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e-business: Microsoft and Intel join up for exclusive phone deal

Posted on: Tuesday, 9 September 2003, 06:00 CDT

Computer heavyweights Microsoft and Intel will have their first jointly designed mobile phone hit the market this autumn. The new handset -shown to consumers by Taiwan's MiTAC -will be the first mobile to use a chipset by Intel.

Intel, like Microsoft, has identified the 450 million units a year mobile phone industry as an opportunity outside the slow- growing PC market.

MiTAC, a computer maker expanding into handheld devices, showed the new model 8380 on its Mio website -www.justmio.com. Mio is the brand name MiTAC uses.

The phone is based on a reference design provided by Intel and Microsoft that was presented first in early 2002. It will play music and video, send e-mail, snap pictures and keep a diary.

This design, announced at the world's largest mobile trade show in Cannes, France, sent shockwaves through the industry as many feared the two could commoditise mobile phone technology in the same way they had done with personal computers where the duo dominate in key operating software and microprocessors.

Established handset makers were reluctant to work with the new players, forcing Microsoft and Intel to first team up with Asian contract electronics manufacturers like MiTAC and High Tech Computer (HTC).

MiTAC said on its website the clamshell phone will come out in Europe by the end of the third quarter, although industry sources said it would more likely be the start of the fourth quarter, at between pounds 354 to pounds 375 before subsidies.

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