According to details leaked by PocketNow, the Edge will be the first known smartphone to pack Nvidia’s powerful quad core Tegra3 hardware, which has four physical processing cores as well as a single low-power companion core.
The rest of the phone’s hardware is similarly impressive, with the quad-core 1.5 GHz CPU backed by a full gigabyte of RAM and 32 GB of internal storage. The screen is expected to be a 4.7" HD display at 1280 x 720, similar to the HTC Rezound and Samsung Galaxy Nexus. There’s even Bluetooth 4.0 and Beats Audio integration.
With four cores at its disposal, the Edge will be dramatically faster than dual core smartphones available today. A leaked benchmark from the Asus Transformer Prime, a tablet with the same CPU, broke 10,000 points in the AnTuTu benchmarking app at 1.4 GHz and 12,000 points at 1.6 GHz. That’s a significant leap over the dual core Galaxy S2 and Galaxy Nexus, both of which scored less than 6,000 in the same test.
The companion core is also an interesting edition; it is a slow but very power efficient core, reportedly clocked at a maximum of 500 MHz, that is meant to be activated when the phone is at a low power state. That means if you’re using your phone just for receiving texts, playing videos or listening to music, the battery life will be vastly improved.
On the software side of things, the phone’s expected to include the forthcoming HTC Sense 4.0, as well as new HTC virtual stores: HTC Listen for music, HTC Read for books and HTC Play for gaming. HTC Watch for videos will also start offering 720p content that’ll fit the new HD display. The Edge will likely also receive Android 4, code named Ice Cream Sandwich.
The Edge is expected to ship between March and June next year. If you’re planning to pick up one of the new wave of HD smartphones, you may want to wait for the Edge – quad core is sure to be as essential as dual core is now to run the latest and greatest applications.
Source: http://pocketnow.com/android/htc-edge-first-quad-core-phone-revealed-images
This article was written by William Judd. William writes for MobileFun.co.uk, the UK’s leading retailer of Krusell iPhone cases and the Kindle cover with light.