This past Tuesday, a development partnership was launched by Google and Intel, marking the latest effort of the largest PC microprocessor manufacturer of the world to enter the quickly growing smartphone market. The two companies have announced a joint venture for optimizing the future generations of Android smartphone platform from Google for the Atom processors which are manufactured by the chip maker, in hopes of speeding up the development and the future of the smartphones which will be powered by Intel’s technology.
This move has the potential to kick start the efforts of Intel to expand into the mobile phone and tablet market at a time when the sales of PCs seem to be slowing down. The first of the Android based phones which will come with Intel chips could land in the market by as soon as the first half of next year, stated the executives from Intel who attended the annual developers conference held by the company on Tuesday in San Francisco.
This new alliance could be a new start for Intel in the mobile space as they have joined hands with one of the biggest players in the industry. Google had also announced last month its plans to take over the mobile phone manufacturer Motorola Mobility for a reported price of $12.5 billion. Apart from that, Google’s Android mobile platform, which the company licenses free of cost to manufacturers, has come to be the most popular mobile OS, replacing Apple’s iOS which comes with the iPhones and iPads.
On the other hand, while Intel has enjoyed tremendous success with the processor chips manufactured for PCs, it has largely struggled to find an opening in the mobile microprocessor chip industry which is currently dominated by Qualcomm and Samsung as they are considered to be more power efficient than Intel’s prototypes.
However, the CEO of Intel, Paul Otellini, who spoke at the conference, said that the smartphone market is still in its formative stages. He said that there is still no established status quo in the smartphone business in terms of the successful and trailing players. Otellini added that this was evident in the way Android snatched market share from Apple, thus establishing that products and platforms which are good enough are still capable of making a big difference in the industry.
