San Diego: Intel's Smartphone Play Hits The West

The Orange San Diego may seem like a low-key launch product for the first phone in western markets powered by an Intel processor, but Orange, the mobile arm of France Telecom, is looking to make an impact: the phone will be promoted by a multi million-dollar ad campaign, the first they have ever lavished on a carrier-branded model. Orange wants to climb high above the bottom rung of cost and quality traditional for carrier-branded phones. But what is Intel’s angle?

Citrus imprints and printed circuits - Intel's processor debuts in Orange's San Diego

Intel’s dominance of the laptop and PC market may not really seem like a problem. At the very worst, one might say that it is a nice problem to have. However, it does highlight a real concern. In the mobile device market, Intel has found the going uncharacteristically tough. In particular, reducing the power demands of a chip design philosophy traditionally attached to large batteries or power supplies has been a challenge. And it is this market which is growing far in advance of Intel’s traditional markets – especially as tablet sales continue to eat at the netbook market, where Intel’s low-powered Atom range has its power base.

Intel’s strategy was initially to create a mobile operating system optimised for Intel’s x86 architecture – which began as Moblin, then became Meego through an alliance with Nokia, and is now in continuing development as Tizen. The basic philosophy of a lightweight open-source OS designed to run specifically on Intel chips continues to have merit, and could extend into markets beyond the obvious phones and tablets towards seatback car entertainment, aeroplane media systems and elsewhere. Despite a popular association with Windows machines, and more recently supporting Apple‘s move into the personal computing mainstream, Intel has a long history of support and development for Linux.

However, this does not address the more pressing issue: that in the battle of mobile processor architectures ARM is currently not only eating Intel’s lunch but also stealing what remains of its lunch money and giving it a vicious wedgie. This is not where the Santa Clara aristocrats are accustomed to being. Nor is it where they plan to remain. And, of course, there is already a lightweight open-source OS popular on mobile devices – Google’s Android operating system.

All of which preamble is an attempt to explain the curious device on my desk. The Orange San Diego is the first smart phone in the Western world to contain Intel’s Medfield mobile processor. And it is worth far more to Intel than sales.

Debut in Orange

Judging on appearances, the San Diego has the usual playing-card shape popularised by the iPhone 3GS (and many others).  It does not look, or feel, like an expensive phone – the entire body is plastic, with a clear screen over the piano-black front, which has four soft buttons built into the bottom strip and a front-facing camera at the top.

The back is soft grey-black and rubberized, with the side-mounted micro-HDMI port making a somewhat unsightly bulge on the left-hand side. The other ports and buttons are arrayed around the silver-colored edge, with the power button, microphone and headphone jack on the top, the volume rocker and camera button on the right edge and the microUSB charge and sync port at the bottom.

The buttons are silver and shallow, but have a tolerable click to them. The only other feature on the body of the phone is a microSIM slot, opened with pressure on a pinhole (an opening tool is considerately supplied, for those not equipped for sewing or field surgery). The battery is sealed and not user-replaceable, and there is no space for external storage.

Dimensions and designs

The handset body is an unexceptional size – 123mm by 63mm, and a hair under a centimetre thick – and an unexceptional weight – at 117mg, it feels a little light in the hand – plastic light rather than wafer-thin triumph of microtechnology light.

It’s a fairly unprepossessing exterior – not embarrassing to hold, but not impressive either. There is a slight lack of rigidity to the back, in particular, and running a thumb over the camera mounting which protrudes in a silver lozenge from the back reveals that the edges of the rim are sharp to the touch. In fact, there is a vectored feel about the case as a whole. In short, it looks like a 3D render of a phone. Uncannily so, in fact. This is not a phone that makes a statement about you, unless that statement is “I am Cayce Pollard“.

The screen itself has a 4.03″ diagonal, and its 600×1024 resolution is pretty good – at 295ppi, not a retina display by any means, but pleasant to use for web browsing and video playback.

So much for the outside. The inside, however, is far, far more interesting.

Intel in- what, somebody already did that? Huh

Most interesting, of course, is the chip, whence all else comes. This is an Atom Z2460 low-voltage processor – the first 32nm low-powered Intel chip to reach the mass market. It is single-core, but uses Intel multi-threading to assign processing headroom to multiple tasks.

Run through the Quadrant standard benchmarking system, the Medfield reveals itself to be surprisingly nifty, with a score of 3749 – below the Asus Transformer Prime TF201 at 4000, but comfortably ahead of last-generation Android powerhouses like the Motorola Atrix 4G, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1-inch tablet.

Of course, this may itself not be accurate, because the benchmarking application may be configured to hook into parts of the ARM architecture which do not exist on this processor. And there is a, if not the, rub. Anandtech provided a comparison of the performance of the reference model – this performance will not be replicated in the real world, but it bears out Intel’s argument that a single core, with enough skill and knowledge sunk into it, is all that many users will need. It also allows for longer battery life – in regular usage, the San Diego can make it through two working days with relatively light use, and Intel boasts that its standby mode is so effective that the battery will last for 14 days on standby – not a very practical statistic in the modern world – when did you last leave your phone unused for 14 days? – but an impressive one.

I cornered Graham Palmer, Managing Director of Intel UK Sales and Marketing, at the phone’s launch and asked him to talk me through the peculiarities of using the one phone on the western market with an x86-based processor. Essentially, he explained, anything designed to run on stock Android should work fine. Anything with ARM-specific hardware extensions the processor will attempt to convert on the fly: laying the track ahead of the train, in effect. In practical terms, 70% of the market will work unproblematically and  25% should work, due to the processing headroom and multithreading of the processor, leaving 5% or so of applications in the Google Play store unusable at the present time. As the processor catches on, goes the sales logic, developers will learn to make processor-agnostic apps, or multiple apps.

Another blockage might be the PowerVR SGX 540 GPU, which while no slouch is a step behind the latest and greatest. However, generally, the system seems to work pretty well – I was able to install and run a large number of apps, including games.

The only app I found myself unable to install was Minecraft – which may or may not be a deal-breaker. Graphics-intensive and high-end applications are more likely to be built to exploit the specific possibilities of ARM’s architecture, so it would be worth checking which power-hungry applications you cannot live without on the handset if you are considering the San Diego.

Orange and gingerbread – an acquired taste?

But, external apps aside, what can the Medfield processor do with the tools available? The answer is, quite a lot.

The first disappointment to get out of the way is that the phone is running Android version 2.3 – Gingerbread. A year after the launch of Ice Cream Sandwich, there would normally be no excuse for that, but given the x86 architecture one can see why this may be slightly more of a challenge.

Intel says that ICS already runs on this architecture in the lab, and Orange are promising the the handset will be updated and upgraded in or near October – but I have found it best never to rely too heavily on the upgrade schedule of carriers. If you get this phone, you should assume that at least a fair amount of your time together will be spent on Gingerbread.

However, this is not a terrible thing – 2.3 is really where the Android OS became mature, and although ICS is certainly pretty, and has certain advantages, those advantages on a phone are not so great as to make this a dealbreaker.

The phone has yet to be rooted, so one should not be confident of easily rooting and installing one’s own build of preference. This also means being stuck with Orange’s supernumerary apps and to an extent its UI – I am not a fan, personally, but it is close enough to the stock Android UI to be an irritant rather than a deal-breaker (with accents reminiscent of HTC’s Sense UI, and a plethora of orange and white iconography). One piece of carrier cruft – the gesture-based system where drawing a particular shape on the screen opens an application or contact (sketching a heart, say, to open an email to your partner) – is actually quite useful.

The processor is robust enough to capture 1080p video (Palmer demonstrated by jumping from point to point in a video he had recorded earlier, which the phone managed without stuttering or sticking), and to take ten still shots in a rapid burst – a gimmick, but not an unimpressive one.

The 8MP camera captures decent images in daylight – an LED flash is provided for low light conditions, and the camera’s controls run to adjustable ISO and white balance. Despite a higher pixel count than most phones at this price point, the camera is not great, and grain appears in indoor light conditions – but, in common with the screen, it is good enough at the asking price. For some sample shots at full size, take a look at this Flickr set.

Sepia filter, for preemptive instagramming

Sometimes, the universe gives you a good reference opportunity

Taken on a summer evening: note the softness of the image.

The 1.3MP camera is probably best for taking Myspace angle photos – live video conversations are functional but not too attractive. However, it is entirely adequate for self-portraiture and video messages – and is an unusual addition to a phone retailing at this price.

“At this price”. That’s a significant phrase, even for those who cannot yet get their hands on the phone itself – the San Diego is being sold through Orange in the UK and France, but it or something like it will no doubt arrive in the US shortly. Intel’s deal with Motorola Mobility should see more Intel-based Android smartphones rolling out in the near future.

Intel and Android are not the whole story, however. A new front in the mobile battle is about to open, when the hardware producers – and possibly Microsoft itself, as of later today – start to roll out Windows 8 tablets. Processor production needs to be scaled up, but a case also has to be made for the virtues of an Intel processor running Windows 8 over an ARM-based processor running Windows RT.

So, Intel is working with handset makers (this one was assembled by Gigabyte) and carriers not just to get a foothold in Android – the biggest pie in town, but one divided into many, many slices – but to gear up for the battle to come, and start making the case to other, higher-margin hardware providers.

How many tablets Windows 8/RT will sell is an unanswered question – but one answer which is certainly correct, if not complete, is ” a lot more than any previous Windows managed to” – assuming no apocalyptic failure, at least. Intel needs to have its 32-nanometer ducks in a row.

Road testing features

Which means that this phone is equipped with features – 1080p video, video calling, near field communication, 16GB of internal storage (11GB of which is available for media), TV-out, an Intel-made HSPA+ modem for high-speed mobile Internet – which one would not generally expect to see in a phone being made available free with a £15.50 ($22) monthly tariff or available prepaid for £200 ($300).

This is a statement of intent for Intel, but it is also a tech demo – and one which is coming in low to gain uptake and increase the amount of feedback received. Intel has some advantages in this contest – most obviously, it controls both design and manufacture of its chips, and has considerable influence over how the products they go in are assembled.

So, innovations in design can be passed on quickly to fabrication, and in extremity Intel is big enough to offer friendly advice to manufacturers about how they should best optimize the experience for their users, as they have had call to do with the Ultrabook specification. Nonetheless, this is going to be an interesting scrap, and a smart customer has the potential to benefit.

Conclusion

The Orange San Diego continues the Orange tradition of naming its own brand phones after American cities. However, far more important than San Diego is Santa Clara, and the “Intel Inside” on the back of this phone is the most important blazon on an otherwise unremarkable body.

It’s very hard to argue against the San Diego, or its nearest equivalent, as an upgrade for those who satisfy a number of “ifs”. If looks are not too important to you. If brands are not too important to you. If you do not play too many processor-mashing games. If you are confident in Intel’s ability to deliver in the smartphone market (and thus an increasing tendency of developers to optimize for x86 architecture). If you do not object too strongly to using an older version of Android. At its current price point, it represents considerable value for money for the large number of people to whom these “if”s can be answered “yes” or “don’t care”, in particular if they use their phone little enough to justify the lowest tariff (since one cannot get cheaper than free, other and potentially better options open up at higher tariff) or want to buy it outright.

There are more polished and accomplished phones running on standard ARM architecture for $100-150 more, certainly. But if you want a competent phone with a better-than-average feature set, which does the simple things very quickly, the San Diego is a promising statement of internet from Intel, and a potentially strong seller for Orange. Intel-watchers, and phone-watchers generally, should keep an eye out for what Intel does next.