It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the consumer electronics industry, and by that we mean laptops, mobile phones, televisions, nearly everything that runs off of electricity and isn’t considered a kitchen appliance, releases better products year after year. Improvements can be small and subtle, such as a decrease in the thickness and weight of a product, or something a bit more substantial, like a new CPU that allows customers to perform tasks they previously couldn’t even imagine their device was capable of achieving. Samsung, in a bid to stir up some hype, has told the Maeli Business Newspaper that by this time next year they’ll have a smartphone out on the market with a dualcore 2 GHz processor inside. Think of the Samsung Galaxy S II, which was announced back in February, yet here we are less than 2 weeks from May and it’s still not out, but twice as fast.
What exactly are two 2 GHz cores going to allow you to do? Websites will render faster than before, games will be that much smoother, and … that’s pretty much it. Coming up with a compelling use case for the stupidly powerful devices that will grace store shelves in 2012 is going to be difficult. People will no doubt buy these newer models, simply because having the latest piece of gear is a simple way to project wealth, that and no one wants an old and crummy phone. How will battery life be impacted? If Samsung manages to make something built on a 32 nanometer process, or smaller, then it’ll actually be comparable to the smartphones on the market today.
Look, we love speed, but we’d rather see improvements come from the operators. More bandwidth, more coverage, cheaper data, these are the things that’ll change the industry. Making an already fast smartphone twice as fast? Not so much.