Intel and Lava International are launching the first smartphone powered by one of the chip maker's Atom processors next week in India. The 3G-enabled Xolo X900 running Android will go on sale in the country on April 23 and cost 22,000 Indian rupees, or about $425, without a cellphone plan, Lava announced Thursday.
The phone is based on a reference design developed by Intel and uses a Medfield-class System-on-a-Chip (SoC), the Atom Z2460, which combines a single-core, hypterthreading-enabled 1.6GHz central processor with a 400MHz graphics core and a wireless networking radio. Intel and India-based Lava announced a technology partnership at the Mobile World Congress in February.
The Xolo X900 has a 4.03-inch LCD capacitive multi-touch screen with 1024-by-600 resolution and protected by Corning Gorilla Glass, dedicated HDMI output, full HD 1080p playback, and dual speakers, as well as an 8-megapixel rear camera and a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera.
The only available model has 16GB of internal storage and 1GB of RAM, according to the tech specs posted on Lava's dedicated Xolo X900 website.
The Intel-based smartphone runs Google's Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS but is upgradeable to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, according to the phone manufacturer.
Intel has struggled to penetrate an exploding mobile device market that largely relies on processors using the ARM instruction set instead of the chip giant's x86-based products which have long dominated larger computing platforms like desktops and laptops. But the company has been adamant in pronouncing that 2012 is the year that Intel-based smartphones will finally take off.
Medfield, Intel's fourth-generation platform for what the company calls mobile Internet devices (MIDs), is tipped to be the first Atom SoC with the combination of processing strengths, wireless networking, and a low enough power draw to make it an alternative to ARM chips for smartphones and other mobile devices.
"We finally have a very competitive product for smartphones," Jeff Ross, director of Intel's Marketing for Mobile and Communications Group, told Wired this week. "We have a high-performance part that can compete with products in the market, and those coming out to the market. It's not just about the performance, but also about the energy efficiency. There are number of performance factors that we'll be the best at."
Intel has also partnered with Motorola, Lenovo, Orange, and ZTE on Atom-based smartphones that are expected to be released in various markets in the coming months.
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