coming; mobile gamers rejoice!
I saw several quad-core tablets at the Consumer Electronics show, but no smartphones. Luckily, Sascha Pallenberg, my friend who runs the Netbook News site, captured video of a Fujitsu handset running on the Nvidia Tegra 3 processor. From the looks of it, this phone’s performance will rival that of the Asus Transformer Prime tablet.
Fujitsu doesn’t target the U.S. market, so I don’t expect to see this Android 4.0 smartphone for sale here. However, Sascha’s video gives us an idea of what to expect from the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona next month: console quality games on a large screen piped from a smartphone and played with using a wireless controller. Although this demo uses a wired HDTV connection, I anticipate we’ll see more wireless video solutions introduced this year.
I’m still holding to the idea that throwing hardware alone at Android’s problem won’t solve any issues. However, I’ve used Android 4.0 for the past six weeks. The user interface improvements in Google’s platform, along with more powerful hardware, will allow Android to better contend against Apple’s iOS system.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see a number of quad-core handsets shown off, with a few available in the first half of 2012. By mid-year, we’ll start to see a larger number of these powerful handsets hit the market. Samsung, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and others will also be touting quad-core chips. But if my mobile predictions for 2012 hold true, far more dual-core handsets will be sold this year.
Then again, Apple is rumored to include its own quad-core chip in the next iPad and would be likely to use the same in a future iPhone design. That means 2012 will be more exciting to watch than 2011 when it comes to tablets and smartphones from a consumer perspective: Two great mobile choices in combination with what I think will be a third up-and-comer in Windows Phone handsets and possibly in Windows 8 tablets.
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Totally misunderstanding of everything: Quality of gaming has very little to do with quad-core vs. dual-core. It has to do with the GPU, essentially the SGX stuff for non-nvidia. Texas Instruments doesn’t have a dual-core on its roadmap.
Sure, gaming quality has much to do with the GPU, but are you suggesting that quad-core smartphones aren’t going to bring more power and capabilities in general? Just curious. And I’m not sure I understand this comment: “Texas Instruments doesn’t have a dual-core on its roadmap.” They already have several dual core chips available. And if you meant to say quad core, one could say they have those on the roadmap in the OMAP 5, depending on your definition of quad-core: two Cortex A-9 CPU cores and two M15 cores for lighter tasks and offload efforts.
Not totally no, quality of gaming includes AI, and physics processing, these are done on the CPU mostly.
WOW!! That’s really great news for mobile gamers like me. Quad-core handsets oh! I’m excited pretty much to check out the edition. Anyways thanks a lot for informing.