Most smartphones and tablets are powered by what are called ARM chips, which are made by a variety of companies including Apple and Qualcomm. ARM microprocessors use very little power compared to the Intel chips inside PC and Mac laptops, and this helps gives smartphones and tablets much better battery life.
Intel, however, has spent the past few years working on streamlining its chips and making them use less power. These efforts first bore fruit in the Intel Atom processor, now used in netbooks and webtop computers. And at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Intel showed off Atom-powered smartphones and tablets, and announced a partnership with a major Android device manufacturer.
Intel + Motorola devices on their way this summer
David Ruddock of Android Police has the details, as sparse as they are: The designs based on Intel's Medfield reference platform (or prototype of an Intel-powered smartphone) will have "actual devices finalized by this summer", with the devices to be available in the US market "shortly thereafter" depending on when the carriers buy them.
A sneak peek at the Intel smartphone?
Sam Sheffer of The Verge had a hands-on look at Intel's Medfield reference smartphone, running Android 2.3 Gingerbread. There's no word on how much it cost to make, or whether this prototype will bear any resemblance to the Intel smartphones coming later this year -- the Intel / Motorola statement only said that we can "expect specific device announcements in the coming months".
Specific smartphone specs
Whether or not it bears any resemblance to the final designs, the phone had extremely high-end specs. It used a single-core 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor, and had a 1080p HD video camera along with 16 GB of internal memory. The games Sheffer tested, including Angry Birds and a "device-optimized version" of 3d game Modern Combat 2 ran smoothly, and Intel claims up to 8 hours of 3G voice call time on the phone's battery.
Other upcoming Intel devices
Lenovo demoed an Intel-powered Ice Cream Sandwich tablet (which did not have hardware graphics acceleration at the time of the demo), and announced the K800, a smartphone that would be released in China.
In addition, Reuters' Poornima Gupta describes a "marketing barrage" surrounding the launch of numerous Ultrabooks, which are Windows PC makers' Intel-powered answers to Apple's MacBook Air laptops. Many of these devices bear more than a passing resemblance to the MacBook Air, both in terms of their thin profile and their overall design, although some are more expensive.
Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.
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