Today’s Fastest Smartphones – April 2011

Development of smartphones is continuing at a rapid pace as manufacturers continue to throw resources into R&D in an effort to win market share in the rapidly growing marketplace (50-60% growth per year).

Qualcomm have released a phone as a development platform at CES this year, sporting a dual-core MSM8660 1.5GHz processor. It also has the latest generation Adreno 220 graphics chip. Benchmarks on this phone have demonstrated that the next generation of phones will have a significant performance advantage over phone released just months/weeks ago:

The iPhone 4's performance is hindered by its high screen resolution

The first such phone likely to blow away all competitors will be the HTC Pyramid. It will have a similar processor, running slightly slower at 1.2GHz and a qHD screen essentially equivalent to the iPhone 4’s retina display. 16 megapixel camera, 1080p video recording and the latest version of Android Gingerbread.

The HTC Pyramid will raise the bar for all future smartphones. The only device that will have comparable graphics performance will be the Apple iPad 2, but it has essentially 2 graphics processors bolted together! It is quite telling that a phone about to be released in the coming days can get close to the much larger iPad 2.

The question is, what will application and game developers do with all this performance?! Surely this is overkill for a bit of video recording and editing on a phone? Or will we enter an era where our phone will have all the processing power we need and when we get home we merely connect it (presumably wirelessly) to a larger screen & keyboard. I like the idea of that … a lot!

Dual-core processors actually help reduce power consumption, however batteries are still the limiting factor for all mobile devices. Bring on the revolution in battery tech!