Geeksphone makes the Intel switch with Revolution phone
The Spanish handset manufacturer will use a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z2560 chip in its top-end phone, set to arrive in the first quarter of 2014.
- Shankland covered the tech industry for more than 25 years and was a science writer for five years before that. He has deep expertise in microprocessors, digital photography, computer hardware and software, internet standards, web technology, and more.
Yup, the upcoming Geeksphone Revolution, a handset that'll run either Google's Android or Mozilla's Firefox OS, uses an Intel processor.
Specifically Geeksphone Revolution will employ a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z2560 processor when it ships in the first quarter of 2014, the Spanish company said Friday. The company teased the Geeksphone Revolution in November, with one employee hinting that it had Intel inside.
Geeksphone is hardly a name-brand manufacturer, but Intel needs any help it can get in finding customers for its mobile processors in a market dominated by ARM chips from companies such as Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung, and Broadcom.
Geeksphone has yet to reveal pricing or share what the phone will look, but it did share some specifications Friday: a 4.7-inch IPS 960x540-pixel screen, a 2,000mAh battery, an HD-capable 8-megapixel camera with flash, and expandable storage.
Geeksphone rose to prominence through its early support of Firefox OS, a browser-based mobile operating system from Firefox developer Mozilla. It runs Web apps rather than software compiled to run natively on its processor, an approach that gives developers more flexibility about underlying hardware.
Android also insulates programmers from chip details through its use of a Java-like virtual machine layer. However, many Android programmers have written native components for their apps that work only on particular classes of hardware, so not all apps are easily portable.
