Intel Medfield smartphone prototype gets brief preview

Squint, or you'll miss it. The tiny slab of shininess clutched in the hands of Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Ultra Mobility Group, is apparently a Medfield based smartphone that, according to the Maemo forums, was shown off at an Intel sales conference last week.

Details on the handset are almost entirely unknown, bar the chipset, but Intel hasn't been shy with its Medfield expectations. Back in August 2010 the company promised to match ARM's chipsets – currently the popular favorite in mobile devies like smartphones – for active power consumption with the new Medfield processors, which are expected to debut in shipping devices later this year.

At least one of those devices, so the rumors would have it, will be from Nokia's stable and run MeeGo, the two companies' collaborative open-source OS. Leaks earlier this month suggested the Nokia N9 had been reworked using a 1.2GHz Medfield processor and dropping the hardware keyboard, and would be shown off at MWC 2011 next month.

[via Twitter]