[doogie]

Now hang on, phones don't quite work like your PC does, recall that we bought smartphones that ran at 528MHz for a couple years (Touch Pro, Touch Pro 2, Imagio), prior to that, 400/416MHz (Mogul, Apache).

Consider now that in order to make the experience of a smartphone OS and its associated applications somewhat similar on a variety of devices, the internals have to be same/similar, and proven. So today you have a bunch of devices that run some Qualcomm processor clocked at 1GHz, perhaps more efficiently than the one last year. You buy the "high end" today and you get LTE (which is indeed a battery destroyer, I have a Thunderbolt here that eats itself alive over the course of 7 hours)..

Or you get dual-core 1GHz, which I haven't had the opportunity to try yet. It brings up the same sorts of questions for me as when desktop PCs started doing SMP, does the software properly run multithreaded, does it take advantage of that additional processor?

So bottom line as an application developer, you have to go for the mainstream, the 1GHz/512MB device with a 3.5-3.8" screen and 3G data/possibly 802.11n.