2011 is shaping up to be the year of the dual-core smartphone, with Tegra 2-based models on their way, and now Nokia announcing its intent to ship smartphones with dual-core processors near the end of the year.

The company’s revelation came as part of a presentation at the International Mobile Internet Conference this week, touching upon its plans for the coming year. Before Nokia gets into dual-core devices, it intends to ramp up the clock on its single-core models, aiming to reach 1GHz by mid-2011.

That’s already putting Nokia well behind the curve, at least when compared to smartphones running on non-Symbian platforms. Thankfully, it plans on quickly moving past that milestone and straight into multi-core territory. Nokia couldn’t guarantee its first dual-core handset would see the light of day in 2011, reserving the right to wait until early 2012 to release the device.

Besides the CPU upgrades, Nokia’s plans for 2011 include beefing up its handsets’ graphics memory, offering a cameraphone with optical zoom, and software improvements like HTML5 support and a more customizable home screen.

Source: Computerworld

Via: ubergizmo