Intel Corp (INTC)

[Saturn V]

Your comment: "The Clover Trail ref design was released on Jan 12, 2012."

Are you sure ? I remember that the Medfield platform was released early in 2012.This was released with a reference phone design, and in Q2 of 2012 this reference phone became the Orange phone and the Indian smartphone. Motorola and Lenovo designed and released their own phone designs based upon the Medfield in mid 2012 as well.

The Clovertrail is not a phone chip, but a tablet only chip. The salient difference between the Clovertrail and Medfield is that Clovertrail has PCI, which is needed for the Windows tablets, and the PCI circuitry dissipates extra power, and this was not put on the Medfield.

However the Clovertrail+ which was released at CES 2013 is intended for both the phone market and the tablet market. Lenovo is already showing examples of its phones with Clovertrail+. (Apparently the PCI can be turned off to conserve battery life for the phone market.)

My impression is that the lag between the release of a reference design and customer product introduction can be significantly less than six months.