Nvidia Tegra-Based Phone Might Arrive in Q4

It seems that the mobile phone segment is beginning to get crowded in about all the aspects possible. Starting with the operating system area, the number of phone makers around the world, and going all the way down to the manufacturers of chipsets and microprocessors for the small computers in the palm of our hands, all levels have seen new players entering the game. The latest of them is, we learn, none other than Nvidia, the worldwide leading graphics card maker.

According to a recent article on MobileCrunch, it shouldn't be too long before we see on the market the first mobile phones powered by the company's Tegra chipset. Some of you might already know that the graphics card maker already showed to the world some phone prototypes, and it seems that the company also stated back in January at CES that the first handsets were expected to hit the market in the fourth quarter of the ongoing year, though no other details have become available since then.

This time around we learn that things are quite close to becoming reality. In a recent interview with The Street, Mike Rayfield, the general manager of Nvidia's mobile unit, stated loud and clear that the company's Tegra chip would be present in a device launched before the end of the year by one of the top five mobile phone makers in the world. Although no word on the company to make the phone was said, some rumors point towards Samsung or Motorola as the best possible choices.

Moreover, it seems that some ideas on the operator to carry the phone and on what operating system said device would run under have also emerged. The fact that Tegra has worked great with Windows CE Embedded, Windows Mobile, and Android might easily suggest that one of these OSes should be spotted on the Tegra-based handset. According to Peter Ha of CrunchGear, AT&T and T-Mobile are the carriers that are most likely to release the Tegra device in Q4, at a price set under the $199 mark.

For what it's worth, this sounds like rather great news for mobile phone enthusiasts who love having a piece of hardware capable of delivering impressive multimedia features. Tegra, as some of you might already know, is a chip that packs inside the power of a computer. It has been called a computer-on-a-chip, and brings forth HD video output and gaming capabilities, while sporting power requirements lower than one watt, as well as cheap manufacturing costs.