The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

Orange unveils Intel Atom smartphone

Keeps mum on San Diego's battery life, natch

Intel's first real threat to ARM will arrive in the UK next week in the form of the Orange San Diego smartphone.

It's not the first Intel smartphone on the market - Lenovo has literally just shipped that handset, the LePhone K800, in China this week.

Exactly like the K800, the 4in Orange handset sports a 1.6GHz 'Medfield ' Atom processor - the Z2460, which the chip giant announced at Mobile World Congress back in February - plus 16GB of Flash storage, a GPS pick-up and an 8Mp camera. Both Lenovo and Orange phones are made by China's ZTE.

Orange San Diego Intel Atom smartphone

It'll run Android, but only Gingerbread, not Ice Cream Sandwich. It has an on-board ARM emulator to allow it to run most Android apps on its x86 processor.

The handset measures 123 x 63 x 10mm and weighs 117g.

Orange didn't discuss the handset's other specs, most notably battery life, the point on which, if anywhere, Intel's inferiority to ARM will, if present, reveal itself.

Orange San Diego Intel Atom smartphone

Intel's Z-series may not gobble up power to the same extend as its netbook-centric Atom chips do, but power consumption has been the rock on which all past Intel smartphone chips have foundered.

Willing to give San Diego a go? PAYG folk will have to cough up £200 for the handset and at least £10 in top-up fees, which will come free for those willing to sign up for a £15.50 a month contract running for two years.

Orange San Diego Intel Atom smartphone

The catch: that contract deal is a special offer available through to 25 July. Orange didn't say how much the handset will cost after that date. ®

This is a non-starter for so many reasons.

1. ARM works. It is efficient and powerful enough for a phone.

2. Consumers don't care what CPU is in a phone. They care about battery life and performance. With Intel Atom you get a little more performance with much less battery life.

3. ARM is the one big contribution to the mobile tech world the UK has made. Intel want to control this market.

Stick with ARM, stick with a British success story!

8
1

'It has an on-board ARM emulator to allow it to run most Android apps'

I can't help wondering how much Intel is paying Orange and why anyone would buy this instead of a same speced ARM version which will have a longer battery life because it wont be running a software emulator.

7
0
Anonymous Coward

Re: 'It has an on-board ARM emulator to allow it to run most Android apps'

Because the majority of people don't know or care about the difference between arm and x86; as far as they're concerned they're all equal, cores and clock cycles are all that matter.

Ideally you'd need to be lobotomised to employ a more expensive, more power hungry chip to emulate a perfectly good processor in its own right. But hey-ho.

4
0
Anonymous Coward

"most android apps"... :S

2
0

wow kudos

Once again having more money than god and the best manufacturing facilities in the industry helps Intel. You know how much engineering it would take to make the x86 dog of an instruction set competitive with ARM in mobile? If Intel succeeds it will be very much in spite of the dog shit not even good for the 1970s x86 instruction set.

1
0

More from The Register

Microsoft reveals Xbox One, the console that can read your heartbeat
Upgrades Live service – and no always-on requirement
 breaking news
Review: Sony Xperia SP
The new mid-range marvel? Oh yes.
US boffin builds 32-way Raspberry Pi cluster
Beowulf cluster built for the price of a single PC
Dell's PC-on-a-stick landing in July: report
Wyse up, suckers, could this be a new set-side-stick?
Review: HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook
All roads lead to Chrome?
Borked your iDevice? Pay EVEN MORE to have it fixed by Applecare
Or scream at their hapless techies on their forums
HTC woes prompts 'leave now' tweet from former staffer
Chief product officer latest to bail from sinking mobe-maker
Euro PC shipments plummet into bottomless pit of DOOOOM
11th quarter of decline, 20pc drop on last year - Gartner