Dual Core 1,5GHz WSXGA Mobile Phone

It has been a while since I mentioned Qualcomm here. They are pushing ahead on full throttle. A few days ago Qualcomm demonstrated a couple of devices powered solely by their latest Snapdragon chipsets. I posted a short entry on the Snapdragon platform two years ago. At that time it all was like a fantasy... Today the chip is ready and OEMs are building new devices based on it. The specs are impressive:

• Two 1,5GHz cores (my latest high end laptop has two 1,86GHz cores...)
• Built-in Bluetooth, WiFi and GPS (no GPS on my laptop!)
• Mobile broadband (of course, Qualcomm is a modem chipsets manufacturer)
• Accelerated WSXGA (1440x900) video (same as in the latest 15,4" MacBook Pro)
• 720p HD Video output
• 12 megapixel camera

Judging by the above, we will hardly be able to call what is built on the Snapdragon a cellphone. With high resolution screen and two application cores, it will be a powerful teleputer. And we should see a number pof these devices flood the netbook market, currently occupied by Asus EEE and the likes, based on the Intel Atom. And this will be the moment of truth for Intel, when it comes to battery optimizations and power consumption. A few years ago people used to say you had to be on ARM architecture to have really good battery run time. Things are different now. I am writing this on a Lenovo X200s. This laptop is based on the SL9400 Penryn Core Duo processor, and with widescreen WSXGA display can run for more than 9 hours on batteries. Full day, high performance computing at last. Let us wait and see what the Scorpion - powered netbooks will bring to the table.

By the way: with the X200s Lenovo has left Apple in the dust... Less than three pounds, 9 hours battery, superb widescreen, standard hard drive (meaning you can have like half a terabyte of storage at hand) and full connectivity: 3USB, LAN and even analog modem (who on earth uses that thing nowadays?).