As Valleywag reports, Intel recently held a top-secret conference with a lot of big name people attending, including John Faith, head of MySpace Mobile, as well as a wireless executive from Disney. Why would Intel hold a conference with high authority figures? Simple: to build a smartphone targeting "the runaway success of Apple"s iPhone."
These devices based on Intel"s design will be running Google"s Android operating system, but probably won"t actually have Intel"s logo on the device. The mentioned design that was shown at Intel"s conference apparently had a large amount of variable resistance sensors, which means that Intel"s technology could, possibly, allow the device to react just by the way it"s held. These sensors are found in all sorts of things, like touchscreens and dials. Interesting stuff, and it shows that the smartphone device market is evolving, rather than companies just pumping out phones with the same features.
So why is Intel really bothering though? Gathering together high profile names just to build another smartphone? Well, it"s not just that; Apple owns it"s own personal chip-design factory, which essentially means it doesn"t have to go through Intel, one of the leaders in CPU manufacturing. This is bad news for Intel, as the iPhone is admittedly a very successful device and they would be understandably worried that they aren"t involved with it.
Keep an eye out for more details when they are revealed.