Nokia's CEO, Stephen Elop, has claimed during an interview with Chinese newspaper that multicore system on chips are just wasting precious battery life.

In an interview with the Yangcheng Evening News, Elop said "The so-called dual-core, quad-core mobile phones can only waste batteries, but not be useful for consumers all the time".

Nokia has started a competition called "Blown away by Lumia" in China that offers 1000 yuan (roughly £100) to smartphone users that can beat the newly released Lumia 900 in a number of cross platform tasks chosen by the participants themselves.

Elop claims that the Lumia 900 has never lost either to the iPhone or to other Android smartphones (not sure whether RIM Blackberry users participated as well) despite rivals sporting chips with two or more cores.

Some may argue that Windows Phone 7 runs very well on a single core processor like the Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8255, one on which Android may struggle.

But the more cynical will note that in its current iteration, Windows Phone 7 cannot even support multicore while Android - which is based on Linux - can.

Source : Yangcheng