When I met with Nicholas Negroponte not long ago, he laughed at the coverage he'd received through the past few years, including our own portrayal of Intel chairman Craig Barrett and him as Beavis and Butthead. Far more hurtful have been the admonitions of his own former staffers who feel he has mismanaged the OLPC project. Nearly every one of the original staff had abandoned the project by 2008, often in disgust. But Negroponte remains stalwart: "My elephant skin is the thickness of steel," he told me. Perhaps his resistance to criticism has been one of the project's fatal flaws.

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Muffled by the cacophony of like a million netbooks and the wireless power that'll power our cyborg brains at the Intel Developer Forum was the low-key introduction of Intel's next-gen 45nm dual core chips for ultra-thin notebooks--i.e., the dwarven chips that made the MacBook Air possible. Now that everybody can snag them, expect a surge of similarly limber notebooks that can suck in their gut to fit into narrow pockets of ugly paper.

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2050. That's the year that you'll plug your brain into a toaster. Intel doesn't know how, precisely, but according to Intel CTO Justin Rattner's recent keynote at the Intel Developer Forum, they're working on it. From Intel's summary of the event:

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This upcoming mini-PC from Celrun is something a bit like the old iLamp-style iMac, a bit notebooky, a bit low-cost desktop Eee PC... but actually not like any of them too much: It seems to be it's own low-power, neat design desktop genre. It's got an 18.4-inch widescreen LCD, has built-in stereo speakers and microphone and has an Intel Atom purring away inside. Mainly the Lluon A1 is intended to be a multimedia PC since it's got an IPTV function which requires it to be dual boot—Linux for the IPTV, and Windows for standard PC functions. It's intriguing, and though there's no info on pricing, we know it'll be hitting the shops mid-September in Korea, Europe and North America. [Aving]

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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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Brazilian blog Zumo unearthed these pics of the Classmate Tablet PC at IDF, but the touchscreen netbook apparently isn't the Classmate 3.0. Zumo says this is a Classmate 2.0 in tablet form. The touchscreen netbook will have a 1.6 GHz Atom Processor, SSD, 8.9-inch screen, SD card slot, 2 USB Ports, and VGA out. Details, such as price and release date, were not announced. [Zumo via Engadget]

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