Intel to join the smartphone gang with 'Medfield' in 2012

Boom! Out of nowhere, Intel decides to step into the smartphone market, next year with their spanking new Medfield chipset. Till now, ARM has been the crowd favourite for every manufacturer, including Apple and Nvidia and this simply doesn’t fly well with Intel. While Intel have managed to produce some good, low-powered chips, like the Atom series, they weren’t power efficient enough to work on a mobile phone, which needs to run at least a whole day before trips to the charging point. Intel just can't stand not being in the limelight, can they? Medfield is designed as an SoC (System-on-Chip), just like ARM-based chipsets, so the entire system is on a single die, which not only makes the chips smaller in size, but also more power efficient. By how much? That’s something we’ll have to wait for. At CES 2012, Intel should demo their prototype phone, built using Medfield. It’s an Android smartphone about the size of an iPhone 4, but should be a lot lighter. It’s also said to have fast web browsing and a ‘burst mode’ for the camera that can capture 15 still shots per second, all at 8MP. What does this mean for us consumers? Well, more choice, of course. Intel certainly doesn’t have it easy though as ARM, Samsung and Nvidia will all be unleashing dual-core and quad-core chipsets, making the competition fierce.