Lenovo to launch first smartphone with Intel chip

The world's first Intel-chip smartphone will be debuted next month by Lenovo Group Ltd, China's largest PC maker and the second-largest globally by sales, Intel announced on Wednesday.

Speaking at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing, Intel Corp Executive Vice-President Sean Maloney said: "Lenovo will be the first OEM (original equipment manufacturer) in the world to deliver the Intel smartphone."

The new phone, the K800, was announced by Lenovo and Intel in January.

The first Intel Atom 1.6GHz dual-core processor-empowered Lenovo K800 mobile phone will be available in late May. The phone has a 4.5-inch 256K color TFT display, an 800 megapixel CMOS camera, and uses a Lenovo customized Google Inc Android 4.0 operation system.

Lenovo President and CEO Yang Yuanqing said the company is now one of the top three smartphone providers in the Chinese market and will introduce more than 40 new phones this year.

Intel achieved a 10-year record high market share of 15.6 percent in the fourth quarter of the 2011 fiscal year, according to the US-based industry analyst group HIS Inc.

However, because of its lack of mobile Internet device chip products, the company has almost no presence in the emerging industry.

Its rivals, Qualcomm Inc and Samsung Electronics Co both use the British technology company ARM Holdings Plc's designs for their chips, which dominate the mobile device market.

In order to compete with these mobile Internet device chipmakers, Intel announced a cooperation lab project with Lenovo.

"The cooperation will center on mobile Internet research, such as X86-based smartphones and conversion from PCs to tablet PCs," said Jesse Fang, vice-president of Intel Corp and managing director of Intel Labs China.

Intel also said it would enter the tablet PC market.

Maloney said 10 companies are developing Intel-chip and Windows 8-based tablet PCs.

"Many mobile phone makers use dual-core processors other than Intel's," LG Electronics' mobile phone brand manager Li Donglan said in a telephone interview.

Various dual-core processors are available on the market. Nvidia Corp, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments Inc and ST-Ericsson launched dual-core processors for mobile phones in 2010. Apple Inc's dual-core processor hit the market in 2011, but only in Apple products.

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