Motorola, Lenovo To Offer Intel-Smartphones

Intel announced multi-year deals with Motorola Mobility and Lenovo to create smartphones and tablets, and said the first Google Android phones using the top chipmaker’s processors would go on sale this year.

Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini said Lenovo would launch a smartphone for the Chinese market using Intel’s newest chip in the second quarter of the year, while Motorola will release its phone in the second half.

The agreements with the U.S. and Chinese consumer electronics makers help shore up Intel’s boldest foray into the mobile arena. The company is hoping its new “Medfield” chip conserves enough power to compete with rival smartphones using ARM Holdings’ more energy-efficient architecture.

The world’s largest chip maker is also making a concerted push for the likes of Hewlett Packard to go big on super-slim, Apple Macbook Air-like laptops called Ultrabooks, which it hopes will preserve its dominance of the PC market as tablets like the iPad draw consumers away.

“It is a multi-year, multi-product strategy that will bring both phones and tablets to the (U.S.) marketplace starting with a phone in the second half of 2012,” Dave Whalen, a vice president in the Intel Architecture Group, said of the agreement with Motorola.

“You’re going to see us working very closely with them on technologies,” Whalen told Reuters in an interview.

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Will Cisco CEO Get The Boot?

Cisco has slashed its forecast revenue increase by more than half, while rumours circulate about the possible departure of its long-serving CEO.

Cisco previously expected to increase revenues by 12 to 17 per cent over the next three years, but it has revised this figure downwards to a much smaller five to seven per cent, according to the BBC. It expects profits, however, to be seven to nine per cent for this three year period, which is a healthy profit forecast for a company that has been struggling in the recent economic climate.

Cisco’s original optimistic outlook appears to have been founded on an overall view that the global economy would recover quickly, a view that is swiftly changing as many fear another dip into recession, particularly with the debt crisis in Europe. This negative outlook has likely had a strong impact on Cisco’s forecast, resulting in its far more modest growth expectations.

Cisco has also had some problems of its own to work out over recent months. In July it announed that it would axe as many as 15 per cent of its workforce, or 11,500 people, in addition to selling a Mexican set-top box factory to Foxconn. It also abandoned its Flip video camera business, with the loss of 550 jobs.

In April the company’s CEO, John Chambers publicly acknowledged that Cisco had lost its way, with fiscal third quarter profit down a massive 18 per cent. He called for a refocusing on areas in which the company is highly successful, such as networking, servers and cloud provisioning.

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Cisco To Cut Thousands Of Jobs

Word the street is that router giant Cisco is about to cut 14 percent of it’s worldwide workforce which is thought to be around ten thousand people.

The reports are saying that seven thousand people will be given pink slips by the end of August; and the other three thousand unfortunate souls will take an early retirement option.

It seems as though many companies go this route when the executive team does not adjust to the changing technology market; they try to boost profits in the short-term by firing those who have worked so hard for the company. That said, the massive cuts are expected to save Cisco about $1 billion in 2012. A company spokesperson told Bloomberg that additional cost cutting procedures will also be instituted.

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Lenovo To Launch LePad Tablet In June

In what appears to be the year of the tablet, Chinese PC maker Lenovo announced plans to sell its LePad tablet worldwide in June, but will first launch the device in China at the end of March, a company spokesman said on today.

The LePad, Lenovo’s first tablet computer, was unveiled in January during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The device is built with 10.1-inch screen that runs the Android 2.2 OS on a 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. (See a video report on LePad’s CES unveiling on YouTube.)

Lenovo said the device would be priced between $399 and $449. But at the time, the company was still unsure whether it would sell the product outside of China.

While Lenovo now plans on selling the tablet overseas, company spokesman Jay Chen couldn’t say which markets will be targeted.  Read More…

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