Remember last Wednesday, when Intel's director of ecosystems, stamp collector, and amateur clown Pankaj Kedia pooped all over ARM and the iPhone at the Intel Developer Forum in Taipei? You know the guy, the Intel zealot who--in an brilliant display of knowledge and strategical thinking said some stupidly dumb things like "the smartphone of today is not very smart, the problem they have today is they use ARM" or "the shortcomings of the iPhone have come from ARM". Well, Anand Chandrasekher--senior vice president and general manager of Intel Corporation's Ultra Mobility Group--has just publicly spanked him, kind of apologised to Apple, and recognised that the low-power Atom is not a match for ARM processors:

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At the Intel Developer Forum in Taiwan, an Intel chief took an opportunity to piss all over one of the company's biggest mobile competitors. "The shortcomings of the iPhone are not because of Apple," he said, "The shortcomings of the iPhone have come from ARM." What shortcomings are those, exactly? "Even if they do have full [Internet] capability, the performance will be so poor." So in other words, by "the shortcomings of the iPhone," Intel means "slowish javascript rendering." For a solution to these problems, Intel makes and unexpected and revolutionary recommendation: "If you want to run full internet, you're going to have to run an Intel-based architecture." Oh!

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At the Intel Developer Forum last week, a lot of the buzz on the demo floor was around new Atom hardware. There were the requisite netbooks and EeeClones floating around, but it seemed like peculiar little quasi-computers, or palmtop Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) stole the show. Sure, it's impressive to see a full, net-connected Vista or Ubuntu desktop running on something the size of a Sega Game Gear, but who exactly is supposed to buy these?

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Wireless USB has finally begun to match regular USB 2.0 speeds, making our inevitable launch into a life untethered by the confines of copper and rubber cabling all the more forthcoming. At the Fall 2008 Intel Developer Forum, NEC unveiled a WUSB prototype that transfers at speeds of 200Mbits per second. The company didn't mention the effective range or when it plans on commercialising its new technology, but it's still exciting news for all of us who have trouble finding our desks under the tangle of our various USB doohickeys. [Tech On via EverythingUSB]

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This year's Intel Developer Forum is all about different form-factors, with walls of nearly identical MIDs, way too many netbooks and this strange creature, the Intel UrbanMax concept. The prototype is running a Core 2 Duo (at least for now) crammed into a thin, quasi-tablet case, with an 11 inch N-trig DuoSense capacative multitouch screen and provisions for a WiMax connection built in. The UrbanMax form-factor is a novel take on the old tablet concept, and possibly a superior one.

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Slotting an Atom into a home phone just sounds plain ridiculous, but the Home Media Phone is more than just a VoIP handset and base station. The base station (which doubles as a speaker phone) has its own software platform, developed in flash and furnished with a full API, and serves many purposes of a PC in a picture frame-sized package. The current set of apps is adequate, but after using it for a few minutes it became very clear that the Home Media Phone could actually be a fantastic net appliance.

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When news of the Classmate tablet broke yesterday, it was hard to know what to think. In terms of specs, the devices is a far sight better that the Classmate 2.0, but aside from the new tablet form factor, the diminutive netbook didn't seem to include any truly innovative new features. During the Intel Developer Forum today I got to fold around with the new Classmate, and my suspicions were confirmed: barring a late-stage killer feature, this iteration of Intel's OLPC killer will be sort of lame.

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Wireless power for charging gadgets has been among the more vapourous of developments we've been hearing promises of for years. While there are a few working instances of the tech on the market, its large-scale adoption still feels miles away. So the appropriate scepticism should be applied to this NY Times report claiming Intel will announce a major wireless power breakthrough today at the Intel Developers Forum, but the details do seem enticing this time around for one of the holy grails of the CE world soon becoming a bit more feasible. UPDATED: Pics of Intel's IDF demo from today have been added.

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Only a month or so after announcing intentions to dabble in the SoC game for embedded systems, Intel's showing off its first iteration at the Intel Developers Forum. The CE 3100 (previously known as "Canmore" in Intel speak) combines HD video processing, "home theatre quality" audio and 3D graphics with the internet connectedness to run widgets from Yahoo's Widget Channel on TVs and STBs like the mockup you see here. Great, another web-connected TV platform.

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At the end of an otherwise tepid presentation at the Intel Developer Forum today, Dadi Perimutter, head of Intel's Mobility Group, dropped a bomb (via PowerPoint) on his audience: a mysterious tablet device, which could well be the next generation of the Classmate OLPC competitor. If that is the case, the OLPC might really have something to worry about. Sugar, the "revolutionary" Linux-based OS originally developed for the OLPC, is already in development for the Classmate project, not to mention that fact that this new picture indicates that Intel may have taken a few of Nick Negroponte's visions for the OLPC XO-2 to heart, and possibly to production.

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