Last updated on July 23, 2020
Advances in processor speeds are heralded as some of the most important new features in smartphones. They can make user interfaces richer and more responsive and help improve battery life, particularly when the number of cores expand. But there aren’t abundantly compelling ways to demo these capabilities beyond games. And for that to be effective, you need to have strong strong developer support (from at least one developer). SunSpider benchmarks aren’t exactly thrilling, and it’s not like you’re going to run the battery down to show the improvement in longevity.
At today’s U.S. hands-on of the Optimus G, though, LG took a different approach, showing off how the Qualcomm S4 Pro quad-core processor (in conjunction with an advanced camera) could help enable some highly relevant photography tricks such as sampling from multiple photograph to correct mishaps such as closed eyes and motion blur. It also showed some less common scenarios, such as being able to take a phone call or engage in other activities as the phone played a video on the television via a Wi-Fi connection and (less impressively) show slide previews and speaker notes while a presentation was running on that TV (just like a real grown-up laptop). Or Blackberry Playbook.