Intel at CES 2012: ultrabooks, K800 Medfield smartphone, new prototypes, and more!

We're at Showstoppers at CES in Vegas, and we just got a first look at Lenovo's new K800 smartphone, the first in the world to run on Intel's Medfield chipset. We liked the design of the phone's hardware, though it's a little thick. It will run a heavily skinned version of Android 4.0 (though the model we saw ran Android 2.3.7), which looks similar to the skins on Lenovo's tablets. It's got a 1.6GHz Intel processor, a 4.5-inch 720p HD TFT display, an 8-megapixel camera, a WCDMA HSPA+ 21Mbps wireless radio, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, and GPS onboard. It's also got WiDi onboard, which Lenovo says "enables screen sync to a TV at 720p30." The phone felt pretty snappy, but we'll reserve real judgment for when we can spend more time with the device. It's going to launch in China in the first half of this year, and there's no word on when (or if) it will be available stateside.

Thomas Ricker contributed to this report.

Intel just announced a new reference design for a tablet with a display that slides along the keyboard and folds onto it to work in either laptop or tablet mode. It looks a bit like the sliders from Sony and the Samsung Sliding PC 7. The tablets will run on Ivy Bridge silicon — probably including the integrated graphics — and have built-in NFC, which was shown this morning. Intel demoed some games with the ability to use your phone as a remote control, and the processor's ability to eat up a live remote video feed.

To deliver TV and Movies to the tablet, Intel has partnered with Technicolor and Dreamworks on an app called M Go available in the AppUp center. Of course, you can also watch your digital media on a TV using Intel's own WiDi technology for connecting to wireless displays. The whole process of opening the app, buying a movie, and watching it on a TV seems pretty slick. You can even choose to make your purchases using NFC with a credit card or smartphone.

What's this? Intel just pulled out another device on stage, a Windows 8 slate, and says it's running on a 32nm SoC but didn't specify Medfield. Thankfully, a little bird (and a PR representative) tell us it's Clover Trail. Sorry, folks, that's really all we know right now.

You've read that headline right: Motorola and Intel have inked a multi-year, multi-device partnership, meaning Motorola will be making both phones and tablets powered by Intel's new Medfield, Atom Z2460 processor. Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha is expected to take the stage with Intel's Paul Otellni here at Intel's press conference to announce the partnership, and while they are not expected to demo a phone, Intel confirmed that Motorola will ship an Android phone in the second half of this year with the new processor and chipset. Carrier validation will begin this summer. Our guess is that it will be an ICS device, and that we'll learn more about it all at Mobile World Congress, where Intel has already told us to expect more news on its phone and tablet strategy. Stay tuned for more details in our Intel press conference live blog.

We've spotted a couple of devices today with Intel's new Medfield chip, and this evening the company is finally coming clean about its forthcoming Atom processor, which is now confirmed to be coming to Lenovo and Motorola phones and tablets later this year. The single-core, 32nm processor, which is now called the Atom Z2460, is clocked at 1.6GHz and supports hyper-threading. That processor is then bundled with the Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX540 graphics, and Intel's 6540 HSPA+ modem inside the reference design. While Intel was showing an Android 4.0 tablet, the reference design is running Android 2.3, but battery life seems much improved over Moorestown: Intel says it gets six hours of video playback, 45 hours of music and 14 days of standby time on a charge.

However, the biggest question about Intel's Android devices has been app support. Back in September, Intel and Google announced a partnership to allow developers to compile apps for both ARM and x86 at the same time, but today Intel's detailing some more Android app magic. According to Intel's Dave Whalen, almost all apps in the Android Market will run on phones or tablets with Medfield. Even apps that haven't been optimized for Intel will work — here's Angry Birds. "Developers don't have to recompile them. We are trying to address the fragmentation issue," Whalen explained. That said, Intel says that a small percentage of apps won't work. Stay tuned for more from our Intel live blog.

In terms of device performance, we experienced fluidity when flicking through the home screen and application page, and played Angry Birds and a device-optimized version of Modern Combat 2. The games ran smoothly with minimal visible lag, and the hardware itself felt a bit light in-hand. Mind you, though, that this prototype hardare is merely for demonstrating the company's new system-on-chip, and Intel's told us it plans on announcing a manufacturer partnership later today. Stay tuned!

This is wild. Intel won't say who it's partnering with, but it just showed off a "Nikiski" laptop prototype at its CES 2012 keynote. It's mostly a regular laptop, but the whole palm rest is a glass touchpad. Outside of being full-width (hopefully with great palm rejection), the LCD can shine through the wide strip of glass when it's closed — turning the bottom of the laptop into a Windows 8-like widget display. Check out our hands-on right here!

As part of its press conference this morning, Intel is demoing ultrabooks running on Ivy Bridge, complete with built-in NFC supported by the Mastercard Paypass system. Intel has built in identity protection technology that only allows it work with a specific card. The company's also shown off plenty of DirectX 11 demos on Ivy Bridge, and the graphics looked pretty great fantastic from our seat in the audience.