Late-comer Intel has teamed up with computer company Acer to make a budget smartphone built on their new chipset.
Despite their surging growth and their cannibalising of computers, Intel has been slow in developing chip components for smartphones. Their absence from the smartphone market has helped rivals Qualcomm and Nvidia gain a sizable head start and establish strong relationships with wanted smartphone companies.
In an attempt to generate support in the category, Intel is relying on its strong relationships with computer manufacturers. The most recent camaraderie to join them is computer maker Acer, who has teamed up with Intel to make the Acer Liquid C1.
According to Reuters, the Liquid C1 is the company’s ninth device in nine months and follows the Motorola Razr i.
It’s a budget smartphone destined for markets experiencing rapid smartphone growth, such as Thailand and Southeast Asia.
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Apart from the intrigue roused by its 1.2GHz Intel chipset, the budget Liquid C1 is underwhelming. It’s a 4.3 inch smartphone equipped with a qHD 960-by-540 resolution screen, an 8 MP camera, 4GB of internal memory and hosts an expandable memory slot.
The Intel atom Z2420m chipset is Intel’s wallet-friendly solution. The 1.2GHz single core chipset features a main x86 processor and supports hyper-threading. GSMArena claim it is powerful enough to handle hardware-accelerated Full HD encoding/decoding and allows the camera to capture 5 burst images in a second.
Like its hardware, the Liquid C1 is held back by dated software. It comes preloaded with Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) at a time where the newer version of software, Jelly Bean, has already been updated to 4.2.
The C1 will be launching first in Thailand in February for 9,990 baht, which roughly translates to $US335.
