The world's two most visually engaging smartphones -- the iPhone and the Pre -- share very similar cores based on ARM's Cortex A8 architecture, and with the newer, more advanced Cortex A9 in the pipeline, you can't help but let your mind wander a bit as you envision what twice as much computational power could bring to a handset. The A9 employs more advanced instruction pipelining than its predecessor, but the biggest news has to be the fact that it can pack two or more cores -- and ARM fully expects dual-core A9-based phones to hit in 2010. Of course, power consumption is the biggest constraint when it comes to this category of device, and while the company says that peak drai
