ARM promises dual-core phones by next year

Every phone is set to become a smartphone, as even lower-end handsets become powerful enough to run full-sized operating systems, according to British chip designer ARM.

As the company ramps up its high-end offerings, even low cost handsets will have enough power to run fully-fledged operating systems such as Google's Android.

"You'll be buying a smartphone by default," Rob Coombs director of mobile solutions for ARM told IT PRO. "These will use an open source OS, [giving] access to millions of lines of code available for free."

We'll also see dual core processors in high-end phones by the end of next year, according to Coombs. He said this will give phones more headroom for complex tasks such as speech recognition.

"It's useful if you want speech recognition, or you want to push out to higher resolutions," he said. "We're also helping Adobe optimise for Flash. There have been many man hours put into that."