We’re here at CES 2012 and Intel is preparing to have a keynote later today to show off its smartphone ambitions but that didn’t stop it from showing off the reference smartphone at its booth. We got a quick look at its Atom for smartphones (it was previously dubbed “Medfield.”).
The handset itself is just a reference device to show off the processor but it packed 4.03-inch high-resolution touchscreen, 8-megapixel camera, 1.3-front-facing camera, 1080p HD playback through HDMI, WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC, and it was running Android 2.3 Gingerbread. If Intel is successful in getting companies to adopt its smartphone processor, you can expect it to land in a variety of devices and form factors.
This could mark a major moment for Intel and the smartphone market because Intel has been the dominant leader in computing processing for decades. Recently, the focus has been on delivering processing power but focusing on power consumption and that’s why ARM has been so successful in the mobile market.
Intel has had many missteps and false starts in the mobile market before, so let’s see if it finally can get it right.
