Curious about which processor will be used in the Samsung Galaxy S III? Rumors have suggested that Samsung was working on a quad-core 2.0 GHz processor. That sounds crazy, but there is a small chance it might actually come true.

Samsung already announced their upcoming dual-core 1.5 GHz Exynos 4212. This system-on-a-chip appears to be similar in design to the 1.2 GHz Exynos 4210 found in several Galaxy S II phones. But it is now built with Samsung’s advanced 32nm High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) low-power process, which promises “30 percent lower power-level over the previous process generation.” It looks like the smaller process technology allowed Samsung to crank up the speed of the GPU too, because they are promising “50 percent higher 3D graphics performance over the previous processor generation from Samsung.”

.........

At this week’s ARM TechCon 2001 John Kalkman, VP LSI, Samsung Electronics said, “I’m extremely excited to announce that Samsung will deliver a new Exynos processor in 2012 that leverages both the Cortex-A7 and big.Little technology to meet the crucial demands of always-on and always-connected computing.”

I don’t want to dive into all the technical details of big.Little processing again, but the basic concept is that you combine high performance cores along side low-power cores in order to achieve the best possible combination of performance and battery life.

Consumers Get Screwed
Ever since the iPhone turned every smartphone into a blank slate, the value of a phone is largely derived from the software it can run and how well the phone can run it. When you’re making a 2 year commitment to a device, it’d be nice to have some way to tell if the software was going to be remotely current in a year or, heck, even a month. Turns out that’s nearly impossible - here are two examples:

The Samsung Behold II on T-Mobile was the most expensive Android phone ever and Samsung promoted that it would get a major update to Eclair at least. But at launch the phone was already two major versions behind — and then Samsung decided not to do the update after all, and it fell three major OS versions behind. Every one ever sold is still under contract today.

The Motorola Devour on Verizon launched with a Megan Fox Super Bowl ad, while reviews said it was “built to last and it delivers on features.” As it turned out, the Devour shipped with an OS that was already outdated. Before the next Super Bowl came around, it was three major versions behind. Every one ever sold is still under contract until sometime next year.

Why Don’t Android Phones Get Updated?
That’s a very good question. Obviously a big part of the problem is that Android has to go from Google to the phone manufacturers to the carriers to the devices, whereas iOS just goes from Apple directly to devices. The hacker community (e.g. CyanogenMod, et cetera) has frequently managed to get these phones to run the newer operating systems, so it isn’t a hardware issue.

It appears to be a widely held viewpoint3 that there’s no incentive for smartphone manufacturers to update the OS: because manufacturers don’t make any money after the hardware sale, they want you to buy another phone as soon as possible. If that’s really the case, the phone manufacturers are spectacularly dumb: ignoring the 2 year contract cycle & abandoning your users isn’t going to engender much loyalty when they do buy a new phone. Further, it’s been fairly well established that Apple also really only makes money from hardware sales, and yet their long term update support is excellent (see chart).

In other words, Apple’s way of getting you to buy a new phone is to make you really happy with your current one, whereas apparently Android phone makers think they can get you to buy a new phone by making you really unhappy with your current one. Then again, all of this may be ascribing motives and intent where none exist - it’s entirely possible that the root cause of the problem is just flat-out bad management (and/or the aforementioned spectacular dumbness).

There are three kinds of smartphone owners in this world: nerds, would-be nerds, and what I lovingly call "civilians."

Let's start with the first group: The nerds (and that's probably a good 40 percent of the people who read this site, at least) want to hack their phones. They need to hack their phones. Can't help it, even. That's awesome. We love that. (Especially in the forums.) But there's also a certain amount of responsibility that comes along with hacking your phone so that you can have the latest and greatest ROM, whether it's the pinnacle of the Android Open Source Project -- CyanogenMod -- or a derivative, or something else altogether. If you're not willing to accept that responsibility, move on.

The second group -- would-be nerds -- like to tinker a little. Maybe root their phones to use certain apps, but not apply custom ROMs. That's a slippery slope. And you know what? Not everybody should root their phone. Again. Don't want to step up? No worries. Next paragraph.

And the last group. "Civilians." That's most everybody out there, who just want to rock Android because it's the hot OS and has a crapload of apps. And they're right for doing so. Android has a crapload of apps, and freedom that the iPhone doesn't. Now that the iPhone's on three of the four major U.S. carriers, it's certainly a more attractive offer, no doubt. I've chatted in airports with Sprint loyalists who refused to switch carriers. Sprint's likely just saved itself some serious churn for Q4.

There's actually a fourth group here. And it doesn't apply to many people. There are those of us who have to straddle these lines. Journalists. Techies, if you will. Maybe we want to use Android because it's the hot OS. Or maybe because we love the openy ecosystem. Or maybe we have to try different operating systems so we can speak intelligently about them. We need to know about rooting and ROMs, but we need to keep up with official updates, too. It's a real pain, unless you own two of everything.

But here's something that's no great secret -- even yours truly doesn't need root access in his personal life. I'm more in the "civilian" group in actual use than not. One reason is because most of our readers just want to make the most of their phones without the hassle. Rooting is awesome. Custom ROMs are awesome. But if you don't have the time to keep up with it all for the sake of being on the bleeding edge, we'd suggest sticking to the latter group. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Now that we've go that established ...

Why stop at June 2010?
I’m not going to. I do think that having 15 months or so of history gives a good perspective on how a phone has been treated, but it’s also just a labor issue - it takes a while to dredge through the various sites to determine the history of each device. I plan to continue on and might also try to publish the underlying table with references. I also acknowledge that it’s possible I’ve missed something along the way.