A gigahertz. That is the number everyone has been repeating since Toshiba put the TG01 on a stand in Barcelona in February, and it is the least interesting true thing about the chip inside it.
It is a real number. Most of the phones you can buy today are running somewhere near half that, so doubling the clock is not nothing, and Qualcomm has earned the headline. But clock speed is the specification that survived the desktop era because it fits on a sticker, and dragging it into phones tells you almost nothing about whether the device in your hand is any good.
What matters is the thing I was banging on about when this platform was still a codename nobody would confirm: the modem and the application processor sitting on the same die under one power manager. That bet has now shipped. Fifteen manufacturers had signed up by the end of last year, which is not a number you reach on clock speed alone, because every one of those companies has an engineering team perfectly capable of reading a datasheet and noticing that the interesting part is the integration.
The TG01 is where the argument gets awkward. It is a genuinely startling object, a 4.1 inch screen on a phone that is mostly screen, running the fastest thing in the category, and it is running Windows Mobile. All that silicon, and the software on top of it is the same resistive stylus platform that has been slowly failing to modernise for five years. It is the fastest phone nobody I know wants.
That is not Qualcomm’s fault and it is very much Qualcomm’s problem. They have built a part that is waiting for an operating system worth its power budget, and the two candidates are both moving. Android is on its second meaningful release this year and is still rough in ways that show. Apple keeps its silicon to itself. Whoever gets there first turns this chip from a specification into a product, and Qualcomm does not control the timing of either.
The part I am watching more closely is the netbook plan announced late last year, dual-core parts aimed squarely at Intel in a category Intel invented by accident. Qualcomm going after x86 in laptops sounds ridiculous written down. It sounded ridiculous when ARM turned up in phones too, and Intel lost that one so completely it has more or less stopped pretending otherwise.
I would not bet on the netbooks. I would bet on the phones, and I would stop quoting the gigahertz, because the moment a competitor matches it the number stops meaning anything and the integration still will.