You may have your sights set on Nvidia's next generation of mobile processor, the Tegra 3, but the company has another little achievement to announce today: the first smartphone powered entirely by its chips. The Mimosa X from ZTE features the dual-core Tegra 2 of old plus an Icera 450 HSPA+ modem for the baseband and RF processing. Icera was a 2011 acquisition for Nvidia that is quickly being transformed into the green team's modem design and development house — saving Nvidia the trouble of relying on competitors like Qualcomm for its connectivity needs. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has promised that we'll see an integrated LTE chipset this year, one that combines the best of Tegra and Icera, and today's news is the first step on that path.

Other than the fact it's a milestone for Nvidia, the Mimosa X is one of the still comparatively few phones we've heard announced with Ice Cream Sandwich as the preloaded OS, although the image above will tell you that ZTE couldn't resist applying a few skinning touches. It's also somewhat perplexing to see the phone equipped with capacitive Android buttons when version 4.0 of the operating system doesn't require them. The 4.3-inch display comes with qHD (960 x 540) resolution and is accompanied by 4GB of internal storage and a 5-megapixel camera. Nvidia describes this as the first "mainstream" Tegra Zone phone, so the relatively barren spec sheet should translate to an aggressive price point when the Mimosa X makes its debut in Q2 of this year.