Orange's London phone may be finished Intel prototype
updated 03:30 pm EST, Fri February 17, 2012
Orange London marketing material slips
The Intel-based Android phone shown off at CES may have secretly been the prototype for a production phone. A survey taker showed a sample description to Coolsmartphone that implied the phone was the London, a phone that would be branded by European carrier Orange. Along with its look, the specifications lined up closely, including the 1.6GHz Atom chip and the rapid-fire, 10-photo burst shooting.
The description gave it a four-inch Gorilla Glass-covered touchscreen, 16GB of built-in storage, and an eight-megapixel camera with the "best ever phone camera stabilizer." As it was shown, the prototype was using an unadorned version of Android 2.3, although there's a strong possibility that Orange would customize its finished product or jump to Android 4.0.
No signs emerged of when the London (not to be confused with the BlackBerry London) would appear. It could appear as soon as Mobile World Congress in slightly over a week's time, although its plain state at CES could push it out to later in the year.
The Intel support is made possible by Medfield, Intel's new architecture for the Atom. A smaller manufacturing process and new optimizations should make it the first Intel processor that's sufficiently power-friendly and small to compete with ARM without sacrificing performance.
