The mobile industry has a number of power players that tend to drive the success and innovation of the industry as a whole, and while the makeup of this pool of companies can change at any time it’s been pretty consistent over the last few years. Samsung dominates the overall smartphone market and Sony supplies more camera sensors than anyone else. Qualcomm and Samsung pretty much rule the chipset market, but MediaTek has taken an upswing over the past year and is now powering a number of mid to entry-level smartphones and tablets. Intel on the other hand has yet to get a good foothold in the door, and apparently this isn’t being unnoticed by some higher-ups at Intel either. A rumor that’s said to be circulating in the upstream supply chain in Taiwan is saying that Intel might be considering quitting the mobile business if it doesn’t see some significant product gains in 2014. While this likely won’t impact the mobile market too much since Intel doesn’t have many products featuring its processors, there could be some other ramifications as well.
Recently Intel’s partnership with Lenovo ended, marking another manufacturer that likely won’t be using Intel’s chipsets in 2014, but they have been working on other partnerships to replace that one. They’ve also been pulling out the big guns to try to sell their lofty goal of 40 million tablets by year’s end by giving some significant incentives for manufacturers to use Intel chips in their upcoming products. Intel also has its new Merrifield-based 22nm processors for smartphones coming out this year, which should be officially debuted at Mobile World Congress next month. We’re also supposed to see a new 2.13 GHz dual-core Atom processor for tablets at the show as well, meaning Intel’s new products could definitely see their names in some homes this year. What this means for Tizen and it’s eventual launch or not there’s really no telling, but given that operating system’s rocky past anything could happen if a major player pulls out of the game.
Source: Digitimes, Via: Phone Arena