Next-Generation Qualcomm Snapdragon Devices Coming This Year
We were easily swallowed up by all of NVIDIA’s and their partners’ exciting news and product announcements surrounding Tegra 2 this year, but you may have forgotten that they still have competitors. Qualcomm’s trying to keep pace – as we know – and they’ve confirmed to everyone that their next-generation chipsets are nearly ready for primetime. We’ve heard several OEMs have had them for some time now, with general kits being shipped a bit later in Q1.
They’ve told us to expect devices starting this year, in fact. So what exactly can Qualcomm provide? A dual-core chipset – clocked anywhere from 1GHz to 1.5GHz – with all of the necessary hardware requirements to handle 1080p video encoding/transcoding/playback/whatever, HDMI, advanced graphics capabilities, and more – nothing too surprising, actually. And we expect these next sets to be equipped with the Adreno 305 GPU, which is said to rival current-generation console graphics.
Acer, Pantech, and others are said to be among the list of manufacturers looking to pass NVIDIA up, but others weren’t ruled out. We know LG has expressed tons of interest in Tegra 2, and HTC has yet to make their move. As for Samsung, you may as well just rule them out – they have their own chipset to worry about, and if they were going to go with someone else’s configuration, we imagine they’d choose NVIDIA over Qualcomm.
I’m hoping to see the fruits of Qualcomm’s labor starting at Mobile World Congress in mid-February. [via Fierce Wireless]