CES 2012: Intel enters the smartphone race with Android Ice Cream Sandwich-powered Lenovo K800

Over on our sister site PocketGamer.biz last week, professional prognosticator Jon Jordan posited that chip maker Intel would soon be taking a leaf out of Google's playbook and entering the smartphone market with its own-branded Android handset(s).

By Jove, he was right!

Up on stage this evening at CES 2012, Lenovo's Liu Jun joined Intel CEO Paul Otellini to unveil the world's first smartphone powered by Intel's new Medfield chip architecture: the Lenovo K800.

The good news: the K800 sports a 4.5-inch 720p multi-touch display, has "incredible multitasking performance", runs the latest flavour of Android (4.0), and can stream HD content wirelessly to big-screen TVs.

The bad news: the K800 isn't coming to the UK or US. Yet. Instead, the K800 will touch down in China on the China Unicom network in Q2 2012. Beyond that, your guess is as good as mine.

The company also plans to release a 10-inch tablet based on the same architecture. Also in China, we're guessing.

More hopefully, Otellini also showed off a reference smartphone design built on the Android platform that OEM partners are free to tweak to their heart's content.

This reference device boasts an 8-megapixel camera that can ripplefire ten HD photos in less than a second; 1080p video playback and capture; 45 hours of audio playback; six hours of HD video playback; eight hours of talk time over 3G; and 14 days of standby time. Oh, and NFC.

There's more.

Next on stage was Motorola chairman and CEO Sanjay Jha, who announced that Motorola has entered into a multi-year strategic agreement with Intel to manufacture smartphones built on the Intel architecture.

The first of these - obviously Android devices, given Google's buying Motorola - will be out in late summer.

Last but not least, Otellini showed off a reference design for a Windows 8 tablet.

Don't tell me you're not psyched by that. Don't lie to me.