I’m live here at the Qualcomm Uplinq conference and CEO Dr. Paul E. Jacobs just said that the quad-core Snapdragon processor is “coming soon.” That’s not much of a surprise but you have to wonder when this will actually land in products and if it will be good enough to keep up with the competition.
Qualcom first announced the dual-core Snapdragon last year and we’ve still yet to see a retail product land. That’s going to change very, very soon, as the HTC Sensation 4G will land on T-Mobile by June 15 (check out our hands-on video) and the EVO 3D should land within a few weeks.
Jacobs didn’t say when exactly the quad-core Snapdragon would be available but from the way he was double-checking with the PR people, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it announced very soon. We’re always excited to see more horsepower in our mobile devices, particularly if these don’t put too much of a hurt on the battery life.
It’s doubtful that it will be able to have devices out on the market before hard-charging NVIDIA gets its Kal-El quad-core processor out, as we’re expecting retail products to land around August. The demonstrations we’ve seen of the Kal-El quad-core processor have us drooling, particularly when you consider what this can do for gaming on smartphones and tablets.
NVIDIA has likely lit a fire under Qualcomm when it comes to release schedules, as we know the Tegra line will continue to evolve and improve at a rapid pace. For consumers, this is mostly a good thing because the competition could bring out the best in each company but I fear is that these companies will use fragmentation as a competitive advantage. For example, the Netflix Android app first brought its streaming content to Snapdragon handsets first but there are some creative ways around it.