It’s been a significant week for Intel. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, they announced that they are entering the phone market. Quite significant if you ask me!
Actually I think the rather significant news got drowned out by the amount of news coming out of MWC, the fact that it wasn’t accompanied by any images of prototypes (always gets the bloggers excited!) and that it’s something planned for 2010 rather than something we can see happening soon. There’s also a little bit of confusion as to whether the announcement really does mean that LG will make a voice-enabled device or just whether they will just use a voice-enabled OS on a MID
From the press release: Intel’s “Moorestown inch-based MIDs are expected to reduce idle power consumption by a factor of greater than 10 versus today’s Intel Atom processor-based MIDs. Additionally, the Moorestown platform will be accompanied by a newer Moblin software version, Moblin v2.0, that is based on the Linux operating system. This software is designed specifically to deliver a great PC-like Internet experience while also supporting cell phone voice capabilities. The “Moorestown inch platform is expected to come to market by 2010. “[Full news at UMPCPortal]
The offline chat I had with people at Intel certainly made it sound like it was a voice-enabled LG device and this article about the LG device screen technology seems to back that up…
“LG has not given the planned mirasol phones a name, nor has it identified the new mobiles it is developing with Intel that will be based on the chip giant’s Moorestown platform.” [Source]
Don’t under-estimate the significance of that screen tech announcement either. The Mirasol technology is vastly different to LED-backlit LCD screen technology and could make a huge difference to power drain and outside readability.
MWC isn’t over yet and we’ve yet to see reports about the devices Intel took with them to Barcelona. I’m particularly interested to see the UMID and the response it gets.
Finally, there was an announcement that Telmap will be porting a navigation application over to Moblin. This is obviously great news as so far, none of the Moblin MIDs I’ve seen apart from the Navigation-focused ClarionMiND have had navigation software on them. I’m looking forward to getting a look at that, hopefully at CeBIT next month.
