Intel announces new partners to come up with Chipzilla-based smartphones

PanARMENIAN.Net - Intel has announced three new partners that will soon offer smartphones based on Chipzilla's handset reference platform, and has provided more detail about its mobile-chip roadmap, The Register reported.

Execs from Europe's Orange, India's Lava, and China's ZTE took the stage with Intel CEO Paul Otellini at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to announce their upcoming smartphones. The three new partners join Lenovo and Motorola, who announced their Intel partnerships last month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Yves Maitre, Orange SVP for mobile multimedia and devices, said that his company's Intel-based handset would be a "true mass-market device", and not focused on the "elite" market. The Orange-branded handset, Maitre said, will be first available in France and the UK this summer.

Vishal Sehgal, cofounder and director of India's fast-rising Lava, now in only its third year of existence, noted that between 150 and 200 million phones are sold in his country each year. Until about two years ago, he said, the bulk of those sales were of feature phones, but smartphones are now catching on and should reach about 50 million annual unit sales in two years.

Lava wants its chunk of those sales, of course, and will launch the Intel-based XOLO X900 next quarter to compete in the nascent Indian smartphone market. The XOLO X900, Sehgal said, will be "all about speed", powered by a 1.6GHz "Medfield" Atom processor that he claims will provide "a browsing speed that is almost two times that of our latest competitors in India in the similar price range."

Appearing for ZTE was executive vice president He Shiyou, who provided little detail about his company's planned Intel phone, other than to say that it would be available in the "second half of this year," and that after that phone hit the streets, ZTE would follow up with an Intel-based tablet.