!!!....Electronics world....!!!

Liu Jun of Lenovo holding up the K800, Lenovo's first Intel-powered smartphone, at CES 2012. Intel's new chip for phones is surprising in many respects, but the biggest shocker is speed. The "Medfield" Atom Z2460 chip for smartphones,  announced at CES , handily beats some of the fastest phones on the market, review site Anandtech said in  this  post. Is this fast enough to be smartphone-market disruptive? Will battery life measure up? Only Lenovo and Motorola know for sure (Anandtech  thinks Medfield will be fine  on battery life). One thing is for certain, though: neither of those companies are signing up for Medfield out of pity, as Anand Shimpi points out. And--another shocker--the results that Anandtech cites are not that different from a bar-graph slide (below) that CEO Paul Otellini showed at a Credit Suisse Annual Technology Conference back in November. (I should add that I had somebody whispering in my ear before  CES  to take those be...

I've long been a believer in cases to protect cell phones. Too bad I didn't practice what I preach. I picked up a Galaxy Nexus at the end of December. Within a week, it leapt from my shirt pocket to a Linoleum floor by way of a porcelain sink edge. The result: the shiny new flagship  Android now has a display with two shatter points and a spiderweb of cracks. Happily, everything else about the phone still works, and the cracks are thin enough that the display is still easily used. Sometimes letters are malformed when I'm reading books, and sometimes the rough patches are distracting to the touch on the edges. But it's definitely a problem that's impossible to ignore. Compare that to my  Nexus One  that I've used for nearly two years. It's ensconced in an Otterbox Defender case. The case--a silicone wrapper with a hard plastic sheath for easy pocketing--is much the worse the wear. The first crack appeared in the plastic when I crashed on a downhill mountain ...