Xolo X900 Launches - Takeaways From Mike Bell's Session

I attended the launch of the Xolo X900, World’s first Android Smartphone, powered by Intel’s Atom processor.

Narendra Bhandari of Intel opened the meeting by giving an overview of the device, Intel’s roadmap and the Intel’s support for the Developer ecosystem for Intel’s Android Platform.

Mike Bell, VP of Intel Communications Group then began his talk by describing Intel’s future role in the mobile computing domain. He acknowledged that Intel was late to the game, but they have all the ingredients to succeed big in this domain. Interestingly, he decided to go along the presentation without using power-point slides calling them a purely marketing tool!

He indicated that their initial strategy of trying to support various Operating Systems / Platforms was flawed, since it did not let them focus esp (Moblin, Meego, Tizen etc) – Now, they are singularly focused on Android, and probably have more people working on Android than Google themselves!

He then listed some of the innovations and enhancements done on Android by Intel’s team, including an optimized Dalvik Platform to improve performance of Apps, Support for ARMv5 binary compliant NDK apps etc. The benchmarks prove that the CPU / Graphics processor significantly perform better than the competition. Mike Bell said that the Operating Systems are not currently evolved to make use of the dual / quad core processors. So, Intel’s Atom processor for X900, beats quad / dual core processors despite being a single core (with HyperThreading)

Mike also presented a quick overview of the road map for the Atom processor for Mobile Phones / Tablets that they are currently using 32nm process technology, and they’ll move to 22 nm in 2013 and 14 nm in 2014 – He said that there is no other company in the world that can keep up with them when it comes to these processes. He also took a dig at the competition (ARM) that their allegations of ‘Intel’s processors being slow, power hungry or expensive’ do not hold good, and Xolo X900 is the proof for the same!

Apart from Android, he expects Windows 8 tablets to run great on these next generation chipsets. He said there should be advancements in leaps and bounds for the App Stores and he said serious thought needs to be put to avoid the issues faced by fragmentation in the Android Market.

Mike’s session was followed by a very interesting talk by Arvind Jha, CTO, Lava Mobiles. He said that developers take an easy way out by creating a lot of ‘me-too’ apps and this should be avoided. He shared some very interesting insights on what’s possible with localized content, support for vernacular languages, focus on local market etc. He also encouraged the developers to identify inefficiencies in the processes around them, and develop apps to overcome those! He also said that Xolo X900 will be available at a discounted price of 19, 990 INR for developers interested in developing for the platform (Developers need to email their requests to [email protected])

An enlightening session indeed and the future for mobile computing looks very interesting!