Thanks to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform, and Google’s Android operating system, more and more people are discovering just how awesome it is to have the internet in their pocket. With time the advances in both hardware and software have made smartphones even more capable than the computers many of us just a few years ago. While we’ve yet to hear about what Google’s plans are for Android in 2011, we can get a sneak peak at what Qualcomm is working on thanks to Anandtech. Qualcomm has provided them with a device called a “Mobile Development Platform” (MDP), which is just a fancy way of saying hardware that’s not meant for consumers, but instead for developers to prototype their applications. In the MDP there’s a dual core 1.5 GHz Qualcomm MSM8660 processor and an Adreno 220 GPU. We’ve yet to see either of these things inside consumer hardware, but we probably will by the end of this year.
The Adreno 220 is a new generation of GPU and benchmarks show it’s roughly twice as fast as the the previous Adreno 205, four times as fast as the Adreno 200, and depending on the benmark it smacks the GPU inside the NVIDIA Tegra 2 and Samsung Hummingbird right in the face. A little word of caution however. The MDP isn’t exactly optimized for the real world, meaning very little is done with regards to power consumption. When you don’t care about battery life of course you can crank the clock speed up and watch as each passing minute knocks your battery percentage meter down a few points, all for the sake of benchmarks of course.
Make no mistake about it, 2011 is all about dual core, not near field communication, though that too will take off once Qualcomm decides to integrate it inside their chipsets.