According to details first leaked by site PocketNow, the Edge will be the first known smartphone to pack Nvidia’s powerful quad core Tegra3 hardware, the same chipset that was announced to be at the heart of the Asus Transformer Prime few days back. The chipset includes four powerful physical cores, clocked between 1.3 and 1.6 GHz, as well as dedicated graphics and a low-power companion core.
The rest of the phone’s hardware is top of the line, if not quite as evolutionary. The quad core CPU is backed by a full gigabyte of RAM, 32 GB of internal storage and an 1800 mAh battery. The screen is expected to be at that new smartphone standard, 1280 x 720, and will stretch to 4.7″, the same size as the HTC Sensation XL. There’s even support for Bluetooth 4.0 and Beats Audio.
With four cores at its disposal, the HTC Edge should be dramatically faster than the current lines of dual core smartphones available today. A leaked benchmark from the Asus Transformer Prime, which as we mentioned earlier uses the same chipset, broke 10,000 points in the AnTuTu benchmark at 1.4 GHz and 12,000 at 1.6 GHz. The Galaxy S2, the fastest dual core smartphone, came under 6,000 points in the same test.
The companion core also has a lot of potential for vast efficiency improvements. As it is a slow but very power efficient CPU core, reportedly clocked at a maximum of 500 MHz, it is only activated when the phone is in a low power state. This ensures that simple actions like playing videos or music, or remaining connected to cellular networks will require much less power than before, increasing battery life for typical usage dramatically.
On the software side of the table, the phone is expected to include new HTC marketplaces, including HTC Listen for music, HTC Read for books and HTC Play for gaming. HTC Watch for videos is also expected to start offering 720p content to match the new HD display. The Edge could also receive a new version of HTC Sense, 4.0, and will almost certainly launch with the new version of Android, version 4 or Ice Cream Sandwich.
The HTC Edge is expected to start shipping between March and June next year. If you were planning to pick up one of the new wave of HD dual core smartphones available this month, you may want to wait for the Edge – quad core is sure to become as essential as dual core is now.
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