INTEL POWERED SMARTPHONES COMING NEXT YEAR

According to Reuters, Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini confirmed that smartphones powered by Intel’s Medfield mobile processor would land next year. Otellini also denied earlier rumors that Intel might include ARM technology in future chips. “There’s no advantage going in there, we’d be beholden to someone else, beholden to ARM. We’d pay royalties to them so it would lower the overall profits,” Otellini explained during Intel’s annual investor meeting in California.

Intel’s Atom processors have been used in tablets and netbooks, but the firm has been noticeably absent in the smartphone market, which has been dominated by ARM, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Texas Instruments, and Samsung. “With Medfield we’re in the power envelope for phones … We’re working with several customers and we start to expect to see the revenue ramp toward the end of this year,” Intel’s CFO Stacy Smith said

NEW BRAIN CONTROLLED ROBOTIC ARM PROSTHETIC HITS FDA

The FDA has just announced a new "Innovation Pathway" program that promises to allow for priority reviews of "truly pioneering technologies," which could potentially cut the approval process time in half. Somewhat ironically, however, that program itself will first need some further review before it's broadly deployed, but the FDA has already kicked things off on a limited basis with its first submission: a brain-controlled robotic arm from DARPA. It's not clear which arm that is, but it sounds a lot like the now-famous "Luke" arm (pictured above) developed by Dean Kamen's Deka organization, which just so happens to be funded by DARPA

ARM CHIPS CUT XO LAPTOP POWER NEEDS TO 2 WATTS

The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) has been making XO Laptops since 2006. The original goal was to create a laptop for kids in developing countries that only cost $100 to manufacture. Although the laptop was made, it ended up costing $199.

While the focus now may be on OLPC’s forthcoming XO-3 Tablet, the XO Laptop continues to be updated. The original device was v1.0, but the current model shipping has had a number of updates and now carries the version number 1.5. At CES last week v1.75 was shown off, and it brings with it some significant improvements thanks mainly to ARM.

One of the major problems of using any electronics hardware in a developing country is gaining access to a reliable power source. The OLPC solved this for the XO Laptop by offering a manual crank charger. The only problem being it took a couple of hours to fully charge the battery.

While the availability of power in certain regions of the world cannot be solved by the OLPC, it can improve upon the power use of the XO Laptop. And with v1.75 they have managed to half that power use. The reason this has been made possible is the move to use an ARM rather than an x86 processor. So now rather than drawing 4 watts of power, the XO-1.75 draws 2 watts. The new chip being used is a 1GHz Armada 610 from Marvell. [Geek]