Motorola has just announced a new handset this month to add
to its growing list of Android devices. But unlike other RAZR phones in the
company’s arsenal, The Motorola RAZR i XT890 is not powered by your usual
ARM-based processors. Instead the RAZRi is powered by a 2 GHz Intel Atom
processor.
This phone is one of a few handsets in the market that is
powered by such a processor. This however, is not Intel’s first attempt to get
a bite off of the mobile phone processor industry. You may have remembered in
the past that Intel tried to win smartphone manufacturers over with various
mobile platforms such as the McCaslin, Menlow and Moorestown, all of which had
trouble keeping up with ARM’s SOC processors.
Although Intel has been known to produce very powerful
processors in the past, this strategy have proven unsuccessful in the mobile
processor wars. In contrast to ARM’s battery efficient processors, Intel’s were
power guzzlers and it took the company a while to realize that.
Intel therefore went back to the drawing board and created a
new processor that would fit the demands of smartphones and other mobile
devices. And this is represented by the announcement of the RAZR i.
Other than the new processor, the RAZR i packs relatively
the same features as other Android phones in Motorola’s lineup. For starters, this phone runs on Android
v4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich, has a 4.3-inch screen with a resolution of 540x960 pixels.
The screen is Super AMOLED advanced capacitive touchscreen protected by Gorilla
glass.
It has 8GB of onboard storage with a microSD expansion slot
capable of supporting up to 32GB cards. It has 1GB of RAM and supports Wi-Fi
802.11 s/b/g/n standards as well as v2.1 Bluetooth. The RAZR i has an 8.0
megapixel rear facing camera able to capture images at a resolution of 3264x2448
pixels and is equipped with autofocus and a LED flash. Software improvements in
the camera include touch-focus, geo-tagging, face detection, image
stabilization and HDR. The camera can also capture videos in high-definition at
1080pixels at 30 frames per second.
The phone also has a front-facing VGA camera, an
accelerometer, A-GPS, proximity sensor and built-in compass. The RAZR i is
available in Black or White and will sell for around US$545 or roughly PHP22,000+
in the Philippines (that is, if it arrives here at all).
So what do you think of the new Intel-powered RAZR phone?
Does it have what it takes to get ARM a run for its money? Well, one thing’s
for sure, the positive feedback of both smartphone manufacturers and consumers
with the new Intel Atom processors will definitely ignite stiffer competition
between Intel and ARM which can in turn drive prices even lower. Which is a good
thing right?
