Do you really need a smarter smartphone? Executives who stake their careers on the answer to that question seem to think it’s a resounding “yes,” and they’re investing heavily to make the next generation of smartphones faster and more powerful. Here are three ways it’s happening.
1. Processors are packing more power. Samsung Electronics says it will invest $1.92 billion in mobile processor manufacturing, with a primary goal of creating chips with smaller transistors that use less power so that more processing power can be packed onto each chip. The company says it’s building a new plant in South Korea to create chips using 20-nanometer and even 14nm production processes. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, and the number of nanometers in a chip design refers to the size of the cuts into the wafers. Currently, the smallest cuts on smartphone processors are 28nm, but ARM said this week that chips using a 20nm processor could be in smartphones and tablets by the end of 2013.
2. Multi-core processing will be the norm. Nokia chairman Stephen Elop got a lot of attention earlier this year by saying that multicore processors “can only waste batteries,” but now it appears he might be just fine with a dual-core processor in a Windows 8 version of Nokia’s Lumia smartphone. This week a Qualcomm executive confirmed to reporters that Qualcomm’s dual-core Snapdragon S4 has been certified for Windows 8. Meanwhile, Intel says it will have a dual-core version of its Atom processor later this year. The Atom Z2460, a single core 1.6GHz processor, powers the Orange San Diego, which launched this week in the United Kingdom.
3. Real money is financing amazing apps. Former Real Networks CEO Rob Glaser and his partner Rob Williams raised $5 million to start a software company, and when their first idea didn’t catch on, they quickly started over. The result was Sidecar, a free app for iOS and Android that lets you use the camera on the back of your phone to stream live video of whatever is going on around you. And if all that video boosts your data charges, you might be able to make it up on minutes — Sidecar enables free VoIP calls to anyone in the US and Canada.
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