Cambridge based electronics manufacturer ARM is enjoying a very solid position in the mobile phone industry, even with competitors such as Texas Instruments, the company’s CPU’s are the standard hardware for many smart phones by manufacturers all over the world.

Intel, a major player in the computer industry, seems to have their sights on the mobile phone market as well. With the introduction of the Intel Moorestown CPU several months ago and the continuous evolution of the Atom hardware to consume less and less power, the company is getting close to producing hardware that will provide plenty of processing power, but will not be consuming so much energy.

According to recent reports, the first Intel bearing smart phones might be seeing light by 2011.

The company is taking the transition slowly and steadily. The company has already started with several Taiwan made tablets –providing the CPU for handheld devices can go a pretty long way.

The MeeGo operating system which Intel co-developed with Nokia is going to be released in October to November. According to Intel, they intentionally designed the MeeGo to work with a wide range of processors –not exclusively Atom technology. By doing this, their OS can be more widely used. Their previous operating system, the Linux based Moblin OS seems to have been scrapped in favor of the MeeGo mobile platform. Of course, with their team up with Nokia, it is likely that new devices from the Finnish phone maker will be showing the new Intel CPUs next year.

In the meanwhile, ARM is steadily strengthening its position in the industry. They have already acquired the support of Microsoft for Windows Phone 7 –according to Steve Ballmer, Qualcomm will be playing an instrumental role in the development of the OS and as such, a Qualcomm CPU is a requirement for the new platform. Aside from Microsoft, Intel has also teamed up with phone manufacturers HTC and Motorola.