After years of talk, Intel is finally making some headway into the smartphone business. And at a joint press conference in London, Motorola and Intel have unveiled its first Intel-powered smartphone: Razr I smartphone.
Razr i is essentially the recently announced Droid Razr M for Verizon Wireless, only with the different processor. It will be available in Europe and Latin America in October, but there’s no word on pricing.
Razr I has an “edge-to-edge” 960×540 4.3-inch Super AMOLED display, a layer of Kevlar on the back, and — most importantly — the brains of the operation is an Intel Medfield SoC clocked at 2GHz.
Rounding out the hardware specs, there’s an 8-megapixel rear shooter, a front-facing VGA camera, NFC, a 2000 mAh battery that is apparently “40% more powerful” than the iPhone 4S, and the entire phone (including the internal components) is protected by a “splash-guard” water repellent coating. If you think these specs sound familiar, that’s because the Razr I is virtually identical to the Razr M — but while the I is powered by an Intel x86 chip, the M is powered by a dual-core Snapdragon S4 ARM chip. Unlike the Razr M, though, it seems like the Razr I (by virtue of Intel’s XMM6260 baseband) only supports HSPA+, not LTE. Considering LTE is almost nonexistent in Europe, that’s not a huge loss.
On the software side of things, rather excitingly, it looks like the Razr I runs an almost-vanilla version of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. We’ve known for a while that Intel has had a large team of developers working on an x86 port of ICS, so it’s good to see that they’ve finally finished. As far as x86 compatibility goes, the press release is claiming that the Razr I has access to 600,000 apps in the Google Play Store — so, that’s near-universal compatibility.
And now it’s time to talk about Medfield, the Atom SoC that powers the Razr I. Intel’s partnership with Motorola dates all the way back to Medfield’s January unveil, when they announced that there was a multi-year deal to bring Intel chips to a range of Motorola phones and tablets. As far as we can tell, the Razr I has the same SoC as the Xolo X900 — the first Medfield-powered smartphone — but this time around the chip is clocked at 2GHz, rather than 1.5GHz. Even at 1.5GHz, Medfield (which is just a single-core chip with Hyper-Threading) was very competitive; at 2GHz, the Razr I should have no problem standing against most smartphones on the market. The only real weakness is Medfield’s GPU — an old PowerVR SGX540, which is much, much slower than any recently-released smartphone. This shouldn’t affect video playback, though, as Medfield contains dedicated hardware for 1080p playback.
One of the weirder aspects of today’s product announcement is that the Razr I won’t be made available in the US and Canada; it’ll only ever see the light of day in Europe and some parts of Latin America (Mexico, Brazil). In fact, to date, four Medfield-powered Android smartphones have been released — the Xolo X900, Lenovo K800, Orange San Diego, and now the Razr I — but not a single one of them is available in the US.
Why? The most likely reason is that Intel isn’t quite ready to face off against the latest and greatest SoCs in the most hotly contested smartphone battleground. Intel knows that in a head-on confrontation with Samsung or Apple, Medfield would lose. By launching products in Latin America, Europe, and Asia, Intel is accruing the experience, confidence, and market research that it’ll need to crack the US. When Intel finally comes to the US, probably with a Motorola phone powered by the 22nm successor to Medfield (Merrifield/Silvermont), it will come prepared. I don’t think Intel will come to the US until it think it can beat ARM — and judging by Chipzilla’s investment in mobile and its continuing technological superiority, I suspect Merrifield will do just that.
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