Engadget has an excellent write up on the hardware behind most of the Android devices to date, specifically the ARM cores. The article is written by Anand Shimpi, of AnandTech.com and it’s a great read on the reasoning behind the 528Mhz core speed SoCs found in most Android cell phones to date. It has some nice comparison in sizes and a link to the differences between ARM11 and Cortex A8 cores.
The bottom line is, the ARM11 chip is cheap to build. The Android OS is young and hard to get working on anything other than the standard ARM11 core SoC. However, with the advent of Android 1.6, it’s much easier now, so we should start seeing more variety of SoCs on Android devices soon. Such as the Acer Liquid.
