Hasta La Gadget!

Intel’s attempt to get inside cellphones will take just a little bit longer.Though the company had hoped to get smartphones with Intel chips in the hands of consumers this year, it is likely that the first phones powered by Intel will debut early next year.

Mobile handsets featuring Intel processors are likely to be shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in next January or at the Mobile World Congress conference in February.

“That would clearly be the window of opportunity for us,” Intel CTO Justin Rattner told Wired.com.

In May, Intel showed its new chip codenamed Moorestown for mobile devices. The company said the chip would be extremely power efficient, while offering enough processing power for features such as video conferencing and HD video.

Though Intel’s chips power most desktops and notebooks, the company’s silicon is glaringly absent in the fast growing category of smartphones and tablets. Worldwide, companies shipped 54.7 million smartphones in the first quarter of 2010, up 56.7 percent from the same quarter a year ago, estimates IDC.  Most talked about smartphones today from companies such as Motorola and HTC that are powered by chips based on Intel rival ARM’s architecture.

Intel has tried its hand in the phone-chip business earlier, with little success. In 2006, the company sold its XScale ARM-based division to Marvell. More recently, it tried to pitch its current generation of Atom processors to smartphone makers but the chips were not accepted because they consumed too much power for phone use.

Moorestown processors can beat the competition, says Intel. Rattner hopes the chips will also go beyond smartphones and into tablets.

So far, Apple has sold more than 3 million iPads in just three months since the product’s launch. Apple uses its own chip for the iPad.

Rattner says tablets using Intel chips are on their way and will be available to consumers by the end of the year.

“Almost all the tablets at Computex (a trade show for PC makers held in Taiwan every year) were Intel-based devices,” he says. “There’s a tremendous amount of interest and activity in the tablet space.”

Yet Rattner says he is “cautious” in his hopes for the tablet market. Rattner does not own an iPad, but has an iPhone 3G S.

“A lot of people are saying that the tablet is the next netbook,” he says. “I am not so sure.” More than 85 million netbooks have been sold, since the devices became popular about three years ago.

Netbooks appealed to consumers because of their price, portability and their ability to offer a computing experience comparable to a notebook, say Rattner.

“With tablets, their utility remains to be seen,” he says. “The first generation of tablets including are missing some important things. The absence of a camera is especially baffling in the iPad.”

The iPad may have its flaws but for consumers it’s the only choice for now — unless you count the very flawed JooJoo.

Some tablet makers were waiting for Moorestown chips but Intel has already started production and handing it to manufacturers, says Rattner.

“Apple’s gotten everyone’s attention and they have set that bar,” he says. “For others now coming to market, they have to have something substantially more capable than the iPad and it is going to take time to get there.”

Photo: liewcf/Flickr

See Also:

• Why Intel’s Processors Aren’t Big on Cellphones
• Next-Gen Cellphones Will Run 1080p Video, 3-D Games
• Intel Introduces Ultra-Low-Power Processor for Smartphones
• Intel, LG Partner To Create New Mobile Internet Device

The original Droid made a powerful statement. Actually, make that statements, plural: for Motorola, it was the largest single affirmation that it was going all-in with Android (after having already released the far less memorable midrange CLIQ on T-Mobile) and that it could play in the very highest rungs of the smartphone elite. For Verizon, the Droid was the carrier’s very first Android device, period — announced to great fanfare in collaboration with Eric Schmidt and crew — serving as a pretty spectacular exit from the Windows Mobile / BlackBerry doldrums that the carrier’s smartphone lineup had historically suffered. By almost any measure, the phone went on to serve its purpose; it let customers (and potential customers) know that Verizon could release a “cool” phone, and they responded. The Droid’s an unqualified success. Today, Verizon’s involvement in Android has never been greater, and Motorola — by all appearances, anyway — seems to be on its way back from the brink.

Time stops for no phone, though, and we’re now halfway through 2010. Motorola’s success as a competitive phone manufacturer is ultimately going to depend not on its ability to produce a single hit, but to produce a never-ending string of hits, each better than the one before it. It’s a tall order — and that’s exactly where the Droid X comes into play. Featuring a 4.3-inch WVGA display, 8 megapixel camera with 720p video capture, a reworked user interface, and a significantly improved processor, this phone apes the first Droid in at least one critical aspect: its ability to immediately steal the spotlight from anything else in Verizon’s lineup. Specs don’t tell the whole story, though, so let’s dig in and see what this beast is all about.

Continue reading Motorola Droid X review

Motorola Droid X review originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 01 Jul 2010 12:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We knew this was coming, but starting today, every citizen of Finland has the legal right to a 1Mbps broadband connection, meaning that providers are now required to make the connections available to everyone. The government of Finland has also promised to make good on its goal of getting every citizen with a 100Mbps connection by 2015, saying that they now consider internet access a basic requirement of daily life. We’re with you on that one, we promise.

Finland the first country in the world to make broadband access a legal right originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 01 Jul 2010 12:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well, we can’t sugar-coat this one — when a major Nokia / Symbian site like Symbian-Guru decides to close up shop “thanks to Nokia’s consistently piss-poor hardware choices and Symbian’s lack of ability to even remotely compete in terms of features,” there’s not much else to say. It sounds like shutting things down was at once both incredibly easy and incredibly hard for site heads Ricky Cadden and Rita El Khoury, who’ve both penned long letters about their decision — you can tell both of them remain incredibly passionate about Nokia and Symbian, but that they’ve been disappointed by mediocre handsets like the N97 one time too many. Better hope Nokia can take that MeeGo for handsets pre-alpha we saw yesterday and whip it into something good, we suppose. You should really hit the source link and read the entire post on Symbian-Guru, but we’ve collected some choice quotes after the break.

Continue reading Symbian-Guru shuts down, says Nokia is ‘losing hard’

Symbian-Guru shuts down, says Nokia is ‘losing hard’ originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 01 Jul 2010 12:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Remember that so-called XT502 “Greco” from Motorola that the Bluetooth SIG slipped a few details on last month? We can’t blame you if you don’t, so allow us to refresh your memory: it’s supposedly a full-touch Android device with 850 / 1900 / 2100MHz 3G, and from the looks of the tiny, crappy image they’d posted, it’d probably be a midrange phone. Well, the FCC just passed a Motorola handset codenamed “Greco,” conveniently, and a look at the test docs says that this phone will be known on the market as the Quench XT3 and XT5 (we’re not sure what the difference will be between the two exactly). As you might recall, the current Quench is the international version of the CLIQ XT, which makes perfect sense — the XT is a midrange full-touch Android phone, so as far as we can tell, we’re looking at its successor here. No word on who will be getting it in the US, but the version that’s been approved is for WCDMA bands II and V — so AT&T (which already offers the Backflip) seems the likely candidate. No firmware stupidity this time, alright, guys?

Motorola Quench (and CLIQ?) XT3 / XT5 get an FCC reveal originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 01 Jul 2010 11:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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