When asked about its ongoing partnership with Microsoft on Windows Phone in a roundtable with journalists today, Qualcomm's Rob Chandhok noted that it's still "strong" and that the company has been "amazed" by how deeply and effectively Microsoft has been able to integrate and utilize Snapdragon's capabilities. We specifically asked about the possibility of seeing the Snapdragon S4 — Qualcomm's latest high-performance processor with two Krait-based cores — in the platform, to which Chandhok said that he didn't want to steal thunder from its hardware partners. "You should ask OEMs about that," he said, but added that "there's no structural problem" to doing it.

As it stands today (and with the latest announcements at MWC this week), Windows Phone doesn't support multicore processors like Qualcomm's S3 and S4, but the company has already committed to launching that capability in the future. It's notable that Chandhok specifically says that the S4 is ready to go, though — the S3 is also dual-core, and it stands to reason that Microsoft might choose to integrate a more conservative processor considering the platform's relatively pedestrian specifications (by 2012 standards).

Will S4s launch on Windows Phones this year? We'll see S4 handsets on Android in the next few weeks, so we'd hope so. Windows Phone "Apollo" is expected to be the most thorough revamp of the platform since version 7 was announced at MWC two years ago, so it might simply be a question of whether we'll see Apollo devices on shelves in 2012.