Intel demos Medfield-based smartphone reference design at CES (video)

There we go! Head past all the months-old Ultrabooks in Intel's CES booth, and you'll stumble across something less pedestrian: a reference smartphone, based on the chipmaker's Medfield platform. How it looks is irrelevant, really -- that chintzy, fingerprint-prone slab of plastic offers no hints as to what the Samsungs and HTCs of the smartphone world are going to create. What matters here is what's inside: this 4-inch handset packs a single-core 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z2460 chip, XXM 6260 modem and Intel GMA graphics, along with your requisite WiFi radio, accelerometer, etc. (Intel had Gingerbread installed, though that'll hardly be current by the time Medfield starts shipping.)

Though battery life will naturally vary by manufacturer, this particular device houses a 1,460mAh juicepack promising 45 hours of audio playback, eight hours of 3G voice calls, five hours of 3G browsing or 14 days of standby. At the same time, Intel was demoing Modern Combat 2, as you can see in that lead shot, and playing HD video playing through the phone's micro-HDMI slot. Look closely at those videos below, and you'll see the output is mostly smooth with some slight stuttering, though trust us when we say video playback and gaming were more fluid on the device itself. Have a peek below and judge for yourselves, and hopefully one day in the not-too-distant future we'll be able to size up the battery life situation too.