Intel is changing in delicate ways while trying to expand beyond the personal computer chip business, after working hard and spending much money for the years to shape the company’s image.
Its long software developers, more than 3,000 of them, have for the first time stolen some of the spotlight from its hardware engineers. These programmers find themselves at the center of Intel’s sudden raid into areas like mobile phones and video games.
On of the most attention-grabbing elements of Intel’s software push is a version of the open-source Linux operating system (OS) called Moblin. It represents a direct assault on the Windows franchise of Microsoft, Intel’s longtime partner.
Moblin is like Windows or Apple’s Mac OS X to an extent, handling the basic functions of running a computer. But it has a few twists as well that Intel says make it better suited for small mobile devices. For example, it fires up and reaches the Internet in about seven seconds, then displays a novel type of start-up screen.
People will find their appointments listed on one side of the screen, along with their favorite programs. But the bulk of the screen is taken up by cartoonish icons that show things like social networking updates from friends, photos and recently used documents.
With animated icons and other quirky bits and pieces, Moblin looks like a fresh take on the operating system. Some companies hope it will give Microsoft a strong challenge in the market for the small, cheap laptops commonly known as netbooks. A polished second version of the software, which is in trials, should start appearing on a variety of netbooks this summer.
While Moblin fits netbooks well today, it was built with smartphones in mind. Those smartphones explain why Intel was willing to needle Microsoft. Intel has previously tried and failed to carve out a prominent stake in the market for chips used in smaller computing devices like phones.
But the company says one of its newer chips, called Atom, will solve this riddle and help it compete against the likes of Texas Instruments and Qualcomm. This low-power, low-cost Atom chip sits inside most of the netbooks sold today, and smartphones using the chip could start arriving in the next couple of years.
To make Atom a success, Intel plans to use software for leverage. Its needs Moblin because most of the cellphone software available today runs on chips whose architecture is different from Atom’s. To make Atom a worthwhile choice for phone makers, there must be a supply of good software that runs on it.
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