If you needed more proof that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 is going to dominate the smartphone market later this year, then here it is: even Acer is going to use it in their upcoming Acer Liquid S2 flagship smartphones, that will arrive later this year, and will also have a 6″ screen, 2GB of RAM and 16 GB of storage.
On the leaked listing that showed up on GSMInsider you can also see something called the “K OS” that is coming with the phone. This could mean Android KLP, but the launch date makes very little sense then. First off, the August release date that is showing there may be only for the unveiling of the phone, not the release date, and second, even a late 2013 launch with KLP seems pretty unlikely.
The next Nexus phone is going to have KLP most likely, but I can’t see any other phone (except the Google Play Edition phones, of which LG wants no part of) will be upgraded to KLP this year. So don’t get your hopes up for this device to come with KLP this year.
Qualcomm has managed to win a lot of contracts for products this year, which is starting to worry me, because it looks like they’re already using their increasingly dominant position to refuse to release the binary blobs for their Adreno GPU inside Nexus devices, which forced the AOSP maintainer to quit.
The ARM chip market has been extremely competitive so far (much more than the PC market), and the last thing we’d want as customers is for Qualcomm to become another “Intel” in the mobile chip market, and dominate 80 percent of the mobile chip market. Qualcomm seems to be rapidly heading that way, unfortunately.
Granted, they’ve been releasing some very solid products, not just in terms of performance and energy efficiency, but also in terms of integrating as many LTE bands as possible in their SoC’s, but we should be more worried about the long term implications of having one chip company dominating the mobile chip market.
Hopefully, Samsung will finally get serious about its chip business next year, once it launches its own CPU core, and the same goes for Nvidia with Tegra 5 and Tegra 6. We should have at least 3 good competitors at the high-end, and more at the low-end and mid-end (where Mediatek seems to dominating right now).