While ARM and Qualcomm have released some awesome mobile GPUs, we kind of wish that Nvidia would start making smartphone chipsets again or at least license GPU designs. AMD dipped its toes back in again, why shouldn’t Nvidia? For now we can only reminisce about Nvidia-powered phones. The GPU maker isn’t the only one to drop out of the race either, Texas Instruments was farily popular at one point too.
And then there is Intel. Still the dominant supplier of laptop, desktop and server CPUs, Intel’s time as a chipset maker for mobile devices didn’t leave such a legacy. It did start okay, though, and strangely enough it started with ARM.
Intel licensed the ARMv5 instruction set and built on it to create Xscale. The first chips were the PXA210 and PXA250, running at 200MHz and 400MHz, respectively, and they were aimed at PDAs, Personal Digital Assistants (from a modern perspective we’d call them “smartphones without the phone part”).
Intel was targeting high-end PDAs and in 2002 that meant pocketable devices that could decode video and MP3s and had features like wireless connectivity. Here are some interesting numbers about these chips:
the PXA250 measured 17x17mm and came in a 256-pin ball grid array, the PXA210 was cut down to 225 pins (by using a 16-bit data bus instead of 32-bit)The PXA250 powered the likes of the Samsung i700. This one did have cell connectivity (2G with GPRS data), a 240 x 320px resistive touch display, a single VGA camera and an MMC card slot. It ran Windows PocketPC 2003 Phone edition (which has very little to do with the Windows Phone that came later).
The Samsung i300 is an interesting one. Not a PDA clearly, this ran Windows Mobile 2003 SE Smartphone. It was a chunky thing, measuring 20mm thick, and it had a large (for the time) amount of storage – a 3GB microdrive.
The Samsung i750 was also phone-like, however, unlike the i300 it had a touchscreen. A tiny 2.6″ resistive touchscreen, but still. While the slider design let you hide the keypad, the front was adorned with a surprising number of hardware buttons. The i750 was even thicker at 22mm, but it didn’t have a microdrive. Instead it used one of those newfangled microSD cards for extra storage.
Motorola had some curious designs from that era. The Motorola A1200 was fairly typical with a transparent flip cover that protected the resistive touch display (and prevented accidental touches). This display was somehow tinier than the i750 one at 2.4″.
The Motorola Q8 went after the BlackBerry demographic with a hardware QWERTY below the display (2.4″ landscape). There were also flip phones like the A910 – not as sharp as a Razr, this one is interesting is that it avoided the Microsoft hegemony and ran a Linux-based OS instead. The E680 was another example of a Linux phone.
O2 XDA devices belong on this list as well. The O2 XDA II, for example, had a “huge” 3.5″ display (still 240 x 320px, though). There was also the i-mate PDA2, a fairly standard device. For an oddball design, check out the tiny laptop that was the Qtek 9000.
By the way, do these feel like they have something in common? Besides the XScale chipsets we mean. That’s right, they were all made by HTC back in its ODM days.Palm used XScale chips as well, running mostly the company’s PalmOS, though there were Windows Mobile devices like the Treo 500v.
The post Flashback: a look back at Intel-powered smartphones and tablets first appeared on Technology Magazine.
