2012 was supposed to be something of a mobile year for Intel – it was the year they were supposed to begin their push into the mobile space good and proper. However, we really haven’t seen all that much from them this year – we’ve seen a few phones launch with their reference design and there’s been a release or two packing Intel chips in say China but, for all intents and purposes they’ve been hiding away. At CES at the beginning of the year, Motorola and Intel made an announcement that the two of them would be working together on something big for the end of the year. Today, in London the two of them announced what their big plan is. A Motorola RAZR packing an Intel Processor.
The RAZR i is something that Motorola are calling their biggest launch in the UK since the original RAZR flip phone. With good reason to, the phone comes with the same kevlar coating those familiar with the Droid RAZR will know and love only this time it’s waterproof. So, whilst this phone might not stop hat bullet going through your chest, you’ll be okay in a water-fight. NFC is onboard as well with Android Beam taking stage – which is nice to see because often manufacturers go a different route as seen on the Galaxy SIII. Design wise the phone is similar to that of the new Droid RAZR family in the states and features a near edge-to-edge screen with hardly any bezel at all. Making the – still – qHD AMOLED display more than acceptable and better looking than it ever could have been. To power all of this there’s an ample 2,000 maH battery and whilst it’s not 32 hours good, it’s good a phone this size. There’s an 8-megapixel camera that’s capable of 1080p recording and taking up to 10 photos a second – that’s dSLR territory.
The real star of the show is that magic 2Ghz number, finally Intel have bought a processor to market that delivers the sort of power we’ve been expecting from the chipmaking giant. The Medfield chip is said to perform excellently at Java based activities – convenient seeing as most Android apps are written in Java and the OS itself is heavily based around it. Web performance has always been good on Intel chips and with this amount of raw power behind it you’ll never wait for a sluggish page load again – so long as you have good network coverage, of course. I’m sure this chip will make it to other phones soon and it’ll certainly be good for Intel if it were to. There’s no word on just what version of Android the RAZR i is running but it’s certainly of the 4.0 ilk. The phone will be coming to the UK next month and other parts of Europe – as well as Brazil – later. I wouldn’t be surprised if this phone didn’t make it’s way stateside but if it were to I’d take a bet that it’d be AT&T would be the one to take it up – it’d be a worthy addition to their line-up as well.
We’ll have more info for you whenever we have it!
[Source: Engadget]