LOS ANGELES — Naming a powerful ally in its quest to
become the king of smartphones, Google Inc. said it was teaming up with
Intel Corp. to develop software aimed at running on the chip maker’s
next-generation mobile microchips.
At Intel’s
annual developer conference in San Francisco, the two companies said
Tuesday that Google’s Android software would be optimized for Intel’s
Atom processors. Atom chips are designed to require half as much power
as earlier Intel models, so are better suited for portable,
battery-powered devices.
Atom chips now run in
laptops and tablets from Sony, Dell, Acer and Lenovo — but have been
used only in a handful of smartphones.
Intel’s
decision to team up with Google comes as the search giant’s Android
operating system has become the world’s bestselling smartphone software,
accounting for 43 percent of the phones sold worldwide last quarter. By
giving away its Android software to any manufacturer that wants it,
Google has found that dozens of phone makers have built Android devices,
including popular models from Samsung, HTC and LG.
Last
month Google agreed to buy Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. for $12.5
billion, the company’s largest acquisition to date. Motorola is a
leading maker of Android phones, and if cleared by regulators, the
purchase would allow Google to design and build its own phones. That
could include the use of Intel chips.
Meanwhile,
in Anaheim, Calif., longtime Intel partner (and Google rival) Microsoft
Corp. touted its own mobile strategy. The Redmond, Wash., software giant
said the next version of its Windows operating system, Windows 8, would
run on tablets and smartphones that use a different low-power microchip
model, called ARM. The chips, based on designs from the British company
ARM Holdings, are built by a number of companies, including Qualcomm
Inc. and Texas Instruments Inc.
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