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By Vincent Capasso
Intel disappoints analysts and investors with failure to give investors reasons to smile on their smartphone plans.
Recently, in a crowded room of investors, media folk, partners and analysts Intel CEO Paul Otellini said,
"I'm going to disappoint some of you; we're not going to have a big
announcement on smartphones for smartphone customers today." Saying the planned smartphone will not be ready until 2012. He
then referenced the trouble they had back in February with Nokia on the
joint MeeGo smartphone venture (the Linux OS version of a smartphone). Otellini went on to say,
"You all know about the disappointment we had with Nokia in the February time frame, when they decided to go a different route. We
didn't sit down and mope after that. We took [back] the product that we
had been working on with Nokia very deeply for several years almost
exclusively—to the extent we didn't work with a lot of other customers.
We have freed up those resources and turned that design into a form
factor/reference design. We're shopping that now to a number of
manufacturers ... and we've had good success. You'll see the first
Intel-based phones [using new Medfield chips] in the market the first
part of next year. In hindsight, Nokia was the wrong partner to have
picked."
Much has been suggested about the union of
the world’s largest chip manufacturer with one of the world’s largest
cell phone producers, but you do tend to wonder if not Nokia then who
would have been a better partner for such a venture for Intel? If you were Otellini, what would be your next move? Obviously, they have a nice reach into the Tablet arena, but should they fast track their smartphone initiative? Who would you turn to now that they seem to be yielding that ground for the time being?
On a positive note, according to Intel, every 600
smartphones in use today requires the equivalent of 1 server ( 80% of
which are powered by Intel processors ) to handle all of the demands of
asynchronous device communications. This requires a lot of processing -
approximately a $10 Billion business today growing to $20 Billion by
2020. Being the backbone provider is not a bad place to be right now. Intel has a history of being late to the game but I am sure they
will figure it out when their innovative production processes has been optimized to
enable them to compete.. Just wait, those 3D chips are coming soon!
Cross posted from myITview.com
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