While Intel’s Atom platform first made its name in the now-fading netbook category of cut-price portable computers, it was long intended to find its way into smartphones and tablets in a bid to break ARM’s effective stranglehold on mobile systems-on-a-chip.

There have been a handful of smartphones that shipped with the Medfield chipset, and Motorola recently unveiled the first result of a partnership agreement with Intel to ship mobile devices that use the latter’s x86 processors.

The Motorola RAZR i does have its advantages over its Atom-powered brethren: with a CPU clocked at 2GHz, it has a 400MHz clock speed advantage over similar devices from Lenovo, Orange and ZTE. This should promise improvements in the phone’s overall usability.

Outside of the different chipset, the RAZR i is uncannily similar to the recently-unveiled Droid RAZR M, a mid-range companion to the Droid RAZR HD and the direct successor to the original Droid RAZR.

It gets a 4.3-inch 960 x 540 display, an 8-megapixel camera (though with some Intel-powered enhancements like a 10-shot burst mode and one-second start-up), and a 2000mAh battery. Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich is the device’s operating system. Storage space comes courtesy of 8GB of internal space and up to a 32GB microSD card.

However, it loses the RAZR M’s 4G LTE compatibility, which makes it less viable in the North American market. Intel seems to understand this, and the United States has been excluded from the smartphone’s initial launch locations, which are limited to a number of markets in Europe and Latin America starting in October.