By the end of this year you could be playing with a quad-core Android phone courtesy of Fujitsu. We just played with the company’s newest prototype. It’s fast, but what would you do with all of that power?
The prototype has an 1.2GHz NVIDIA quad-core Tegra 3 processor a 1280×720 4.6-inch TFT LCD. The prototype we played was juiced with 4GB of RAM, but Fujitsu says that any production model would likely have 1GB of RAM, putting it on par with the most powerful phones out there — heck this thing is more powerful than a lot of the tablets out there. The phone could see a release in Japan as early as this (northern) summer in which case it would run Android Ice Cream Sandwich. The phone also has a 13.1MP camera.
Fujitsu wouldn’t actually let us hold the phone on our hands, but we did get to play games on the big screen with it. The phone was connected via a mini USB to HDMI and we played the game using a Logitech controller. The performance was excellent. Graphics were smooth and accurate. Gameplay didn’t lag at all. It felt playing a game on a console.
With a processor this powerful, Fujitsu clearly envisions the phone hooked up to a TV for gaming or other processor-taxing functions. The main question that remains, is what apps if any would require that much power. Most apps run relatively well on the existing single-core and dual-core phones on the market. Then again, developers move very quickly. If you get excited about four cores, well, developers will too. Fujitsu’s apparent position on the matter: If you build it, they will come.