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Intel-powered smartphones arriving this year

The chipmaker's CEO Paul Otellini makes announcement at MWC...
Written by Natasha Lomas, Contributor

The chipmaker's CEO Paul Otellini makes announcement at MWC...

The CEO of Intel has confirmed that smartphones based on Intel's chipsets are coming this year.

Speaking at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Paul Otellini said smartphones would arrive in 2011 but declined to give further details, adding: "I can't pre-announce our customers."

Noting the rise of tablets, Otellini said the mobile device field will not consolidate to one type of device. He predicted that multiple types and form factors will proliferate.

Devices will also get smarter, and more context-aware, according to Otellini, as social networking services are more deeply integrated into the mobile experience.

"It just makes sense that the devices that already know who you are and where you are are increasingly context-sensitive, increasingly location-aware, increasingly always-on and using that capability to bring you the information you need as opposed to the things you have to search for," he said.

Intel-powered smartphones arriving this year, according to CEO Paul Otellini

Intel-powered smartphones will be available "this year" according to CEO Paul Otellini
Photo: Stephen Shankland/CNET

"Moore's Law will continue to drive this capability. If you look at the evolution of the microprocessors in these mobile devices, they're following Moore's Law just like they did in the PC environment. They've gone faster and faster, they're going from single core to dual core, adding caches, adding graphics. This is just computer architecture happening on a micro scale."

Asked for his reaction to the Nokia-Microsoft strategic alliance announced last week, and Nokia's decision to use the Windows Phone 7 platform, effectively nullifying an earlier mobile partnership with Intel on the open-source MeeGo platform, Otellini joked: "I used a word that Carol [Bartz, a fellow panellist for the session and Yahoo's CEO] has often used."

Otellini said he understood the reasons for Nokia's decision, telling delegates: "I would have made the same or a similar call." But he added that the repercussions of any company making such a big strategy switch are huge - and companies should not make such decisions "capriciously".

"We're seeing the last fully integrated phone manufacturer become horizontal," he added.

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