My contract on my Desire runs out the end of this month and I was going to hold out for the new Samsung Galaxy S 2 when it's released. However, after having a good think, I don't know if a dual core phone would be beneficial to me. I don't play games as I'm not interested in them, and I very rarely record video's. Would I be wasting my time getting a dual core phone as I imagine that they would be best for the things mentioned above.

So what do you do on your phone, if you just talk and text, no point for a dual core, if you do things like listen to music and go online etc the a dual cores the way to go. As far as I know, theres no software right now that won't work on a standard 1 core CPU.

Dual core isn't even needed for that though.

The blade would handle browsing and music at the same time with its 600mHz single core CPU.

Dual core may well be better for gaming, but thats about it. It has virtually no other benefits.

I really only surf the web, and, only listen to music when I can't be bothered charging up my Ipod which isn't very often.
However, what I am looking for in my next handset is more internal storage for apps as the Desire's is small. Also I'd prefer my next handset to play DIVX straight out of the box and to run on Android..

Dual core is required for 1080p video I've read somewhere

But I would not get hung up on if a handset was dual or single. More important it matches your requirements for everyday use.

S2 sounds good then its android and comes with either 16gbor 32gb internal memory

1080p is completely pointless on a mobile phone.

Dualcore's best application is going to be games, some very exciting ones coming up (see Android thread in the Mobile Gaming forum)!

It will be interesting to see how they do battery life -wise. The processors are supposed to have some better power management, but one never knows until it's tested in real life conditions.

And whoever wrote the article was wrong.

Video is best handled by the GPU, not the CPU, results in better video handling, a more repsonsive handset.

Agreed that it doesn't really matter if the device is single or dual core. Although there were dual CPU mobiles on the market a few years ago (N95 had dual ARM cpus).

Meant video recording rather than playback.

I meant both - video encoding and decoding. Both are better handled by the GPU, which often has dedicated hardware for the job. Which will often result in lower power drain than using something more general purpose and less efficient like the main CPU.