The cut-throat market for the chips that power smartphones and handhelds just got more competitive. In the past few days, no fewer than five semiconductors companies, including Samsung, ST Microelectronics, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, and, yes, even Nvidia, have all announced new application processors:

• Nvidia APX 2500 press release
• Qualcomm QST-series press release
• Samsung S3C6410 press release
• ST Microelectronics Nomadik STn8820 press release
• TI OMAP3440 press release

I won’t spend a lot of time detailing the specs of each of these. (I’ve included some links to more detailed analyses of several at the end of this post.) Instead, I want to highlight some of the trends in these mobile chips, which don’t get quite as much attention as all the new eye-candy from Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG and others announced at GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, but are growing in significance.

Traditionally, cell phone design has been dictated by the telecommunications companies. They have long design cycles (in other words, it takes a long time to get a handset off the drawing board and into production), use low-cost components and little memory, and are geared primarily for making and receiving calls. Data services have been slow to catch on, especially in the U.S., because of a poor user experience and high prices.

Apple’s iPhone upset this industry dynamic. Even in comparison to users of other smartphones, it’s clear that iPhone users spend significantly more time browsing the Web, watching YouTube videos, checking stock prices, and so on. Over the holidays, the iPhone accounted for more traffic to Google servers than any other mobile device, despite the fact that it has a fraction of the worldwide market share held by smartphones based on the Symbian, Windows Mobile or BlackBerry operating systems. Why? It’s a better browser.

The software gets most of the credit. But the features that make the iPhone a superior smartphone–a sophisticated user interface; a large, high-resolution display; high-quality video playback–all require more powerful hardware too. Just as Windows Vista’s Aero interface needs a decent processor (and lots of memory), a better smartphone requires a powerful application processor. In fact, the mystery application processor in the iPhone is based on the same ARM 11 series core found in the new Samsung S3C6410, and is probably very similar, even though Apple uses different model numbers.

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San Francisco—The next big thing for Intel is little. The company has used its Developer Forum, here, to extol the virtues of its forthcoming handheld device platforms for allowing consumers to connect to the Internet. Intel calls this “Internet in your pocket.”

Intel has been chasing the handheld space for some time without much success. It started with the Xscale processor, recently sold to Marvell, and is now taking aim with its own Intel Architecture or x86 processor technology. The first generations of its IA-based handheld platform, which use its low-power notebook processors and chipsets, haven’t done much to wow thus far. That’s partially because they have been wrapped in Ultramobile PC hardware, which costs around $1,000 and does not have a straightforward method to gain access to wide area wireless. For that price, you might as well just buy an inexpensive notebook. And that’s what most people do.

But Intel is touting significant improvements in device size, battery life and connectivity for its forthcoming handheld platforms, including one dubbed Menlow that is due in the first half of next year. It appears as if the Menlow has begun to win over some. The company listed companies including Samsung and Fujitsu as designing MID devices here at IDF.

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