Hear that distant sound? It’s the beat of the quad-core drum. Samsung, HTC and Apple will almost definitely all be showing off quad-core mobile processors in 2012, but is there actually any need, or are handset manufacturers merely locked in an industry pissing competition?
First off, a short disclaimer: progress in mobile devices is fantastic and should never be purposefully quelled. But in some areas I worry that hardware is now advancing faster than we can find a need for it to do so. The infrastructure is lacking and the processes phones are currently put through just don’t demand as much as they’re about to be stuffed with.
Let’s take an example: The Samsung Galaxy S3, which is likely to debut at Mobile World Congress in the spring, is rumoured to have an Exynos 4412 quad-core processor, with each of its four ARM Cortex-A9 cores running up to 1.5GHz. That’s a lot of raw power, but it’ll largely be wasted, and here’s why:
When was the last time you really had to wait for an app to load? Or felt jarred as you scrolled between homescreens? The answer, unless your pocket houses something pre-2011, is that you haven’t. And you don’t. If you’ve got a dual-core phone then you won’t have any problems with anything, but even single-core handsets run like liquid silk if their power’s managed well enough by the OS.
There’s nothing really going on to challenge it. I spend my time running apps like Facebook and Twitter, which rely more on download speeds than actual hardware grunt as it is. That’s applies to pretty much anything you ask a phone to do on a day-to-day basis; there’s nothing baked in to the iPhone 4S that runs any faster than it did on the iPhone 3G.
Even Siri would work fine on an older handset if it were allowed. The only real difference between those handsets is in download speed, which is entirely aside from how many cores your processor’s got.
The increased power may make those applications and processes run a tiny bit faster, but there must be a terminal velocity in that the phone can only move as fast as you can. I can sit and wizz around a Samsung Galaxy Nexus with no noticeable lag affecting my user experience whatsoever, so I fail to see what the race for quad-core processors is really about other than for the benefit of marketing.
It’s a moon mission, really. We’re edging towards a time where processing cores are the new megapixels; if you can slap a bigger number on the box than that of your rival, you’ll probably shift a few more units – even if that number pertains to unnoticeable differences in use, or if the consumer doesn’t really know what any of it means.
The only real difference the extra power gives you is in gaming. There, I’ll concede that added brawn does produce genuine next-level performance. All well and good if that’s what you’re buying a phone for, but then you can always fall back onto the old argument that graphics don’t equal gameplay. In most cases, the closer you get to a console experience on a phone the less engaging the game becomes as a result of ludicrously fiddly touchscreen controls. Angry Birds has sold half a billion copies, and runs like a dream on a single-core Windows Phone.
But I’ve gone off piste a bit. The basis of this piece isn’t whether or not shoving a quad-core processor into a handset is a good or bad thing. This is about the fact that, as good as extra technology is, we’re genuinely not ready for it. We need to be, but we’re not, because the way we use mobile phones hasn’t yet changed in a profound enough way to put this power to any real use.
The answer is altogether more radical than just speeding things up. The Motorola Atrix is, for my money, the most pioneering phone of the last few years. It was among the first handsets to boast of a dual-core processor, but unlike the rest of the pack it went further than just sticking that number in its spec sheet.
Motorola, bravely, looked at that top-flight tech and thought: “Right, what can this actually help you achieve?” The result was the lapdock and desktop dock, which aimed to turn the phone into an actual computer.
The execution may have given less than polished results, but Motorola was thinking ahead of its time. It was a proof of concept. It was pointing to where mobile phones will inevitably end up: replacing computers altogether. Look at the concept the Atrix was pushing for and look past its clunkiness and lagginess: the basic idea that your mobile phone can be powerful enough to offer a solid computing experience, store all your data in the cloud and go with you wherever you go without the need for a laptop is surely an idea worth following up.
If you move this technology on about 2 or 3 years we’ll get to the point where we’ve all got a mobile phone with an 8-core processor and as much RAM as your average laptop. When we get there, the ability to use that hardware to anywhere near its potential will undoubtedly lie in a general change in computing infrastructure – the places in which you’ll be able to use that kind of mobile powerhouse need to be all-encompassing.
We’ll need a universal standard of dock. We’ll need to be able to go to the office or to Starbucks, dock our phones into a monitor and keyboard and pick up where we left off. For it to take off it’ll require an industry-wide abandoning of both desktop PCs and laptops, and for the public to be told plainly and simply: this is what’s gonna happen from now on.
The infrastructure for this kind of mobile computing needs to be widespread, but it’s not. It’s nowhere near. Probably because nearly every company that makes smartphones also makes computers, and who’d want to cannibalise their own products?
As it is, we’re all sitting there watching manufacturers offload better and better phones, but with scant disregard for their actual use. They’re locked in battle; all we can do is hope that at some point one of them stops dicking around and wakes up to the fact that we’re all sat playing Angry Birds on phones more powerful than the human brain.
