Intel and Nokia Gets Serious With New Mobile Device

It never ceases to amaze me what pressure and, frankly, threat to your existence can make you do.  In some instances, the route to the inevitable can be quite painful to go through and excruciating to watch as the party involved is unable or unwilling to see what's happening.  I might be talking about Motorola's mobile business.

With Intel and Nokia, they took a look at Motorola and decided that was how they wanted to end up as far as their mobile business was concerned.  Intel still has the server and computer chips but well, Nokia lives off the handsets.  Nevertheless, Intel's move into the handheld market has not been quite as roaring as their CPU where folks like Samsung and Texas Instruments has a bigger role.

Today, Intel and Nokia decided enough was enough and decided tocollaborate in crafting  a new market by creating a new mobile device.  So far the pact involves the following areas:

• long-term partnership in chip architecture and software
• mobile applications and wireless Internet access
• open source mobile Linux projects
• previous work includes Intel's forthcoming mobile chip "Moorestown".  

Implications for Mobile Warriors like you.  We will see Moorestown product in 2010.  They appear headed for the smartphone and mobile device classes.  While I hope we won't have a repeat of the useless Mhz (then Ghz) wars, we will likely get a lot of chatters about calculations the chips can do all the while using as little power as possible.  

For a while, I had thought things were going to cool down with the CPU war going no where but now with renewed interests in mobile devices, we can see great things in the near future.  

What's in this for Intel?  Getting Nokia to use your chips is huge.  It was like when IBM used Intel's chip in the personal PC.  Well, sort of.  The whole chip and memory ecosystem is a lot more complex today than it was in the late 70s.  Suffice to say, the mobile handheld business will benefit greatly with Intel's efforts.  And you never want to count Intel out of any chip business.  Qualcomm, Samsung, TI, and maybe even Apple are pouring billions into the mobile device market, with this announcement, Intel and Nokia are simply saying they still around.

So with their survival at stake, Intel and Nokia decides its best to innovate rather than hide their heads in the sand.

More on the deal at CNet.