Is Asus working on new Nexus 7 model and Intel-powered smartphone?

Quick, how many smartphones powered by an Intel processor can you name? Not many models come to mind, do they? That's because there's just a handful of them currently on the market, although Intel is slowly but surely making its way into the mobile arena with its smartphone- and tablet-optimized Atom chips. In particular, ZTE, Motorola, and Acer are among the chip maker's partners and they all have smartphones that run on Intel's silicon.

The next big name to join forces with Intel might be Asus, if DigiTimes' sources are to be trusted. Actually, Asus already has a product with an Intel processor ticking under its hood, namely the Fonepad tablet that was announced at MWC, but allegedly, there's a smartphone also coming down the road. The handset is said to be equipped with an Intel Atom Z2580 processor, which has two cores that can run at up to 2GHz. As a side note, that's the very same chip found on the Lenovo IdeaPhone K900 smartphone. Furthermore, the source adds that the screen of this mysterious Asus handset will measure between 5 and 5.5 inches, which leads us to believe that in case this device truly exists, it might very well be positioned in the high-end smartphone category. We might not know for sure anytime soon, however, as this Intel-based Asus phone may not launch before June of this year. 

But wait, there's more! The very same source hints that Asus has a new Nexus 7 model in stock, scheduled to launch in May of 2013. To tell you the truth, that doesn't come as much of a surprise considering that the Google I/O event is in May, and that's when the next-gen 7-inch Nexus tablet might be announced officially. The new variant will have better specs (as if we couldn't predict that ourselves) and will retail for a temptingly-low price, somewhere around $250.