Ti Announces OMAP 4 for Smartphones and MIDs in 2011 and beyond.

That’s not me adding the ‘MID’ label there, that’s exactly what Texas Instruments are saying as they announce the OMAP 4 series of platforms.

OMAP 4 is built using the next generation of ARM Cores, Cortex A9 MPCore, which allow for dual-core builds.

Helping Smartphone and Mobile Internet Device (MID) manufacturers shape the future of the mobile market with innovative devices, Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) (NYSE: TXN) today announced the new OMAPâ„¢ 4 mobile applications platform. The OMAP 4 platform delivers new, stunning, multimedia-rich user experiences such as 1080p video record and playback, 20 megapixel (MP) imaging and approximately a week of audio play time. The new platform provides significant improvements in performance and play time compared to today’s most popular Smartphones, with 10x faster Web page loading times, more than 7x higher computing performance, 6x higher video resolution, 10x better graphics performance and 6x longer audio play time.

The last time I spoke to Ti, their definition of MIDs was slightly wider ranging than the average definition out there and included voice-enabled sliders, tablets and netbooks so you can see why they are giving it such weighting.

Putting the figures into perspective from the above excerpt, I’d say they’re talking about performance levels well above the baseline 800Mhz Silverthorne Atom from Intel. Maybe something around the 1.3Ghz Atom level that we see today. Of course that’s an educated guess. Real-world speed really depends on software and ergonomics in addition to raw power.

There’s a lot of information to digest on the press release and accompanying white papers but don’t worry too much unless you intend to use it in multi-million quantities , it’s initially aimed at large volume wireless carriers and won’t be in production until late 2010. For you, me and the rest of the potential customers out there, we’ve still got the OMAP 3 platform to look forward to. Now where’s that new Nokia Tablet?