Intel has been lagging in the mobile space lately. In contrast to its position in the server and PC markets, the company has an almost negligible share in the handset and tablet industries, though it has been planning to improve that for the last couple of years.

The chipmaker is going to make a big push during CES 2012 towards advancing in mobile, revealing an Intel-powered smartphone that it hopes will help kick start its efforts. The design will be freely available to manufacturers, enabling them to develop their own handsets based on the device.

“You’ll see a number of Intel customers using the guts of this phone to go into the market in the first half of next year,” CEO Paul Otellini said at a Credit Suisse investor conference last month. “And we’ll have more announcements of that at CES.”

Among those announcements will be an ultrabook development, another area where Intel is promoting its Ivy Bridge chip.

Back in the mobile arena, Intel’s OS of choice – by default to some extent – is Android. It has released over 120 patches to Google’s handset platform, a sizable portion of which were dedicated to optimizing it for the chipmaker’s products. It also made several investments in this area including the $10 million it injected in Insyde, an Android firmware maker that has already been collaborating with Intel.

ARM is also making gains with Android. It released a free edition of ARM Development Studio 5 late last month, an Android development toolkit. It caters to mobile developers programming in either C/C++ or Java, giving a large number of Android app makers the ability to optimize their applications for the company’s widely-used mobile chips  – all using the free software.