back to article India's new Atom-powered Xolo X900 ISN'T Intel's first smartphone

Intel is providing the Medfield Atom processor for the Xolo X900, an Android phone being launched in India - but despite the headlines it's a long way from the Intel's first smartphone. Not that the X900 isn't a competent Android handset. Outsiders might rate India as a developing market but local brand Lava reckons there's a …

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  1. petepachal
    Stop

    Well, I guess...

    Fair points, but seriously -- come on. The phones cited have about as much in common with modern smartphones as the original Apple Macintosh does with an ultrabook. For all intents and purposes, for the current era of smartphones, this is Intel's first model.

  2. narlin

    Sure there were 'Intel' processors in phones, but...

    Sure there were 'Intel' processors in phones, but those were still based on ARM (StrongARM and XScale processors). Intel sold that part of the business to Marvell a few years back and haven't had a processor in a phone since.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Sure there were 'Intel' processors in phones, but...

      Apart from all the ex-Infineon parts that go into handsets...

  3. Christian Berger

    Nobody cares about the CPU

    What's more important is whether the rest is "PC" compatible. Does it have an AC97 sound codec? Does it have a VGA compatible graphics card supporting VESA?

    If you go through all the hassle of buying an Intel phone, you don't want to run Angry Birds, you want to run your favorite operating system, and for that it needs to be as much as a PC as possible.

  4. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    Nobody cares about AC97

    "For all intents and purposes, for the current era of smartphones, this is Intel's first model."

    I don't buy it, the older smartphones were smartphones, and had Intel CPUs in them. I could use the same logic to claim some 2012-model PC was the first PC to ever use an Intel CPU. Nevertheless, the older devices that used Intel CPUs were not running x86, they were running Intel-built ARMs.

    To run my favorite OS, Linux does not care one bit if you have AC97, VGA, or even a PCI bus. The fact of the matter is, though, unless the Atom has changed radically of late, the Atom draws more power than a similar-performance ARM both under full load and idle. I would not be interested in an Atom-based phone.

    1. Christian Berger

      Re: Nobody cares about AC97

      Then just try to install Debian or Ubuntu or Gentoo or whatever on a machine where there is no public documentation of the audio codec. Most mobile devices are like that.

      Linux only works so well today, because PCs are very standardised. Accessing harddisks or the screen is exactly the same no matter what kind of PC you have, at least for basic stuff. Just try to read onto what people with laptops had to go through in the 1990s. Back then not even diskette drives were standard, so your Linux boot disk didn't work on every laptop. In fact if you had a SCSI machine, you didn't have a standard SCSI controller, so getting it to run was hard.

  5. Chris Redpath

    I might be incorrect but I thought that the first two Communicators were GEOS-based, with a 386 processor.

    1. BristolBachelor Gold badge

      The 9000 yes; a 386. The 9110 series used an AMD 486. And yes they ran GEOS (although there was a little app that temporarily changed a file allowing you to boot it into DOS and then run quite a few standard DOS programs). Ah I miss those days.

      I'm now less than a week into my main mobile not having a qwerty keyboard for 15 years; it's hard going.

  6. asdf
    FAIL

    wow congrats Intel

    Woot to Intel for finally creating x86 kit that doesn't require a fan blowing hot air. Bet the thing still gets very warm to the touch and has half the battery life of its competitors.

    1. Geoff Campbell Silver badge
      Mushroom

      Re: wow congrats Intel

      Well, how about we apply a really advanced forensic technique that I developed a few years ago, called "wait and see"? Radical suggestion, I know, but it's served me well in the past. It's so much more informative than guessing from a basis of no knowledge whatsoever.

      GJC

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: wow congrats Intel

      Back in the day no processors had a fan, my first Pentium 133 had a small passive heatsink about the size of a chipset heatsink, ran passive 24/7.

      However thanks to the whole package and every chip being larger and fabbed at much lower density and consuming more power and the PSU being awfully inefficient it used as much or more wattage than a small modern PC.

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