Intel and Nokia have announced a partnership agreement covering hardware and software development. There had been a bit of buzz this morning in advance of the announcement, with a number of folks speculating that Nokia would announce a handset using Intel’s low power Atom processor. Or maybe a netbook. But the truth of the matter is that the two companies announced a relationship today, but no products.
Nokia has a whole lot of expertise with smartphones and always-connected, 3G enabled internet devices, while Intel’s all over the computer space, which includes netbooks, MIDs, and UMPCs (if you actually think there’s any difference between the three). Maybe in the short term we’ll start to see Intel chips showing up in Nokia products, or Nokia software (including Maemo) designed to support Intel powered machines. In the long term, this partnership could lead to entirely new classes of devices. Or not.
What do you think? Is this big news, or much ado about nothing?
Off the cuff, so to speak, just speaking off the top of my mind, it sounds more like a “no compete” agreement, rather than a “partnership”.