Amid the furor over you-know-what this week, some genuine news that's actually pretty cool occurred. Symbian and ARM announced that future Symbian devices will support multiple CPU cores. (I don't know about you, but I am still waiting for quantum processors to take over the universe.) In the meantime, Symbian smartphones will get a serious boost in performance come 2010.Symbian says it will support ARM's symmetric multiprocessor technology, which will allow smartphones to access processing power on demand. In most instances, only one processor will be used to save battery life. But should more serious computing power be needed, the smartphone will be able to tap into the second processor to handle the additional calculations.

Noted Symbian:

In converged mobile devices, SMP CPUs consist of multiple cores which can be individually powered up and down by the operating system. This delivers high performance for high-end applications such as games, browser-based intelligent services, and media-rich applications such as video streaming or TV recording, while offering low power consumption when the device is idle or executing less performance-critical tasks. Symbian believes SMP support is a crucial step in continuing to deliver industry-leading battery life in a world where converged mobile devices offer increasingly performance-demanding features with constant battery capacity.

Of course, this support would be moot without an actual processor for the Symbian kernel to take advantage of. ARM also introduced the Cortex-A9 MPCore multicore processor. The two companies will work together with handset developers to build the technology into mobile phones and expect the first handsets to be available in 2010. Nokia and Sony Ericsson are the primary makers of Symbian-based smartphones.

I say the sooner the better, baby! I've tested too many smartphones that are underpowered when it comes to processor speed. Anything that will help speed up smartphones is welcome news.