HTC Planning to Unveil Quad-Core Smartphones This Year

By Vincent Funaro, Christian Post Reporter Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Smartphone maker HTC is reportedly planning to unveil a new line of handsets that include a quad-core processing chip, according to a recent article in the Chinese language publication, Commercial Times.

The new smartphones will be powered by Nvidia’s quad-core Tegra 3 CPU and Qualcomm’s LTE enabled MSM 8906 SoC solutions. The company is expected to unveil the new high-end devices at this year’s Mobile World Congress event.

"HTC will maintain its lead against rivals by two months if it unveils Tegra 3-and MSM 8960-based smartphones in February and ships the models on time in April," said Alvin Kwok, an analyst at JP Morgan Chase to Commercial Times.

Some industry insiders have forecasted the smartphone shipments from HTC to stay flat or decline in 2012. But Kwok believes that HTC will continue to post a growth of 15 percent and 29 percent respectively, in shipments for 2012 and 2013.

ASUS also plans to release a quad-core smartphone this year named the ASUS PadPhone, that will feature the Nvidia chip as well. The company’s tablet, Eee Pad Transformer Prime will also utilize the Nvidia’s quad-core processing technology.

Two other devices expected to debut this year and run on quad-core processors are the Samsung Galaxy S3 and next generation iPhone. The new iPhone is also rumored to be a 4G LTE device.

The current line of high end smartphones mainly use dual-core processors and are extremely fast when it comes to performing various tasks on devices. Quad-core chips should bring speeds that have never been seen before on smartphones and tablets once they debut.

There seems to be a race taking place right now for who will launch a quad-core tablet and smartphone first. New tablet lines from companies such as Apple and ASUS are expected to include these processing chips as well.