Intel are the largest manufacturer of processing power in the world. With 84,000 employees and a turnover of $37 billion they have immense power and influence. Their Atom processor is the current standard for netbooks.
Nokia is the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world. With 124,000 employees and a turnover of $51 billion they are even bigger and more powerful. They make 37% of all the world’s mobile phones.
Where they have common interest is mobile electronic devices. Like the netbooks and smartphones that are the fastest growing gaming devices at the moment. And the devices that evolve from them.
It is important to realise that smartphones and netbooks are the same thing, they only differ in form factor. Also, in the white hot heat of competition, they are developing very rapidly towards Linux driven, touch screen devices with the power of a desktop computer of just a few years ago.
So we can expect a pooling of not only hardware from these two companies, but also of software. This has the potential power to take the market on in a significant way. However there are two young upstarts that are currently making all the waves in this market, Apple with iPhone and Google with Android. The competition is fierce. And for gamers Nokia have the legacy of nGage to get over.
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Some long words from the partnership on what they hope to achieve: “new class of Intel Architecture-based mobile computing device and chipset architectures which will combine the performance of powerful computers with high-bandwidth mobile broadband communications and ubiquitous Internet connectivity”.