Intel Wants Oak Trail Tablets with Android 3.1

Intel may have once been focused on seeing its processors paired with the Microsoft Windows OS, but it looks like it now wants a certain new Atom chip to be used in as many Android devices as possible.

It has been about a month since Intel delivered its newest member of the Atom series of central processing units.

That particular processor is the first of the Oak Trail generation and is the Santa Clara, California-based chip maker's main weapon on the tablet front.

In fact, there have already been leaks, rumors and reports, even official announcements, about slates based on it.

Apparently, Intel is not just willing to have its chips running Android, it actually wants to see the Z670 in as many Android 3.0, 3.1 and even Chrome products as possible.

This includes both slates and netbooks and, according to a report by Digitimes, is part of the reason for how ASUS, Lenovo and Acer are all preparing things of this sort.

Apparently, all three of the above companies are creating media tablets that have the Oak trail CPU at their heart and are loaded with the most recent version of Google's mobile OS.

Android 3.0 was, originally, intended as 'the' tablet OS, but after some operational problems, as well as the overall lack of applications of Android slates, Google began to slow down on licensing it to vendors. This is the main reason for how the number of Android 3.0 slates is relatively limited.

The companies mentioned above should have Atom Z670-powered tablets loaded with Android 3.1 ready during the second half of the year, maybe even before summer is out.

What remains is to see how the showdown between these products and those based on the ARM architecture, particularly the NVIDIA Tegra series of SoCs (Toshiba might even be preparing one using Kal El) progresses.