Intel partners with Nokia, Symbian

Intel is hedging its bet across the mobile OS market, announcing today that it is collaborating with Nokia and Symbian to develop technology and applications for the future Symbian and Series 60 smartphones.

Intel is joining Nokia’s Series 60 Product Creation Community, which develops new handsets and applications for Nokia’s licensed middleware built over the Symbian OS. In addition, Intel, Nokia and Symbian are developing a reference platform to base a future class of 3G smartphones built over Intel’s XScale processor technology. Such a platform will essentially give developers a base set of specifications upon which to build applications and hardware, Intel said, thus speeding the time new handsets come to the market. Intel, however, has not yet announced any specific contracts with Series 60 and Symbian licensees for new handsets based on XScale.

"While that’s certainly a possibility in the future, we’re not announcing a design wins here today," an Intel spokesperson said.

Intel has been investing heavily in wireless over the last few years, starting with its launch of the Centrino chipset, which helped revolution Wi-Fi and continuing with its work in WiMAX silicon and handheld processing and multimedia technology. One of the Intel’s particular focuses has been on reducing the tremendous strain processors have taken on power supplies. It’s XScale chipsets are its latest line of PDA and smartphone chips designed to couple high performance with low power.

Intel has already extended its partnership with Microsoft to support its Windows Mobile software, and it sells many of the processors embedded in handset vendors Smartphone-and PocketPC-based devices. Symbian and Nokia, however, have a far greater market share in smartphones, and Series 60 devices are expected to dominate the market for years to come.