Lenovo K800 is world’s first Intel-powered smartphone

Lenovo K800 is one of the much-hyped products on display at CES 2012 in Las Vegas. The Android smartphone has grabbed large media attention for being the first device to run on Intel’s Medfield microprocessor. Intel CEO Paul Otellini uncovered the Lenovo phone that is powered by its Medfield Atom Z2460 chip at CES. The K800 that has an angular frame design like Lenovo ThinkPad range of notebooks is actually designed to run on Android 4.0, a.k.a. the Ice Cream Sandwich. However, the CES demo model runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread.

Lenovo K800 smartphone

The Lenovo smartphone sports a 4.5-inch display with a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels. The 720p HD TFT screen is smoother for better video playback and is up with vibrant colors. But with a density of 10mm, the K800 is somewhat heavier than most of smartphones on market today. There are ultra thin smartphones like Huawei Ascend P1 S and Samsung Galaxy S II respectively with 6.68mm and 8.55 mm thickness. So, the K800 will not be able to compete with many of the present phones in screen size.

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Smartphone with Intel Medfield processor

Smartphone with Intel Medfield processor

The Lenovo smartphone will be equipped with a 1.6GHz Intel Medfield Atom Z2460 processor and 16GB of internal memory. Like the top tier smartphones of the day, the K800 will have an 8-megapixel camera in the rear panel for capturing high quality images and videos. For network connectivity, Lenovo has included a WCDMA HSPA+ 21Mbps wireless radio, Wi-Fi 802.11n, Bluetooth 3.0 and GPS onboard.

Another specialty of the K800 is its WiFi capability to sync the phone with a large display at 720p@30 fps. Well, you can watch contents of the phone, i.e. images, video and games, on a large HDTV. Indeed, the first Intel-powered smartphone is snappy and it has a great look and design. Certainly, the Lenovo smartphone will rock in tech markets as there will be lots of people, who will love Intel over any other chipmakers thanks to the high influence the company has made over the PC industry for decades.

Intel just decided to carry out an active role in mobile chip making. Irritated by the huge growth of the Cambridge-based ARM Holdings in the escalating mobile chip industry, the American chipmaker announced its first mobile chip last year. The company also announced that it would bring out its own smartphones and tablets using the chip by mid 2012. The K800 will be the smartphone, so we can soon expect a tablet as well.

Lenovo is to ship the K800 in China in the first half of the year. The Chinese tech maker has neither exposed a release date for the device in western markets or its possible price tag. Let us wait for another update from Lenovo.

Via: The Inquirer/The Verge