Intel gives a first glimpse of its Medfield Android tablet

CHIPMAKER Intel showed off its own-brand tablet with its Atom 'Medfield' chip at the Intel Developer Forum today.

The INQUIRER got a close-up view of Intel's Medfield tablet "form factor reference design", which was running on its 32nm Atom Medfield processor. The device has a 10.1in screen and was shown off running Android 3.x Honeycomb.

Other than getting a brief look at it, we didn't get to find out much about the tablet. Intel said it is 8.9mm thick and is running "alpha software" at present that is in an optimisation phase.

Steve Smith, VP of notebooks and tablets at Intel said, "This is the kind of thing we use to qualify the SoC (system on chip) and to work with the software developers to get the operating system up, running and optimised to do performance analysis and then to provide a baseline that OEMs (original equipment manufacturer) can use to go to production."

"World's first Intel x86 based Android tablet", Smith added.

There were a couple of devices working that had a few functioning apps. From a brief demonstration the performance looked very smooth.

Earlier in Paul Otellini's keynote a Medfield smartphone was very briefly shown with Android Gingerbread on it when Andy Rubin from Google was on stage announcing the partnership between the two IT industry giants. µ