MediaTek wants to lead the charge on cheap Android ICS smartphones

Taiwanese semiconductor company MediaTek wants to lead the charge of inexpensive midrange Android 4.0 handsets, and they're coming out with inexpensive guns blazing with their new MT6575 Android Platform. This SoC solution should lead to Ice Cream Sandwich-powered handsets that retail for under $200 in the near future.

The MT6575 platform won’t be cutting edge, but they will bring an energy-efficient 1GHz ARM Cortex A9 CPU that can power qHD screens, 720p video capture and playback, hot-swappable dual-SIM slots, and 3D/HSPA radios. While those specs won’t blow the skirts up of jaded smartphone enthusiasts, remember that these specs are better than the phones that more than half the world users – including many smartphones sold in the last year by the likes of Nokia and RIM.

MediaTek isn’t trying to go head to head with the iPhone or Galaxy Nexus of course, but rather the sizable population in emerging markets. They expect to find a particularly receptive audience among prepaid cell carriers, who are looking for ways to increase the amount of data used (and thus paid for) by their customers. Offering inexpensive smartphones is a sure-fire way to increase the data usage of their feature-phone toting customers.

How well will Ice Cream Sandwich run on a phone with these specs? We won’t have to wait long to find out, MediaTek says the first phone built on the MT6575 platform should hit the market this quarter.

source: MediaTek via The Verge