2011 Is The Year Phones Go CRAZY

Samsung's Flagship is Just the Beginning

Nov 12 2010, 1:59pm CST | by Robert Evans

Next year is going to be a hard one to wrap your head around.

In my travel bag is an Eee PC with a 1.6 GHz processor and 1 GB of RAM. When I bought it a year ago, it was virtually identical to every other netbook on the market. Today, I happened across this Engadget article.

It spoils Samsung's new flagship smartphone for the first half of 2011. The processor is 1.2 GHz with 16 GB of storage and an 8 MP camera. It is capable of full 1080p display and is billed as a "universal e-book Reader". The display will either be 4.3" or 4.5" AMOLED 2. Kind of insane, especially when you compare it to the Eee PC.

The netbook has a slight processor edge, but it's worth considering the fact that the phone's 1.2 GHz processor is actually an SoC with a graphics processor that will undoubtedly be a step beyond the Galaxy S's Hummingbird. My Eee PC can't handle 1080p. This little phone can.

We can do a lot with our smartphones today, but in the next year their power is going to more than double. The jump from 524 MHz to 1 GHz was huge. The jump from 1 GHz to dual-core 1 GHz or 1.2 GHz is going to be astronomic.

And we'll have dual-core 1.5 GHz smartphone chips before the end of next year.

Any smartphone OS that wants to continue as a platform will need to cater to this added power. iOS and Android are both much more limited in capability than a desktop OS. The limits of processing power and memory have confined phones and smartphones to devices (primarily) of consumption.

Those limits are quickly disappearing.

A dual-core 1 GHz processor and 1 GB of RAM can handle a stripped-down thumb-drive version of Photoshop CS3.

Those more advanced applications, photo and video editing and full office program suites, will hit tablets first. But the jump from an 8.9" or 10" display to a 4.5"-5" display isn't huge. Developers haven't had much trouble scaling up for the iPad. Why not scale down for a dual-core Tegra superphone.

Smartphones are incredibly helpful companions today. By this time next year, they'll be well on their way to morphing into your everything. People will live out of these things, even more than they already do. The next iPhone may very well be able to act as a credit card.

By 2013 there will be 1.1 billion smartphones. That's also the year when pretty much everyone in the US and Europe will have access to some sort of "4G" network.

By that point, smartphones will be even more powerful than the dual-core Tegra machines we're so hyped for today.

How long before the bulk of people stop needing anything else?

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Robert Evans
The excitement about new smartphones, tablets and anything mobile drive Robert to unearth the latest rumors and developments in this fast moving space. He adopted 4G as soon as it become available and knows where the mobile market is going.
Robert can be contacted directly at robert@i4u.com.