Motorola, Lenovo Plan Intel-Chip Smartphones

[BillMorrow]

read all about it in the Wall Street Journal article in todays (Wed, Jan 11 2012) issue..

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 31374.html

By DON CLARK And SHARA TIBKEN
LAS VEGAS—Intel Corp. won a badly needed boost to its credibility in the smartphone market, as Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. and Lenovo Group Ltd. announced plans to introduce phones that use the company's chips.

The Silicon Valley giant, whose chips power most personal computers, has struggled for years to move that technology into smartphones. Those devices mainly use chips from companies that license designs from ARM Holdings PLC—which use little power and offer longer battery life in portable devices.

Intel believes it has just about reached power-consumption parity with ARM-based chips and has some performance advantages with a new product—code-named Medfield—that is based on a design called Atom and is used in low-end laptop computers. The company has combined that chip and others in a "reference design" for a smartphone—essentially a fully functioning mobile device that can help customers in designing their own products.

While Intel has been demonstrating that design, it hasn't been able to show that anyone planned to use it until a keynote speech Tuesday by Chief Executive Paul Otellini at the Consumer Electronics Show here.

Sanjay Jha, Motorola's chief executive, said it is embarking on a multiyear, multidevice relationship with Intel that will include tablet computers as well as smartphones. The company, which uses ARM-based chips for other devices, expects to be testing phones with carriers this summer and shipping phones soon afterward, Mr. Jha said. He didn't specify what markets it will initially target.

Liu Jun, a Lenovo senior vice president, showed off an Intel-powered smartphone, the K800, that he said will be available in China in the second quarter of 2012. "This phone has incredible multitasking performance without any compromise in battery life," he said.

Mr. Otellini's keynote speech had a series of other product demonstrations and disclosures. Dell Inc., for example, showed off its own entry in a new category of thin laptop computers Intel is promoting called Ultrabooks. The new machine, which starts at $999 and is called the XPS 13, closely resembles Apple Inc.'s popular MacBook Air. It has a solid aluminum chassis, but also a carbon-fiber base that brings its total weight to less than three pounds, said Jeff Clarke, Dell's vice chairman.

Neither of Intel's new smartphone partners exactly dominate the smartphone field. Lenovo is a relative newcomer to the market. Researchers at Gartner Inc. estimate it accounts for 1.7% of those products sold to end users in China, its home country, and holds only a 0.3% share of the world market.

Motorola, a cellphone pioneer, has struggled in recent years to compete with smartphone innovators such as Apple and Samsung Electronics Co. Its global market share in the third quarter was 3.7%, Gartner said, down from 4.7% a year earlier and putting it in ninth place. Motorola, which is being acquired by Google Inc., last week said its fourth-quarter sales would come in lower than expected.

But Scott Steinberg, head of strategic consulting firm TechSavvy Global, said Lenovo and Motorola can't be counted out yet, with the majority of consumers still expected to move to smartphones.

"The smartphone market is very fickle," he said. "While you can have success for a short period of time, so many handsets are introduced in the matter of six months to a year that it can make a difference." Mr. Steinberg added: "Yesterday's market leader is tomorrow's also-ran."

Tom Kilroy, Intel senior vice president of sales and marketing, meanwhile, said Intel isn't concerned that its first phone is in China, not the U.S. "The U.S. is an important market, but our efforts are getting phones and partnerships in play around the world," he said.

Mike Bell, an Apple and Palm Inc. veteran who is helping to lead Intel's smartphone-chip effort, said the company has been hard at work to make sure that software apps that run on Android-based smartphones powered by ARM chips will work on Intel-powered phones. He said the company is confident the two new customers will not follow the path of LG Electronics Inc., which also announced plans for an Intel-powered smartphone two years ago and never released it.

Mr. Otellini's speech concluded with an appearance by pop-music star Will.i.am, who has been consulting with Intel on technology projects including a new effort to make music in various cities. He discussed the way technology is changing the way music is created and enjoyed, with songs now being played on laptops rather than the stereos once dubbed "ghetto blasters."

"This is the new ghetto blaster," he said, cradling an Ultrabook on his shoulder

[ThinkRob]

Mr. Otellini's speech concluded with an appearance by pop-music star Will.i.am, who has been consulting with Intel on technology projects including a new effort to make music in various cities. He discussed the way technology is changing the way music is created and enjoyed, with songs now being played on laptops rather than the stereos once dubbed "ghetto blasters."

"This is the new ghetto blaster," he said, cradling an Ultrabook on his shoulder

Yet again, Intel demonstrates why old white men should not, under any circumstances, try to make a computer press release sound "cool."

[BillMorrow]

i WAS going to just post the critical part about lenovo, moto & intel but i did this from my thinkpad tablet and it was 5am so i left the idiot stuff and just copied the whole article..

[ThinkRob]

I don't think they're idiots, just...

Well you know those cheesy comedy B-movies that feature some 50s white guy trying to talk slang in an attempt to fit in with his kid that he adopted due to $FUNNY_HOLLYWOOD_QUIRK? Yeah, Intel's CEO kinda comes off like that.