Intel's finally getting its foot into the smartphone market door: a date has arisen for the debut of the first device from the much-discussed Motorola/Intel mobile partnership.
The two companies have announced a joint smartphone launch event for September 18, where Motorola will unveil Android-powered phone powered by Intel chips.
The event will be at London's Victoria House. VentureBeat picked up that the Twitter hashtag for the event, #motoedge, looks to give away the phone.
The move is huge for Intel as it bucks into territory dominated by other processor producers, like ARM. Intel CEO Paul Otellini said in May the smartphone's his company powers will receive mobile version of Intel's Atom processor.
Matching up with Motorola
The partnership between Intel and Motorola, first announced at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, is one of the few that Intel's been able to acquire in an ARM-dominated mobile market.
The reason? Typically, ARM-powered devices are built for battery-savings and overall power efficiently, whereas Intel's x86 chips - while still head nodding to energy-savings - are generally thought to be geared more towards performance than power.
The big question, in this case, is whether Intel will be able to adequately balance its brand-new Medfield mobile processors between performance and efficiency to best compete against Cortex-A15-powered devices, expected to arrive in late 2012 or early 2013.
At the very least, however, the appearance of a second player in the ARM-driven market could be seen as an overall benefit for consumers - competition breeds lower prices and stronger performance, after all.
Wirelessly charged
In other company news, Intel's also touting a partnership with Integrated Device Technology (IDT) to bring mobile wireless charging technology to laptops - a one-two punch of mobile news that's a good foothold for Intel in an the otherwise ARM-dominated market.
But while the date for the Motorola/Intel smartphone reveal is set in stone, the launch of Intel's new wireless charging technology is not.
While IDT is allegedly good to go as far as getting the "resonance wireless charging technology" to work, there's no explicit timeline as to when the feature might be making it to future laptops.
IDT hopes to be able to provide a "full chipset solution for reference design work," as reads an Intel blog post, by early 2013.
Intel teased recently that its partnership with IDT will allow the company to develop wireless mobile charging solutions that aren't bound to today's conventions - namely, having to place one's device on a charging "mat" or other inductive-driven charging.
While Intel's mum on the details, its description of the capabilities of its wireless charging solution suggests that the technology will could match the speeds of a typical USB-based charging.
In Intel's example, a user would only need to fire up the related charging software on his or her laptop and place the supported device approximately one inch away.
"Within an hour," Intel's Dan Snyder wrote in the blog posting, "you have recharged your smartphone sufficiently to make it through the afternoon.
Source : techradar[dot]com
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