In Monday's Intel keynote, Paul Ottelini revealed telecoms giant Orange as a key partner for its new 'Medfield' mobile processor platform, and that the company would be the first to launch an Intel smartphone in the UK.
We got hands-on with this device at the Intel stand at Mobile World Congress, and put it through its paces.
Firstly, a few key points about the Santa Clara. Orange has no smartphone manufacturing heritage, and its existing range tend to be rebranded ZTE handsets, aimed at the entry level market. Intel has designed the Santa Clara for Orange, and that presumably gives way to its moniker, which is the location of Intel's HQ in California.
The handset itself is closely based on the Intel reference design, as you might expect, so it's compact, not dissimilar to the iPhone 4S in bulk, and has the same flat rounded edge. It's black, with a silver band around the side, which is home to a wake/sleep button, volume control and a hard camera button.
Inside is the older Intel Atom Z2460 Medfield 1.6GHz single-core chip, powering Android 2.3 Gingerbread, which has not been reskinned or tweaked. An Intel spokesman revealed that the handset will get an over-the-air upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich after launch.
The 1084x600 4-inch screen has been widely superseded by competition like the Fujitsu F-07D and the HTC One X, with high end handsets offering 720p HD resolutions, and AMOLED displays. It lacked the vibrancy and sharpness found on most modern smartphones, and this coupled with the dated, pale and featureless desktop of Gingerbread lead to a less than aesthetically pleasing first impression.
The 8MP camera was also lacklustre, and the results were noisy in low light conditions. The Medfield chip enables several cool features, such as quick fire burst mode, that lets you to take up to 10 shots in under a second, but the sensor and processing led to many of them being blurred.
Despite only being a single core processor, Medfield performed well, and there are no doubts that Intel has got a decent mobile processor on its hands. We saw games and video being outputted onto a 1080p screen without any sign of slow down, and the camera and other applications loaded instantly.
It's not Medfield that lets down the Santa Clara, it's just that it feels like a budget handset. Basic smartphone users will be served adequately here, but those people looking for a device that they can really stretch and use as part of their daily lives, which is what the Medfield platform is supposed to offer, will be left wanting.
The Orange Santa Clara launches in the UK and France in the summer.
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