The first Intel processor-powered Android smartphone – the Xolo X900 – was launched in India earlier this year, made by local manufacturer Lava, which currently retails at an extremely affordable price of INR 17,500 (~$320) for much better specs than any similarly priced smartphone. But that’s not enough for Intel apparently, as the company is planning to launch Intel-powered Android smartphones in the country, for a much, much lower price of INR 7,000 (~$130).
Intel’s Managing Director for South Asia, Debjani Ghosh, said that the company is working with handset makers in India to achieve this goal, for a release some time in the second half of 2013, right around the same time that Qualcomm is planning to launch affordable quad-core devices under their Qualcomm Reference Design program.
Despite having a single core, the x86-based Intel Medfield processor inside the Xolo X900 and the Motorola RAZR i is quite a capable performer and beats even dual-core processors in some cases, helped by Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology, so despite the extremely low price of the upcoming handsets, we can expect performance to be much better than similarly priced low-end devices running on Qualcomm or other ARM-based processors.
This is specially great news for those who look for budget Android smartphones, as an Intel-powered one shouldn’t be as slow and laggy like currently available budget Android phones, and hopefully other specs won’t be too compromised to make up for the price. Intel is also planning to launch a multiple-core variant of their Medfield processor next year, and who knows, we might even see a dual-core Intel processor powering the new smartphones, though that would be quite wishful thinking.
What do you guys think? Would you buy an Intel-powered Android phone at that awesome low price? I know I would at least suggest them to anyone shopping for a new low-cost Android device, though the final verdict will no doubt come when a device actually releases.
Via BGR
