The gadget watchers are enthusiastically watching for the first sight of a quad-core smartphone in the wild at next week’s Mobile World Congress. But the jury remains firmly out on whether small-screen, power sensitive gadgets will actually benefit from multicore, and from the consumer’s point of view, other aspects of handset chip technology will add far more to the experience, this year at least. The chip vendors know this, and while early mover Nvidia is sure to have partners showing its quad-core Tegra 3 in gadgets, most multicore excitement will be reserved for tablets. The watchwords for most of the silicon giants will instead be power efficiency, and new levels of integration. Those two themes will tap into the immediate…