Tegra 3 Phone From Motorola? (Photo/Leak)

The fact that Motorola is working on a device powered by an NVIDIA Tegra 3 chip (aka Kal-El) would not surprise me for a second. After all, the Tegra-2 powered Atrix (check our Atrix Review) is one of the most powerful Android device on the market, so a sequel of some sort is a given – especially because Motorola can leverage some of the code written earlier. The question is: where is the development at, and most importantly, is this the first image of the next-generation Motorola smartphone?

From the photo, this looks like a cousin of the Droid X (don’t miss our Droid X review), and to be honest, even for a leak, the photos are pretty bad. Unless the person who shot the photos was being “tazzed” by Motorola’s security guards when he/she took it, this is pretty bad photography.  But bad photography make induce a good discussion: First, Motorola has had silver-colored test devices before. Secondly, if we look at the thickness of the device, this could mean that the internals and/or the battery are quite big. Why would the battery be big?

Quad-core! you might think. Probably not. NVIDIA is committed to keep the power envelope relatively stable, so I might bet 4G LTE (Verizon or AT&T?) or it could have a big retina display (the Atrix’s qHD is close enough). Or maybe it simply has a long battery life? To be fair, any of those would be really cool, and all would be delicious :)

In any case, the info is too thin to have some real leg, but it reminds us a couple of things: 1/ quad-cores will appear on Tablets this summer, NVIDIA said. 2/ Smartphones might show up as early as late this year, so 2012 will be the year of quad-core smartphones, that’s pretty much a given. Freescale and Qualcomm are also working on quad-core solutions, although NVIDIA is poised to come to market with a comfortable advance.

If you’re not familiar with the Tegra chips, check my Tegra 2 overview and the NVIDIA Kal-El (Tegra 3) primer that were published earlier this year. In the meantime, tell us what you think of quad-core phones? Does it seem like an important feature to you, or would you rather have something else first?

 

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Cellphones, Top Stories
Tags: Motorola, NVIDIA, quad core, Tegra 3