Here is a link to the specs of the GS5. Samsung Galaxy S5 - Full phone specifications
So what are we using all that power for? You can’t edit videos very well or play high-end games with a touchscreen. I guess it could be used for distributed computing, but what other uses are there? You don’t need a 3Ghz dual-core processor to play Angry Birds or text.
Yeah, I’m not sure either. The most demanding apps right now are 3D games. I can’t think of any other app where CPU time is an issue.
I’ve my health app, that’s just data entry, the most demanding thing my social apps do is display the occasional funny animated gif.
I could see more powerful specs being important for some proprietary and professional level software. Maybe some MD stuff that can handle and quickly scale very high resolution xray scans? But that kind of thing is probably only useful ona tablet grade device, not a phone.
We’re moving toward a future where your phone -is- your computer. The charge station will work as a dock and the tablet/laptop you use on the couch will be a simple monitor display, like the tv is now. It’s just a matter of time. In the interim, we need to create smaller and more powerful components. The current state of phones is leading us up it. The nVidia shield tablet is a current example of streaming powerful games to a handheld tablet device. In ten years, that sort of thing will be the norm, only the computer we use to stream will be phone sized, not tower-based desktop sized. Meanwhile, all software installation and management is going to switch to the appstore model. It just makes life easier for everyone.
The real bottleneck for this state of development is actually America’s crappy wireless situation. If we can’t dislodge Verizon and Comcast, et al, from their stranglehold on wireless speeds and broadband coverage, it could set us back years. It won’t hold back development in other countries, of course, but it could have a tangible negative effect on our position as a technology leader.
When I upgraded from a crapphone to a GS4 a while bunch of stuff started running at decent speeds, so there is a lot of computation going on behind the scenes - for instance voice to text translation, mapping, etc. (No change in Wifi or anything like that, it was the phone.)
Where it will come in handy is when we get real personal assistants, who know our calendars and our location and can remind us of meetings and provide context sensitive help.
And streaming of course, though I don’t do that, since I don’t care to look on a small screen and use my Chromecast at home.
Modern processors have advanced power management - they continuously adjust their speed, and only run as fast as they need to. In fact, they aren’t even designed to operate at full speed continuously - if you forced them to, they’d overheat and break down. All that computing power is in reserve, only to be used in short bursts when needed.
Those short bursts of computing power are needed when loading apps, user interface animations (e.g. turning a page smoothly), rendering web pages, and numerous other routine tasks. These tasks get done quickly thanks to the fast processor.
p.s. - Is it a waste of potential to buy a car with a 200+ horsepower engine and 5 seats, if it’s mostly used to drive to work alone? Is it waste of potential to buy a food processor that you only use a couple of times a year, or some exercise equipment that gets used for a month and then spend the next 10 years in the attic? And if so, is it a problem?
The thing to remember is that software has not kept up with hardware. If anything, it’s gone backwards, because programmers no longer need to worry about getting every last drop of performance out of a very limited machine. They assume bandwidth, memory and storage are infinite, and program like it. Add a huge amount of graphical overhead that didn’t used to exist, and our computers aren’t much faster (subjectively) than they were in the 80s, except for a much improved ability to multitask. The main progress we’ve made in the last 30 years is in networking all our devices together.
The question is whether people ever use their smartphones’ full processing power.
Allow me to disagree (being someone who was around and making my living programming computers) in those 80’s.
In 1981 I purchased one of the first of the IBM PCs. I paid $5000 (in 1981 currency) for a computer with 512K of memory, two floppy disk drives, and an 80 character-per-second dot matrix printer. I believe the memory alone cost me $500.
The 8088 processor in that PC ran at (as I recall) something like 4MHz.
The 512K’s worth of RAM chips took up all of the available space in an adapter card.
A couple of years later I purchased a full-height, 5-1/4" 5MB hard disk drive for that PC for something like another $500.
(Yes, mainframes were more powerful than that. I made my living programming mainframes. But purchasing a mainframe was not something the average programmer could accomplish. And the storage costs and power bill would have been immense. 
)
Flash forward to today.
I just purchased a couple of 64GB flash drives for my PC from Amazon.com for $27 apiece. I would have had to string together a bit over 10,000 of those old 5MB disk drives to get that much storage for my original PC.
The CPU in my smartphone not only has more speed, computing power, and memory capacity than my old PC, it has more of each than the biggest mainframe you could purchase in the 80’s had.
You’re missing something. The reason that computers seem subjectively no faster is that the programs that people use respond in a reasonable amount of time - consumer type programs, of course. Extra processing power is eaten up by extra functionality. Getting performance is no as simple as you make it. You can usually tradeoff the memory footprint for performance. If you have a lot of memory, you code can run faster. I remember some games that required you to have a disk in the machine and read it for the next screen of data. Way slow compared to today.
If you have nearly instantaneous response time, it is a waste of effort to reduce it. Add more capabilities instead.
I read recently Larry and Sergey had to scrape together $15,000 to afford a single terabyte of storage in 1997. Nowadays that’s $100 at best buy.
If you compare a high-end smartphone to a budget model, or one generation to the next, the faster phone feels more responsive, and everything seems to run smoother. There’s less lag when you switch apps, open a new app, open new web sites, etc. I think this is sufficient proof that the full processing power is being used for these routine tasks.
Even on a high speed desktop, response times are far from instantaneous. Opening a new tab on my computer, fetching the new content and displaying it takes… about a second. It’s fast enough to be usable but to me at least, feels incredibly slow. Most real-world devices react instantly to our inputs, but computers mostly still feel sluggish (computer games are a big exception–they make a big effort to respond within 10 or 20 ms).
At any rate, it doesn’t matter if our processors are underutilized on average. What matters is if we’re limited by the peak performance–when launching a new app or the like.
I hope that at some point we’ll put truly fast processors in our mobile devices–ones that are utterly power limited most of the time. At full blast, they would drain the battery in minutes, if it didn’t melt the device first. But they wouldn’t run at full blast for minutes–only for a few milliseconds at a time when doing something important (a small supercapacitor would handle the power load and thermal mass would take care of the heat). The rest of the time they’ll be in a deep sleep, drawing negligible power.
Word Lens translator is one of those “holy crap, I’m living in the future” type apps that would benefit from more resources YouTube Demo. Image
Any pattern recognition is computationally intense. Voice recognition apps like Siri needs more resources than your phone can provide. Shazam is one of those apps where you put your phone up to the radio and it tells you what the title and artist of the song playing. There’s no reason you can’t have apps like that for things other than music. If you’re out walking and you’d like to identify a plant / car make and year/ manufacturer for a cool jacket someone’s wearing / whether this cool pebble is igneous or sedimentary.
A few weeks ago, I found caterpillars on my grape vine. I had to use descriptive terms on Google image search like a caveman to find out what it was and how to get rid of it. It would have been useful to turn on my phone’s camera and have it tell me the species and advise an insecticide.
Now those things can be handled by sending it off over the network to be sorted out by a mainframe somewhere, but live augmented reality stuff needs local processing.
Looking through the camera the phone could have located all the caterpillars and highlighted them for me with a bright red bullseye for manual disposal.
IKEAs augmented reality catalogue shows you how furniture would look in your house. Youtube Demo. Image
You could have the same thing for anything you’re looking to buy. Use your phone as you would a handheld mirror but have it add in an overlay showing how you would look with those new glasses, or a pixie haircut, or with a handlebar mustache.
Heaps of potential, but no one’s going to try to make those things until there’s a base of potential users with suitable hardware.
And yet you still type at the same speed. And if you are like the programmers I know, you do it inaccurately. 
In answer to the OP, of course smartphones are a “waste” of potential. Does the typical user need that much power to tweet selfies? No, but it’s there if they need it, and economy of scale in the production of the phones means it’s there for everybody, whether they need it regularly or not. It’s like scr4’s car with 200hp; you don’t use all of it every day but when you need it to clear your mental cobwebs, it’s there.
Really? I just opened a tab on mine, and it took a half second at most. And I have an early Vista computer, so it is relatively underpowered today.
Starting up clocks too quickly does terrible things to your signals. Switching on power too quickly does terrible things also. Thermal mass? Please point me to this, because the heat sinks on the parts I work on are truly impressive. Mobile processors don’t get to use heat sinks.
In any case, it would be better if we could convince the sellers to get rid of the crapware. As if that’s ever going to happen.
And if 90% of buyers wanted the fast car, a slower one might cost more, or almost as much.
Yeah, we often hear that slogan, but the notion behind it is the problem, actually. Most people rarely do serious computing “on the go”—on the bus, or at the beach, etc. In those places what they are almost always doing is either communications or dicking around killing time with games or social networking. When they do want to do serious computing, they prefer to have a full screen and keyboard. This is because of human physiology—something that’s not going to change for a while—so it doesn’t matter how small you can make the technology.
There’s no good reason why your computer/tablet and phone have to be the same device, and in fact it’s ridiculous to be using something as big as the S5 for a phone. I want to be able to stuff my phone in my pocket and forget about it when I don’t need it (and that’s why I’m sticking with the S4). I don’t want to be carrying around my phone the way so many people do now as if it were an infant or something, always in their hand, and always needing to have some place to put it.
The Galaxy needs to shit or get off the pot-- to decide if it’s going to be a tablet/computer or a phone.
You know it’s already possible to hook up a monitor and full-sized keyboard to a smartphone, right?
The idea of using a smartphone as the core of a desktop or other computing platform has been proposed many times and attempted in a few cases - Motorola had a smartphone that could dock into a laptop-style workstation and I think there was another offering comprising a smartphone that docked into the back of a tablet.
That doesn’t seem to be what people actually want though - seamless access to important data and suites of applications that maintain a consistent look and feel across multiple platforms seems to work better - that is, cloud storage and integration, standards-compliant browsers and file formats and companion apps and viewers for desktop applications - as well as fully cloud-based applications.
A smartphone converted to a tablet feels clunky - a smartphone converted to a desktop feels cheap and makeshift - jack of all trades - master of none.
Why try to have one device for all your computing when you can have a collection of devices, each one properly tailored and optimised for the mode of use - a slim tablet, a robust laptop or desktop, a compact phone, etc - each of which can be upgraded individually when and if required.