Hands On With the Intel-Based Orange/Gigabyte Phone

BARCELONA – Most phones contain gigabytes. Europe's first Intel-powered smartphone, apparently, is made by one–according to research firm Informa, it's made by Taiwanese company Gigabyte, not known outside Asia as a smartphone maker. I spent some time with the new smartphone here at Mobile World Congress.

I'm ripping through a lot of phones today, and there's not much to be said about most of the body designs. The (that's what the booth called it) is yet another black rectangle with rounded corners, with a screen on the front and camera on the back. It's 123 by 63 by 9.9mm (HWD) and fits easily in the hand. It won't break your pocket, but neither is it breaking any slimness records. It's light at 120g, and runs cool even when pumping out HD video or a game through its HDMI connection onto a big-screen TV. The phone supports Intel's Wi-Di wireless display technology, too, which means you'll be able to play games on a big screen over Wi-Fi.

The phone has a 1024-by-600-pixel, 4-inch screen and a 1460mAh battery. There's an 8-megapixel camera on the back and a 1.3-megapixel camera on the front, and it's all powered by a 1.6Ghz Intel Medfield processor with a 400MHz GPU. According to its settings screen, the phone had a surprisingly slim 2GB of storage, along with a 16GB SD card.

Let's establish that just putting out a slim, functional Android 2.3 smartphone that's neither chunky nor running hot is a big step forward for Intel. What does the Orange* phone bring to the party that we haven't seen before? Intel showed me a few demos to give me a hint.

The most impressive demo was of the camera's burst mode. The Orange* phone took ten, 8-megapixel photos in 0.7 seconds. That's fast, and shows impressive image processing chops. The phone also has a very quick HDR mode to deal with backlit photos, like HTC's new One line does.

I got to check out some games, too. One of the ubiquitous Need for Speed games played very smoothly, with great atmospheric and collision effects.

We're seeing these kinds of features on ARM-based phones as well, of course. Nvidia's Tegra 3 powers some awesome gaming effects, and HTC's Image Sense seems to have fast camera capability down–the two features come together in the international version of the HTC One X. But Intel is, of course, promising to do them better, faster and cooler.

Intel's also doing them with fewer cores. Nvidia's Tegra 3 is a quad-core chipset. Medfield is single-core. This just proves that you can't use either clock speeds or number of cores to describe phone performance any more.

When I got hold of the phone myself, things didn't go entirely smoothly. I tried to play Fruit Ninja, and it crashed. But that's par for the course with trade show demos, and I'm not willing to say it's a problem with the phone. It highlighted, however, how game-makers are going to need to optimize some games for Intel. Back at CES, Intel reps said that not all games designed for current Android phones, which have ARM processors, will run on Intel without tweaking.

Hopefully, at this afternoon's Intel keynote, we'll hear more.