The mobile industry is one of the most entrenched and while there are a lot of advances and new features hitting smartphones and tablets every year, they’re all from the same old major players. Like an exclusive club that doesn’t take to newcomers, it’s hard for a new company on the mobile scene to become successful and stick around. Intel knows this only too well, after struggling for years to even make it into smartphones, they’re still hardly anywhere to be seen on store shelves. While ASUS and Acer (both big friends of Intel’s) use Intel’s chips in a number of smartphones, their big devices are all powered by Snapdragons or more affordable MediaTek CPUs. Intel continues to struggle, and with the recent news that Acer is turning to MediaTek and Qualcomm for their latest 4G handsets, they could continue to struggle for some time.
Acer is getting ready to launch 4G LTE capable smartphones in Taiwan and Asia, and it looks like they’re going to be using chips from Qualcomm and MediaTek, rather than their close partner, Intel. As Taipei Times is reporting, the new line of 4G smartphones is to launch in Taiwan shortly, where 4G has recently become available. According to sources however, Qualcomm and MediaTek chips will be used, possibly due to limitations in Intel’s offerings. The Snapdragon line of processors we all know and love here in the West have LTE modems on the chip, whereas an integrated solution from Intel isn’t said to be ready until the end of 2014. The upcoming Merrifield Atom chip from Intel will have support for LTE as well, but this won’t be integrated, either.
While hardly surprising that Acer is to go with someone else for their 4G offerings, Intel could do with all the support in the mobile industry as possible. Since their mobile efforts launched a few years ago, they’ve yet to really make it into any high-profile devices. The most appealing device on the market running an Intel CPU seems to Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 3 10.1, and only ASUS has seriously adopted their CPUs into smartphones. While certainly not bad chips, Intel continues to struggle getting their chips into smartphones. Why do you think this is? Let us know in the comments below and over on Google+!
UPDATE: The original article gave the impression that Acer hadn’t yet launched 4G-capable smartphones, that isn’t the case and the article has been updated to reflect that.