Lava and Intel are planning to launch a new smartphone this week, a smartphone that the companies are claiming is the “Fastest Smartphone Ever.” The phone is supposed to be launched in Goa on the 14th of March and Lava and Intel have pushed out media invites for the event. The invitation shows a little bit of the new smartphone but it’s heavy on Photoshop and marketing so we can’t really be sure what the device will look like.
However, that won’t stop us from speculating on what the device (which will probably called the X1000, since its predecessor was the X900) will amount to. Lava and Intel have partnered earlier on Intel powered smartphones with devices such as the Xolo X900 and the X500. Both devices were very good performers with the X500 leaving its competitors behind in the dust while the X900 performed at par with its competition but wasn’t able to do so in terms of graphics performance. Since then, however, ARM based processors from the likes of Qualcomm, Samsung and Nvidia have ruled the high-end smartphone segment, leaving many of us to believe that Intel would have a very difficult time playing catch-up.
Fast-forward to February of this year when Intel showed off its new line-up of Clover Trail processors at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. These processors – the Z2520, the Z2560 and the Z2580 will power smartphones that will be launched in 2013. Since the upcoming Xolo smartphone is touted to be the ‘fastest smartphone ever’ we expect it to be powered by the Z2580 which is a 2.0GHz dual-core processor with Hyper-Threading that for all intents and purposes will give equal performance to a similarly clocked quad-core processor (at least when running apps that support hyper-threading). Graphics will be handled by dual PowerVR SGX 544MP2 GPU chips which are capable of outputting a resolution of 1920×1200 pixels. The processor is also capable of handling cameras up to 16MP (with a front camera of 2MP) but Lava will probably cut-down that megapixel count to either 8MP or 13MP, to keep the price of the phone in check.
Apart from a high-end variant of the X1000, there is a reason to believe that there will be two other variants launched by Lava and Intel. AnTuTU benchmark figures spotted by Tech Enclave show devices called the X1000 sporting three processors clocked at 2.0GHz, 1.6GHz and 1GHz. These clock speeds are in line with the Clover Trail variants that Intel has already talked about- the Z2560 which can go up to 1.6GHz and the Z2520 which can go up to 1.2GHz. What’s interesting to note is that if you take a look at the AnTuTu benchmark figures for the X1000 (we have to reiterate here that it’s highly possible that the benchmark figures are not representative of the final product’s performance. Also, these are just numbers from one benchmarking tool, so it’s unfair to do a direct comparison), the numbers produced by the variant with the 2GHz processor fall short of the LG Optimus G by about 30% (note: the LG Optimus G scored 17,802 on AnTuTu in our benchmarks).