We’ve been excited about Nvidia’s Tegra chipset making its way to mobile handsets for as long as they’ve been showing off their prototypes – which, to be clear, is quite a while. They’ve managed to jam a beast of a computer down into a itty-bitty chip and sink the power requirements down to less than one watt, all while keeping the thing cheap. In other words, straight ridiculous computing power (games, HD video output) on a handset that lasts, as Nvidia puts it, “days and days”.
We’d heard whispers from Nvidia’s crew back at CES that this thing ought to make its mobile debut in Q4, but we had a hard time getting an official statement on the matter. Looks like it has become a sure thing since: in an interview with The Street, Nvidia’s GM of mobile Mike Rayfield fessed up that one of the big five manufacturers should launch a Tegra phone by the end of this year.
We aren’t going to take a stab at which of the big five we’re talking about here, but we can make educated guesses as to which platform it’ll run. Last we heard, Tegra played friendly with Windows CE Embedded, Windows Mobile, and Android. If you see us around, pardon the shade of blue that has conquered our faces; we’re not going to stop holding our breath until we get a Samsung-made, Android-based Tegra phone.
UPDATE: Looks like our own Peter Ha of CrunchGear nailed out this information in an interview with Nvidia last week. Not only that, but he took it one step further, getting pricing/carrier information; expect Tegra phones to launch in Q4 on AT&T/T-Mobile for right around the $199 price point.