Even if Intel powers just one Android tablet made by Samsung, it would be big for the Intel Atom team. Since debuting the Atom chip five years ago, it has typically been used in low-end PCs such as netbooks. Over the past year, Intel managed to get Atom silicon inside a few smartphones, but none of those devices have gone on to be major sales hits. The chip does power Windows 8(msft) tablets as well.

In this case, Samsung is one of the top Android tablet makers, giving Intel a chance to prove its Atom has the right blend of power and efficiency to compete in the growing mobile market.

I noted earlier this week that Samsung could be considering the move in order to keep its Exynos chips available for higher demand devices such as the Galaxy S 4 smartphone:

“So why would Samsung, which makes it own chips for smartphones and tablets, consider an Intel inside its newest Galaxy Tab? Samsung could be keeping the Exynos for its own handsets, such as the new Galaxy S 4, because it sells more handsets than tablets. The company’s tablets wouldn’t like suffer any performance hit by using Intel’s silicon either; at least not if the early benchmarks are valid.”

The timing of a potential Intel Atom design win is a little surprising to me. The company will debut the next generation of Atom chips called Silvermont in the second half of this year, promising three times the computing power or five times the power efficiency of the current Atom processors.

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According to the testing details, the device in question uses a 1280 x 800 display and is running Android 4.2.2. The processor can run between 800 MHz and 1.6 GHz clock cycles and uses a PowerVR 533 for graphics, which fits the bill as an Intel Atom chip, possibly the newest CloverTrail+ that Intel recently announced.

So does this particular device perform? Based on the benchmarks: Quite good. Here’s a comparison of the graphics performance of the tested Galaxy Tab 3 and last year’s Galaxy Tab 2 model, for example.

And SamMobile recently noted a different benchmark test of the Tab 3 using the Antutu test, finding that the device scored the highest ever for an Android tablet in terms of overall performance.

So why would Samsung, which makes it own chips for smartphones and tablets, consider an Intel inside its newest Galaxy Tab? Samsung could be keeping the Exynos for its own handsets, such as the new Galaxy S 4, because it sells more handsets than tablets. The company’s tablets wouldn’t like suffer any performance hit by using Intel’s silicon either; at least not if the early benchmarks are valid.

If Intel’s Atom does power the Galaxy Tab 3, it would be one of the biggest mobile design wins yet for Intel. The chipmaker does power a few smartphone products, but hasn’t yet cracked the U.S. market with a top-tier hardware partner such as Samsung.

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This is a big win for Spain-based Telefónica, which is trying to get as many partners as possible to plug into its BlueVia billing API. It’s previously managed to get Google, Facebook, Microsoft and BlackBerry to agree to play along, but Samsung is the first major phone manufacturer to sign up. It also happens to be the world’s top phone manufacturer, having shipped 70 million smartphones in the first quarter of this year.

Carrier billing makes it easier to sell smartphones to people, particularly in emerging markets, who lack a bank card. Telefónica has 315 million mobile customers around the world, and is particularly strong in Latin America. The fact that Google Play is already plugged into Telefónica’s billing API means that, without this deal, Samsung was risking its cardless Android customers finding it easier to buy through Google’s storefront than Samsung’s.

As Lee Epting, vice president of Samsung’s Media Solutions Centre Europe, said in a statement:

“Samsung is committed to ensuring that our customers have choice and convenience when purchasing content on our devices. Our partnership with Telefónica Digital allows us to deliver yet another easy and convenient purchasing experience to our Samsung Hub and Samsung Apps customers.”

The “direct-to-bill” option will roll out first to Telefónica’s O2 business in Germany, during the coming months, then to its other operating businesses in a phased deployment.

We’re going to be seeing more of these carrier billing arrangements in the future, and that’s a good thing for all concerned. Not only does it mean more apps and content will be sold, benefiting their producers, but it also means the telcos themselves aren’t shut out of the value chain.

And, if the carriers manage to be involved beyond the provision of basic data services, it may stop them complaining about returns on their network investments and trying to do heinous, net-neutrality-shredding things like charging content providers for their traffic. Everyone’s a winner.

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The Digital Reader, which has been following this story for several months, reported Monday that an unnamed Delaware-based LLC was the new owner of Liquavista. Amazon confirmed the purchase in a statement:

“We are always looking for new technologies we may be able to incorporate into our products over the long term. The Liquavista team shares our passion for invention and is creating exciting new technologies with a lot of potential. It’s still early days, but we’re excited about the possibilities and we look forward to working with Liquavista to develop these displays.”

The purchase price was undisclosed, though it may be made public in Amazon SEC filings’s next quarter.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets obviously already have color screens, but Liquavista’s technology offers the potential for color screens that wouldn’t deplete battery life to be added to e-ink readers. This would be particularly useful for children’s books and graphic novels.

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Why? This is more a traditional camera that has integrated connectivity. The older Galaxy Camera with LTE seemed more like an Android device with camera capabilities bolted on. You won’t find Android on the NX2000, although I suspect the user interface is similar to the camera app on Samsung’s Galaxy S 4: Company representatives told me that Samsung is trying to use the same interface across phones and cameras.

Forgetting the interface and connectivity for a second, the NX2000 offers some impressive capabilities that you won’t find on a smartphone: shutter speeds up to 1/4000th of a second, a wide ISO range from 100 to 25800, and a large ASP-C sensor that is typically found on DSLRs. The NX2000 has a burst mode of 8 frames per second, which can certainly be useful, but we are starting to see high-end smartphones rival that.

Aside from taking advantage of a common user interface, Samsung is also cleverly using its own brand of Wi-Fi sharing. What used to be called AllPlay on Samsung phones and tablets is now Samsung Link. With it, you can wirelessly share photos from the NX2000 to Samsung mobile devices and smart televisions. The camera also supports the standard Wi-Fi Direct for sharing images and videos to other Wi-Fi devices. And connecting the camera to a phone or tablet should be easy with integrated NFC.

I spent a limited amount of time with the older Galaxy Camera and found the image quality to be slightly better than a smartphone, but not even that close to what I can get from a $700 DSLR. That’s the problem with grafting a point-and-shoot camera onto an Android-based Wi-Fi device: You get instant and simple connectivity but at the cost of image quality.

I suspect that won’t be the case with the NX2000, which looks like a camera with interchangeable lenses from the ground up, with the added benefits of Wi-Fi and NFC technology.

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The 12-person San Francisco startup, headed by CEO Tim Tuttle, already had $2.4 million in hand from investors like Google, Greylock Partners, Bessemer Ventures and others. Tuttle refused to give the total value of the trio’s new investment except to say it exceeds all previous funding.

The backing of leading companies from the consumer device, semiconductors and telecommunications worlds is a significant endorsement of the company’s vision.

“We’re still a small company, but we have the backers and team to make a serious run at solving a very hard problem,” Tuttle said in a phone interview. “Which is, how do we get computing devices and applications to understand everything we say and find stuff before we need to search for it?”

That vision — which is shared with others working in predictive computing — is that our computers should push information to us, instead of us having to constantly ask. Expect Labs’ videoconferencing iPad app, MindMeld, is a basic example of what it’s working on: as a conversation is taking place, the contents of it are being analyzed and relevant information pops up in response to what’s being said.

Expect Labs’ three new investors seem to be positioning themselves for the future of computing that’s defined by natural interfaces: touch, gesture and voice. Samsung is one of the biggest consumer electronics makers in the world and will probably want to be able to offer natural interfaces with its TV and mobile devices one day; Intel makes sensors that will pick up inputs like voice; and Telefonica could theoretically use something like what Expect Labs is offering and turn computers listening to phone calls into an additional service for individuals and businesses.

Expect Labs’ partnership deal with Nuance Communications, signed last year, will continue, Tuttle said.

With the fresh round of capital, Tuttle says he plans to grow his team with experts in machine learning and language analysis, and scale up the company’s current infrastructure.

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One interesting thing about this partnership is that Samsung has its own Smart TV platform, which it has been promoting aggressively to app developers. So why get a third party to power your devices? One likely answer: Samsung’s platform has been evolving from an all-purpose app platform towards a more TV-centric approach for high-end TV sets.

At CES in January, Samsung unveiled a new UI for its 2013 Smart TVs that comes with voice control, a live TV guide and a remote control with an integrated touch pad. The company is offering owners of select 2012 TVs to upgrade to the new experience for $300 with the help of its Smart TV evolution kit; but that kind of premium pricing doesn’t really work for a $130 Blu-ray player.

In light of that disparity, Samsung has to make a choice: Either fork its Smart TV platform to work on both high-end and low-end devices, or use a different solution for lower-priced devices. It looks like the company may be ready to go for the latter — and Opera seems to be the company to benefit.

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As these companies battle for the top spot, it’s interesting to note which competitors aren’t on the top five smartphone shipments list. Namely: HTC, BlackBerry and Nokia, all of which were on the list together as recently as the last quarter of 2011. Now it’s LG, Huawei and ZTE that round out the top five after Samsung and Apple.

It should be noted that Apple is the only vendor that reports sales and not shipments, but even that fact doesn’t support the idea that Apple outsold Samsung. It’s simply not a reasonable expectation that Samsung has 33.3 million smartphones sitting around in inventory worldwide.

Unless Samsung stumbles in a big way, it’s not likely that another Android handset maker will outsell Apple’s iPhone any time soon. For all intents and purposes, Samsung is the de facto Android standard, having built a huge audience with its line of Galaxy smartphones. This strategy started in 2010 and, as we pointed out in mid-2011, Samsung was poised to become the smartphone king. Let’s see how long it keeps the crown.

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