Intel rings in change
Intel has hired former Palm and Apple vice president Mike Bell to push its smartphone product development forward.
Previously responsible for all aspects of product strategy, development and deployment at Palm since 2007, including its successful Palm PRE and PIXI phones, Bell was a VP with Apple from 1991 to 2007 and made ‘significant contributions' to the iPhone, iMac and Apple TV programs.
Bell will take on a similar job title at Intel as vice president and director of Smartphone Product Development in the company's Ultra Mobility Group (UMG).
According to Intel, Bell will: "lead a team with the charter to build breakthrough smartphone reference designs with the explicit intent of accelerating Intel Architecture into the market."
UMG leader Anand Chandrasekher wrote in a note to employees that Bell will work on producing ‘leadership products' that accelerate Intel chips into smartphones, driving new business growth.
Intel launched its Atom Z6xx series processor in May. Codenamed Moorestown, it is the first Intel processor low-powered enough to be used in handheld devices and marks the PC giant's entry into the smartphone market, currently dominated by ARM chips.
In a bid to boost Moorestown, Intel also rolled out MeeGo, an open source Linux project designed to merge Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo projects to form one operating system for mobiles and PC-like devices. The MeeGo Handset Project, recently made the baseline source code available to the development community and is due to release version 1.1 in October.
However, as well as being involved in MeeGo, Intel is looking to tap into Google Android too.
Imad Sousou, director of the Intel Open Source Technology Centre, previously told Hexus: "Intel is looking to broaden our mobile efforts by opening up our architecture to more smart phone platforms, thereby enabling Intel Atom processors to run on all available operating systems. Our primary goal is to offer Intel customers a choice of operating systems that run best on our processors."
