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.
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.
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.
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. ®
COMMENTS
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!
'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.
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.
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.
