Intel Wants To Deliver Cheap Smartphones

Intel has revealed some additional information on the 2012 mobile strategy to its partners and it even shared some pricing guidelines for mobile products.

According to a slide entitled Mobile Landscape in 2012, Intel wants to sell mobile phones powered by its CPUs for as little as $199 to $299. This is where Intel sees a market opportunity for its phones and the prices are surprisingly low.

It also places netbooks in the same price range $199 to $299 while Intel based tablets should float between $399 and $499. Naturally more expensive options are always a reality. Tablets can go up to 12.1 inches and the starting price for these bigger machines should be $299, and in the high end the sky is the limit.

Hybrid notebooks should stay at less than $699 and this is a category where you can twist the display, slide the keyboard or even take the keyboard off from the netbook, or tablet. Think Asus’ Eee Pad Slider, Transformer, this will give you an idea of what to expect, but with x86 support. Phones, netbooks, hybrids and tablets are all based on Atom architecture.

Intel plans to sell laptops starting at $3xx and up. Probably slightly more than $300, but less than $400 is what they have in mind. Top notch notebooks based on Core i7 chips will start at less than $799 and Ultrabooks with 11-inch or larger screens might be coming down to $599 to $699. Of course, high end models will end up a lot pricier.

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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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Windows 8 Tablet Being Developed By ASUS

Chinese newspapers have indentified Asustek as one of five international PC brands that will work with Microsoft on the “Windows on ARM” (WOA) architecture.

Microsoft is to release its first operating system that supports chips from Arm next year. Only five PC brands have been invited by Microsoft to join WOA, a development project that shows its aggressiveness in tapping the burgeoning tablet PC market. Asustek is the latest announcement. So far Samsung, Toshiba, HP and Lenovo have been identified as working with Microsoft to develop notebooks and tablets that run on WOA architecture.

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Is Qualcomm A Threat To Intel?

Intel tried to do gaming graphics cards and it failed, but when it comes to CPUs for desktop and notebooks, it is currently dominating the market. Even the graphics used in Intel’s latest integrated CPUs these days are quite decent for multimedia and even some basic gaming.

Still, Intel is now shifting its focus and it sees Qualcomm as its main competitor in years to come. We heard this from high ranked sources from within Intel who believe that Qualcomm is the only ARM company that has it all, and Intel wants to take it on.

Intel is carefully watching Nvidia and Texas Instruments, again two strong ARM players, but it still thinks Qualcomm has better time to market, more customers and a much stronger portfolio.

Intel should start shipping Medfield just in time for Windows 8, and in case you’ve missed it, Medfield is a SoC (System on Chip) platform that should find its place to a few tablets and probably even some phones next year. Since Intel is trying to speed development up and put as much pressure on ARM players as possible, its next generation SoC will also come before the end of 2012, and it will use the advanced 22nm process, something we won’t see in ARM chips next year.

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Hitachi-LG Executives Plead Guilty

Three executives at Hitachi-LG Data Storage (HLDS) have agreed to plead guilty and serve prison time in the U.S. for their participation in a number of conspiracies to rig bids and fix the prices of optical disk drives sold to large computer manufacturers, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday.

Young Keun Park, Sang Hun Kim and Sik “Daniel” Hur conspired with others to suppress competition by rigging bids for optical disk drives sold to Dell and Hewlett-Packard and to fix prices for optical disk drives sold to Microsoft, the DOJ said. The conspiracies happened at various times between November 2005 and September 2009, the DOJ said.

Under a plea agreement in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Park and Kim each have agreed to serve eight months in prison and Hur has agreed to serve seven months in prison. Each has also agreed to pay a US$25,000 fine.

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Apple’s Patent Hints At Tablet-Macbook Hybrid

Apple has received approval from the U.S. Patent Office this week for a patent for a MacBook with a cellular antenna and a rotating display. Such a MacBook could have the super thin qualities of the MacBook Air and the cellular connectivity and touchscreen versatility of the iPad.

It could also strengthen Apple against the onslaught of Ultrabooks that PC makers are gearing up to unleash. “This officially announces to the Wintel camp that Apple now has the ability to match or beat the Ultrabook design that is to come to market in 2013 with the [Intel] Haswell processor,” declared Jack Purcher, of Patently Apple.

Intel announced the Ultrabook category of PC laptops in May. The line is squarely aimed at the MacBook Air. The first wave of Ultrabooks, based on existing Intel processors, has already begun to hit the market. The units are supposed to be priced under $1000 and be super thin–0.78 inches–or in the case of the HP Folio announced today, even less–0.70 inches.

Next year, the platform is expected to be advanced further with the introduction of units based on Intel’s Ivy Bridge processor. A third wave of Ultrabooks is planned for 2013. They would be based on the Haswell processor and consume half the power of today’s laptops. Some of them also will sport Windows 8 with its touchscreen-enabled Metro interface.

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HP Makes Changes At The Top

HP has appointed former Boeing Company executive John Hinshaw as CIO.

In the newly created role of EVP of Global Technology and Business Processes, Hinshaw will oversee IT and shared and administrative services, including indirect and services procurement. Hinshaw also will be in charge of optimising business processes across the company.

Hinshaw was previously VP and general manager of Boeing Information Solutions at The Boeing Company, where he was responsible for running a new business.

Prior to Boeing, Hinshaw was SVP and CIO at Verizon Wireless. Earlier in his career he also served as a consultant with Accenture.

Hinshaw will join HP as a member of its executive council on 15 November, reporting to HP president and CEO Meg Whitman.

Meanwhile, HP also announced that Craig Flower has been promoted to SVP and CIO. Flower will be responsible for data management, application architecture, global business intelligence, sales, and product development and engineering applications. Flower has held a wide range of IT management positions within HP since 1984.

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Lenovo Passes Dell, Becomes No. 2 PC Vendor

Lenovo surged past Dell to become the world’s second largest PC vendor at the end of the third quarter, according to research firms IDC and Gartner.

Top PC maker Hewlett-Packard also saw its worldwide PC shipments grow by 5.3 percent in the quarter, despite reports that the company may spin off its PC business.

Both research firms said growth for the quarter failed to reach earlier projections. IDC said at the end of the third quarter, worldwide PC shipments increased by 3.6 percent year-over-year, below its earlier 4.5 percent growth projection.

Gartner said PC shipments grew by 3.2 percent year-over-year, which was lower than the research firm’s original projection of 5.1 percent growth for the quarter.

Analysts have pointed to sluggish spending because of weak economic conditions as a key reason behind the slowdown in PC growth. The rise of tablets has also hurt shipments.

“For the moment, PCs have taken a backseat to a range of other devices competing for shrinking consumer and business budgets,” said IDC analyst Jay Chou in a statement.

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WebOS Lives

HP is aiming to keep WebOS alive by putting it on printers.

The firm has discontinued its WebOS devices such as the Touchpad tablet and Pre 3 smartphone but WebOS will appear on new products, according to Pocketlint. The operating system (OS) will come on the Designjet line of HP printers.

An HP spokesperson said, “HP is currently investigating using WebOS on its Designjet range of professional printers.”

It’s likely that the OS will come on consumer printers at some point in the future, too. The following statement also hints that it could appear on products other than printers.

“HP is 100 [per cent] committed to producing print solutions that meet our customer needs and we will continue to drive innovation to ensure our products and solutions meet market demand. We built our printing franchise based on being OS agnostic – we have been and will continue to be agnostic to meet our various customer needs. As webOS plans develop we will continue to evaluate how and if we incorporate it into our future products.”

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HP’s PC Division Decision This Month

HP will decide on the future of its PC business this month, according to a statement from its newly installed CEO.

While it was under the Apotheker captaincy the firm announced rather shocking plans to dump the PC business. Okay, it didn’t explicitly say that, rather it said that it would consider selling it or spinning it off, which apparently meant something else to HP than it did to normal people.

According to Bloomberg, new HP CEO Meg Whitman sprinkled a little more colour into the HP PC business tapestry, and in a conference call said that the firm is almost ready to say what its plans are.

It’s likely that shareholders and the board are still reeling from the suggestion, but the extra time will give HP room to decide on what it wants to do with the still profitable, but boring hardware arm.

While it was under Leo Apotheker’s rule the firm had given itself the deadline of the end of the year for a decision, but presumably sick of people asking her, “what are we going to do with the PC business?”, Whitman has bought the decision forward.

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