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Owners of upcoming  iPhone  and iPads could enjoy a boost in graphics power 20 times greater than that offered by current models, according to enthusiast site  AppleInsider . Such a leap in power would come courtesy of new graphics processing units developed by U.K.-based Imagination Technologies, which builds the GPUs for Apple's mobile products. Announced at CES  on Tuesday, Imagination's new PowerVR Series6 GPU core chip family is touted as providing 20 times or more of the performance of the current generation. As a result, "it enables Imagination's partners to deliver amazing user experiences in devices from innovative 'natural' user interfaces to ultra-realistic gaming, as well as enabling new applications never before thought of from advanced content creation and image processing to sophisticated augmented reality and environment-aware solutions," Imagination said in press release. With Apple as one of those partners, Imagination has cr

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who is worth about $14 billion, has gone paperless, and truly believes that the only difference between Microsoft and Apple in the mobile market is that the  iPhone  maker made one right decision--choosing ARM chips for its smartphone, rather than Intel's battery-hogging alternatives. That's about all you're going to learn about the man in  a sprawling seven-page profile from Businessweek . True to his desire to control how Microsoft is perceived by consumers, Ballmer let little go in the profile, and instead tried to keep positive about his company's prospects in 2012, saying the tech giant will have "a reset moment" this year. Related stories Ballmer highlights Windows Phone, Windows 8, Xbox Kinect (video) Ballmer reveals first LTE Windows Phone on AT&T (live blog) Microsoft: Kinect coming to Windows February 1 For Ballmer, 2012 could prove to be an important turning point in his career. This year will be the one whe

Betting heavily on Microsoft to revive its fortunes, Nokia is in a position to sell as many as 37 million Windows Phone handsets this year and 64 million in 2013, says a Morgan Stanley report cited by  AllThingsD . Of course, much of that forecast depends on just how hard Microsoft will work to promote its partnership with Nokia. The two companies already reportedly plan to  spend $20 million  to market their new lineup. Nokia has been pushing its Lumia phones, with the  710 now available  through T-Mobile, the  800 selling in Europe , and the  LTE-compliant 900  sailing to the U.S., possibly  as soon as March . With AT&T set to carry the 900, Nokia is also counting on the folks at Big Red to lure in U.S. customers. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, and AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega took the stage together at  CES  on Monday to introduce and tease the 900 for the crowd. Already putting in a good word for Nokia, de la Vega said that with the Lumia 900, &

Microsoft has finally won second place among search engines. Carving out 15.1 percent of the market in December, Bing narrowly outstripped the 14.5 percent share eked out by Yahoo, according to data released yesterday by market researcher ComScore . Of course, Google still led the search engine market with a whopping 65 percent share. But December was the first month in which Microsoft outshone its competitor and partner Yahoo, according to a Citi analyst  cited by TechCrunch . As always, ComScore's numbers include only explicit core searches that people manually enter on a Web page. Under the hood, Microsoft and Yahoo use the same search engine technologies. But  Yahoo has been gradually shedding share  over the past year, while Bing has been soaking up more. A year ago, Yahoo's search market share was 16 percent, while Microsoft was stuck with only 12 percent. And though Google's lead has stayed firm, its share for December was slightly down from the 66 p

Microsoft has struck another key patent-licensing deal in the  Android ecosystem.                                                            The software company announced today that it has inked a deal with LG that will see it license operating system patents for devices running Android and Chrome OS. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. LG has been relying heavily upon Android for its mobile push. At the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this week, the company showed off its new flagship device,  the LG Spectrum . The smartphone, which will be launching later this month, runs Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and will be upgradeable to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). "We are pleased to have built upon our longstanding relationship with LG to reach a mutually beneficial agreement," Microsoft corporate vice president and deputy general counsel Horacio Gutierrez said today in a statement. "Together with our 10 previous agreements with Android and Chrome OS device manufacture

AS VEGAS--Texas Instruments is offering one of the most revealing demos of Windows 8 on  ARM  yet at CES .                           That's not saying a lot, though, as demos of Microsoft's next operating system on ARM processors have been extremely restrictive, if nonexistent to date in public (Nvidia's untouchable, relatively static CES demo is behind closed glass). But TI pushed the boundaries a bit in a demo for CNET at CES. The demo  tapped TI's freshly minted OMAP4470 ARM processor , according to Bill Crean, an OMAP product marketing manager. Needless to say, I was not permitted to take video. But TI's Crean demonstrated live scrolling with Windows 8 Explorer on the CNN news site. Scrolling was fluid and I didn't see the jerkiness that I do get, by the way, with my Verizon-Motorola XyBoard  tablet  on  Android  3.2. Again, that's not revealing a lot, but Windows 8 on ARM is a very touchy subject for Microsoft. For the first time, it is porting mainst