News is coming out of Chinese newspaper Commercial Times that HTC is planning to launch an unnamed quad-core tablet and two phones, the quad-core HTC Edge and the dual core HTC Ville. The announcement is expected to be made at the Mobile World Congress in February. The Barcelona-based conference has long been a staging ground for HTC announcements, with the HTC Flyer announced there last year.

The devices will pack a Nvidia Tegra 3 (Kal-El) System-on-Chip, boasting four cores clocked at 1.3 to 1.6 GHz. The system also includes a highly efficient companion core suitable for low-intensity activities that’s clocked at 500 MHz. This should allow much lower power consumption during tasks like playing music and watching videos.

 

The HTC Edge is also expected to be launched around a similar time, and may yet be the first phone to include the quad-core Tegra 3 chipset. The Edge looks to be quite a mighty phone, packing an HD optically laminated screen, 32 GB of internal storage and a capacious 1800 mAh battery. The other phone, the HTC Ville, is expected to be HTC’s counterpoint to the Galaxy Nexus. It will ship with Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest version of Android, and will include no physical buttons on its 8 mm frame.

These two quad core devices from HTC are expected to have similar specifications to two other recently announced or leaked tablets, the Asus Transformer Prime and a Lenovo tablet. The Transformer Prime and the unnamed Lenovo tablet are both expected to ship before the end of the year, but the HTC tablet may be late to the party. It’s set to arrive before the release of Microsoft’s Windows 8, which is currently scheduled for the third quarter of 2012.

As these leaks continue to occur, it’s looking more and more likely that Tegra 3 will become the new standard for high-end tablets and phones in late 2011 and early 2012. This should encourage developers to write apps to take advantage of the platform’s power, as well as encouraging Google to continue to emphasise multi-tasking in further releases of Android.

If you were planning on picking up a tablet soon, I’d strongly suggest waiting until the new generation hits at the end of this year.

 

 

 

This article was written by William Judd. William writes for Mobile Fun, the UK’s leading online retailer of the accessories for the Razr, including the Motorola Razr car holder, the Motorola Razr cover and the Motorola Razr charger.

 

 

(pictures from http://www.androidauthority.com  and http://pocketnow.com