Intel smartphones are on the way--again

From CNET News.com: Intel is getting ready to make a long-belated entry into the smartphone market with a new-and-improved chip. But the usual questions linger.

The most obvious ones are: Will it appear in a phone that is groundbreaking enough to entice buyers? And will this finally usher the world's largest chipmaker into one of the world's largest chip markets?

The answers are hard to come by--Intel is saying little about the chip, due later this year, or about customers at this point--though the trends are clear. Market researcher IDC said in February that vendors shipped about 101 million smartphones during the fourth quarter of 2010, surpassing, for the first time, the 92 million PCs shipped during the same period.

But Intel's reticence is understandable: it doesn't want to announce the chip without real phones in tow. Its current version of a chip slated for smartphones ("Moorestown") never found any top-tier takers in the phone industry, despite promises in 2009 that devices were in the works.

Remember the LG phone that was preannounced two years ago? And that never appeared? Most people don't, but Intel and its rivals do. And that's a mistake Intel doesn't want to repeat. And that may also have been one of the contributing factors to this week's departure of the executive who headed up Intel's smartphone chip business.

"They understand the boy-who-cried-wolf reputation [they've incurred], so they are really trying to coordinate chip announcements and [phone maker] announcements so they'll be taken seriously," said Mike Feibus, principal analyst at TechKnowledge Strategies, a marketing research firm.

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