At the Intel Developers Forum, Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president of ultra mobility at Intel, showed off the new Menlow and the follow-up Moorestown mobile platforms for pocket Internet devices. Could this be the next-gen competition for the iPhone? Or might the iPhone even incorporate the new technology?

Menlow and Moorestown go in a different, and much more Intel-centric, direction. They’re ultra-low-power x86 chips, using Intel’s own instruction set that developers will be familiar with from desktop machines. While these chips aren’t designed to run Windows Vista, Intel asserts that it’ll be easier for developers to port software from other x86 platforms to the new chips as opposed to recoding for ARM. ARM, meanwhile, touts what they say is even lower power usage than the new Intel chips.

Menlow and Moorestown Mobile Internet Devices (MID) will connect to WiMAX, Wi-Fi (802.11 g/n), and 3G networks for total Internet connectivity (at least where 3G and/or WiMAX is installed).

Read (anandtech.com)
Read (pcmag.com)