Mobile World Conference 2016: $100 Intel Atom X3 smartphone with Android and Debian Linux

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/23/move_over_continuum_intel_shows_android_smartphone_powering_bigscreen_linux/ Intel is showing off a smartphone prototype that can also power a desktop PC experience. No, it’s not running Windows 10 Mobile and using Continuum for phone software. Instead, this is a low-power phone with an Intel Atom x3 processor and two operating systems: Android and a custom version of Debian Linux.
On display in Barcelona is a prototype SoFIA (Smart or Feature Phone with Intel Architecture) smartphone with an Atom x3 processor, 2GB RAM and 16GB storage, and modified to support an external display. Attach keyboard, mouse and display, and it becomes desktop Linux, with an option to display the Android screen in a window on the large display. "Android is based on a Linux kernel, so we're running one kernel, we have an Android stack and a Linux stack, and we're sharing the same context, so the file system is identical. The phone stays fully functional," Intel's Nir Metzer, Path Finding Group Manager.
Hold it like a phone and you can run Android apps. Plug it into an external display with an HDMI cable and you can run desktop-style apps on a big screen. In the demo, you can see VLC playing a video while LibreOffice Calc and Writer (spreadsheet and word processing apps) run in other windows, and the Google Chrome and Firefox web browsers are also running at the same time.
Unlike Continuum for phone though, which lets you continue to use your phone while running full-screen apps on an external display, it looks like you can only interact with one operating system at a time on Intel’s smartphone prototype. When using the device in desktop mode, the smartphone screen turns off. Android does continue to run in the background though, and you’ll see notifications on the Linux desktop if calls or text messages come in while the screen is off.
Also unlike Continuum for phone though, you can run apps in resizable windows that can be positioned anywhere on the screen. The only real problem is that screen resolutions are limited to 720p because the hardware isn’t really powerful enough for higher-resolution displays.
But WinFuture reports phones with this technology could sell for as little as $100, which would make them far cheaper than any smartphones that support Windows 10’s Continuum for phone feature.
The prototype was reportedly built by Foxconn, features a 5.5 inch, 1280 x 720 pixel display, up to 2GB of RAM, and up to 16GB of storage. It currently runs Android 5.1, but support for Android 6.0 is said to be in the works.
Pity Intel Atom x3 C3200 is sloooooow! This processor is the least powerful CPU in the Atom lineup by Intel. In the geekbench performance benchmark, we got 854 in multi core performance test and 3293 in 3DMark gaming performance benchmark. So god news is is x86 instruction set and as such many application, yet CPU performance needs to be improved.