Microsoft is threatening the “major league players” regarding mobile devices, by announcing it is going to produce a smartphone “collaborating” with NVIDIA's new system-on-a-chip. Also, the Redmond giant is saying the upcoming mobile will become a fierce rival for all such competitors, but its main purpose is to go against the iPhone.

Covering the new smartphone release, the Inquirer wrote: “What do you get if you take an iPhone, remove the clean UI, user friendliness, nice industrial design, battery life, cachet, functional OS, and in general everything else that makes it worthwhile? […] The new Microsoft phone, powered by NVIDIA."

Detailed information about the features and capabilities of this upcoming device are not available yet, but, according to the Inquirer, it will run using NVIDIA's all-in-one Tegra chips, which are also to be released shortly. These Tegra chips are said to come in three different versions, the Tegra 600 for GPS and automotive markets, Tegra 650 for handhelds and notebooks, and the Tegra 2500APX for the smartphone.

Our interest lies with the APX 2500, which certainly gets us curious, especially if we read about the features said to be included in this new Microsoft release. The capabilities are relevant because of the 600 MHz MPCore processor, the GeForce ULV support for Open GL ES 2.0, a 12 Megapixel camera support, and also NVIDIA’s nPower technology that should provide you with an amazing 10 hours of video playback and 100 hours of audio.

If all these features are to be included in Microsoft plans for the new release, then we can’t but conclude that this device will probably become very successful once released. Since it’s set to be unveiled at February's 3GSM's conference in Barcelona, we have to wait until that time to draw the real conclusions about this phone. Until then, all these speculations are all we can cling to when it comes to this device.