Qualcomm Spectra adds a "Kinect" to smartphones

After the dual camera craze, the natural evolution for smartphone cameras is to have a real 3D camera, and Qualcomm is already working on it, showing on mobile devices will soon be able to have an embedded "Kinect".

Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 820 will have to play it cool

After the Snapdragon 810 heating fiasco, Qualcomm can't afford to make the same mistake twice. The new Snapdragon 820 promises to be 35% faster than the 810, and heat a lot less.

Snapdragon S4 Pro Shows us What's to Come

Qualcomm is readying a reference developer tablet using their new quad-core ARM Snapdragon S4 Pro CPU and a Adreno 320 GPU, and it seems like we have a winner. A winner that shows us what we can expect for the next generation of mobile devices.

This $1299 might be consider too expensive for the general public, but its purpose is to provide developers with everything they can expect to have in the next generation of tablets. Although its 10.1" LCD has only a 1280x800 resolution (we would expect a FullHD screen by now), everything else is as you'd expect - and more. You'll find the speedy 1.5Ghz Snapdragon S4 Pro quad-core CPU (soon to reach 2Ghz), the Adreno 320 GPU, 2GB Ram, 32GB Flash, 13MP main camera, accelerometer, gyroscope and compass, ambient light/proximity/temperature/pressure sensors, microSD slot, microUSB, IO connector with USB and HDMI adapters - and even less usual stuff like a fingerprint reader and 7 microphones for surround sound recording.

When put to the test, the S4 Pro ranges from "fast" to "incredibly fast" leaving all the current contenders in the dust. In some tests, the S4 is over twice as fast as Nvidia's Tegra 3; and even the latest quad-core Exynos CPU by Samsung (used in the latest Galaxy S3) can't keep up with it.

That makes us wonder how developers will put all this power into good use, for next year's batch of tablets.